The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work

11Stage Two: RehearseIt's Not Just About Fire Drills

Your Role: TenaciousCoach

When Every Day Is Game Day

The Medical Center at UCSF (University of California at San Francisco) is one of the top hospitals in the United States, with 8,000 employees providing medical care and services around the clock. Hospitals like UCSF need to balance a particularly thorny set of challenges:

• Provide the best possible care to all patients, addressing their unique issues
• Drive innovation and incorporate new technologies and processes
• Coordinate the many handoffs between departments and caregivers happening every day for each patient
• Operate in an environment with complex, often contradictory, regulations, privacy issues, and third-party oversight
• Do all this 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

UCSF CEO Mark Laret shared with us his practical definition of failure: “the repeat of a process that results in an adverse outcome that might otherwise be preventable.”¹ In this instance, an adverse outcome might truly have life or death consequences.

To limit adverse outcomes and provide the best possible responses, UCSF conducts frequent rehearsals across a broad range of possible medical emergencies along with potential disasters like earthquakes, fires, and large-scale accidents. Through this training, Mark and his team work to instill values that encourage the right kinds of decisions in every employee, ...