Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

High velocity organizations relentlessly compare actual experience against expected experience and rapidly adapt their approaches based on the gap analysis.  This way, they improve, innovate, and invent incessantly, thereby crushing rivals, even in the most competitive industries.  Denise Grady details just such fantastic behavior in “Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others” about this closed loop learning in the military (NY Times, May 25, 2009).

The situation?  When war dead returned home in times past, their families were told they died in service to their country and not much else. Now, the bodies of fallen service men and women are CT scanned and autopsied within an hour of arriving at Dover Air Force Base.  The result?  Tremendous insight into vulnerabilities in body armor, vehicle shielding, and the short comings of battlefield medic kits that can be quickly looped back into a redesign of equipment to make it more reliable.

Here is just one such example about which Ms Grady writes. Colonel Howard Harcke noticed that a soldier’s collapsed lung had not been reinflated.  Why?  To do so requires punching a hole in the chest with a needle, snaking in a tube through which air can be blown. The problem?  The tube was too short.  Dr. Harcke reviewed several other images to discover–same problem!  The kits didn’t account for contemporary warriors being bigger and stronger than their predecessors.  The Army Surgeon General ordered all kits to have an 8 cm rather than a 5 cm tube meaning it would be adequate for 99% of soldiers, not the 50% for which the old version was capable.

What would a high velocity organization do next?  A similar analysis from wound analysis on soldiers who survived.

Related posts:

1. Innovation and Workforce Engagement in a High-Velocity World
2. BusinessWeek.com Video: High Velocity Lessons in an Economic Downturn
3. The Basic Science of High Velocity Systems: Principles for generating and sustaining improvement and innovation
4. High velocity innovation and food safety…
5. High velocity competition…Lessons from the Boston Marathon