Semmelweis

On Changing People's Minds or Why Being Right Is Not a StrategyThere is a story managers tell each other for comfort, usually late in a chat thread, usually after a decision has gone the wrong way. It goes like this. There was once a doctor who discovered that washing your hands stopped women from dying. The establishment mocked him. He died in an asylum. Years later he was proven correct. The moral, delivered with the satisfaction of a man who has just lost an architecture review, is that the world hates truth-tellers. That is a lovely story. It is also the wrong lesson, told by the wrong people, for the wrong reason. Ignaz Semmelweis did not fail because the world hates the truth. He failed because he treated truth as a deliverable rather than a starting position. He had one of the most spectacular results in the history of medicine and he handled it so poorly that women continued dying, in the same hospitals, for decades, while he was correct at them. The numbers were not…