Human Limits

Over the past couple of years I have argued that the current world wide obsession with “big data” and metrics is going to lead all sorts of people astray in many fields. The related idea is that every human activity can be turned into a quality improvement project with guidelines and check boxes that will reduce error and improve outcomes.   Taken too far these twin beliefs are going to limit the sort of individual mastery and innovation needed to find novel solutions to our problems.

A couple of months ago I gave a presentation at Mayo where I highlighted the problems of too much standardization in medicine and the risk it poses to better patient care and innovation. I used parallels with the high jumpers Dick Fosbury and Debbie Brill who as teenagers in the 1960s invented the ‘flop’ and went over the bar backwards. In the current world would their efforts have been stifled by a compliance bureaucracy insisting they face the high jump bar while going over? What would the “approval process” for this new technique be in 2014? How many other barriers might be thrown up in the current world to stop them from moving high jumping forward by going backwards?

I explore these and related issues in the talk below. It is a long presentation about 40 minutes, but bear with me and I think you will enjoy the questions and observations raised in the talk.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2014 at 4:45 am and is filed under Current Events, Elite Sports Performance, Media Appearances, Research and Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.