Window of Light

When I started working for the Lean Enterprise Research Centre in 2005, I was part of Ann Esain’s Health and Services team. Ann was leading an action research project across an NHS trust in Wales so much of my early experiences of lean were in healthcare settings.  When I talk through ‘my lean journey’ with teams on our Executive Education courses I joke that after my work in hospitals “I ran to the nearest office” working with some great people in the Shared Service Centre for HM Court Service and Home Office.

Like many things said in jest, there is much truth within, because when you suffer from health anxiety, hanging out in hospitals a lot isn’t the best. I think that my health worries might have stemmed from my childhood when my lovely cousin suffered from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for many years when he was young. My other cousins, his brother and sister, came to stay with us whilst his mum was with him in hospital, so we’d visit them often.  When you are young and people that you love get really sick, and you get to see lots of other people who are really sick, you really do get a sense of how fragile and precarious our health actually is, so I guess I feel that I’m always on tenterhooks waiting for worlds to start crashing down. (Important information: my cousin is still here! Praise be for Bone Marrow transplants https://www.dkms.org.uk/)

I was at the top of my health anxiety game (a.k.a. totally bossing it) when I was single, happy and carefree (carefree but for the question  ‘why doesn’t anyone love me? Sniff!’)  The lack of love actually helps here however because you can kind of compartmentalise the fragility of your existence with ‘meh, so what if I die, who’d miss me?!’ (cut to Mum and Dad screaming from afar ‘we would!’)

Fyi, this attitude also helps with conquering a fear of flying!  Bonus.

Having a child and her being the absolute best thing ever kind of changes all of this though and now I need to not die again and neither must she.

With each illness and the need to visit a Doctor, the tension starts from my fingertips into the pit of my stomach and burrows deep into the core of my being. She’s been having trouble with her ears recently and this has required trips to an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist in our local hospital.

Hospital visits with beloved children are next level anxiety triggering.

As I was sat waiting for our recent appointment however, I caught myself not feeling as anxious as I would usually feel in such times.  Sitting there felt very different to my normal ‘sitting and waiting for a health professional’ experiences.

Why was this experience so different? Well, I can only really attribute it to the presence of a massive window.

The huge window let the light stream into the atrium of the children’s hospital and made the whole space and vibe feel radically different. Everywhere was bright and airy, full of optimism and hope! Oppressive trepidation didn’t seem to hang in the air at all?

I found myself suddenly grateful that the window hadn’t been ‘value engineered’ out of the building plans, such was the extent to which the light literally lightened my mood.

How much cheaper would it have been to just have a wall there and yet how much the building would have lost – its whole energy would be completely different.

So yes, I took a picture of it and thought to myself – ‘hmm, this might make a nice blog’.

Value Engineering – The Institute of Mechanical Engineers describes the value engineering process as “a systematic and creative method used to increase the value of a product or service. It is a technique used to reduce the cost of a product or service while retaining quality, reliability and safety”.

Sounds sensible.

Wikipedia offers a definition which is a bit more stark and synonymous with how I have come to understand its use – ‘value engineering is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality’.

‘Tolerable loss’ is never going to ‘spark joy’ within anyone or anything.

I’m sure that there are lots of value engineers out there bemoaning my interpretation of their craft in exactly the same way as I roll my eyes at people who don’t understand lean (‘lean is not primarily about removing waste ACTUALLY’). Maybe the building had been value engineered and the window made it through the process, such was its importance within a space designed for the most heart wrenching aspect of all life, sick kids. I honestly don’t know, I just know how much of a difference that huge window made to me that morning.

I suppose that this blog is simply an extension of the theme of a variety of my musings, that of the ‘difficult to financially quantify’ thing that is value.  That window would have been expensive, and potentially therefore, expendable, but how much the service would miss.