Simplify your offense!

Yesterday was the start of the pro football season (American football, not the Ted Lasso kind of football popular everywhere else around the world - incidentally, the fictional character, Ted Lasso, did get his start coaching college football for the Wichita State Shockers).  I heard that there were 15 NFL teams with new starting quarterbacks yesterday, including a couple of rookies.  It seems that every year, we hear that coaches try to "ease in" these rookie quarterbacks by simplifying the offense.  It's not universally true that pro football teams always run offensive schemes that are particularly more complex than some of the best college football teams (although this is commonly the case).  Rather, the players are just so much more competitive and talented compared to most of the players that rookie quarterbacks play against in college.

The American author and pediatrician (well, that's pretty awesome!), John Gall would be quite pleased with the coaches who "simplify the offense" for their rookie quarterbacks.  Gall wrote a book in 1975 called,  General Systemantics: An essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail.  One of the statements in his book is now known as Gall's Law.  Gall's Law can be summarized as follows:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

In other words, "simplify your offense!"  Think for a moment and then ask yourself this question - if you were going to change a process in your hospital, how would you start?  Would you take the new process and implement it in every single inpatient unit of the hospital, or would you start smaller and try it in one inpatient unit first?  We call this "a small test of change" - the concept is to start simple and small, test to see whether the process works as you predicted it would, and if so, spread the change more broadly.  If you follow this strategy, you are essentially running a PDSA Cycle - Plan, Do, Study, Act!

Start small.  Simplify the offense.  Gall's Law.  It all makes really good sense.