The United States healthcare system seems to be under constant scrutiny for its downfalls. There never seems to be any consensus among doctors on treatment plans for patients, hospital treatment horror stories are rampant, and proven medical research takes decades to implement broadly among medical professionals. The solution to this seemingly inefficient system remains largely unknown. Atul Gawande, a former New Yorker staff writer, renowned author, and accomplished surgeon, attempts to devise a solution to this ongoing problem by comparing U.S. medical systems to a national chain restaurant: Cheesecake Factory. While it initially seems to be a radical and frivolous comparison, Gawande successfully highlights the benefits of tightly coupled…show more content… While learning 13 new dishes may not seem like a daunting feat, it's important to recognize these dishes are placed on top of the 318 dinner items that chefs are already expected to have memorized and to make from scratch. To understand how their chefs seemingly flawlessly transitioned despite that daunting figure, Gawande investigated their take on information transfer. The answer is its commitment to clear, hands-on instruction. The process begins with our Cheesecake instructors. Managers and Chefs will travel together to informational sessions and learn about the new menu inside and out. Once they have a full understanding of the menu, they are then taught intrapersonal skills on how to teach all the other members of their restaurant. Every manager may have a different teaching method that they could have pursued, and some likely would have been more successful than others, leading to some restaurants having more competent and knowledgeable staff than other restaurants. The Cheesecake Factory cleverly bypasses this conundrum by standardizing the teaching methods to something they know will have a greater success rate. These managerial staff later return to their restaurants and spend days ensuring their kitchens understand the new recipes and how to properly cook them. This is a structurally tight form of information flow. This system works a lot better than if managers…show more content… In the Cheesecake Factory, this could take the form of a slightly overcooked chicken breast or a roughly composed salad. These human errors are something that the Cheesecake Factory anticipates and accounts for in its organizational structure. The role of kitchen manager is to double check all food items before they reach the guest, ensuring every plate is up to Cheesecake Factory code. This is not a punitive system in which chefs are criticized for their errors and demanded to improve. Rather, it more closely resembles the Swiss cheese model first created by James Reason, where every “slice” of cheese represents an organizational safety measure. Independently, there are a lot of holes in the slice where disaster could occur, but stacking a whole bunch of organizational safety measures (slices) will decrease the chance of disaster significantly. Therefore, when a failure does slip through a hole in one slice, the malfunction should smack firmly into the next slice, halting the progress of disaster. The level of oversight in the Swiss cheese model is a prominent part of tightly coupled systems and the success that they achieve. This model works best if the comments during service are varied. For example, rather than simply correcting, the kitchen manager also makes sure that compliments are dispersed throughout his comments. This method
