I caught myself reading a post the other day and thinking: come on, this is obvious.
Utilisation. Productivity. Pricing. Bog-standard business basics.
Except it's only obvious to me because I've spent years sifting through thousands of MI spreadsheets and making enough mistakes to fill them. That's the curse of knowledge. When something is so clear in your head, you lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to know it.
So you walk into a clinic and say "Right, we need to drive productivity." You think you've given direction. You haven't. You've given the answer before anyone's felt the problem. There's no gap. No tension. Nothing that makes it matter.
People do what humans do: they jump straight to wondering how. Shorten sessions? Push harder? Get busier? Sell more kit? Everyone looks busy but nobody aligns. Activity without progress.
The shift is simple.
Don't start with the instruction. Give them an itch.
Most physios are obsessing over clinical excellence, courses and hands-on versus rehab debates. I'm looking at the ghost in the treatment room.
An empty 2pm slot isn't cash neutral. It's a £25 bill you've already paid for an empty room. Five of those a day is £30k a year, per room, quietly disappearing.
One extra patient a day doesn't feel like a productivity push. Across a year it's fifty grand per clinician.
Same people. Same hours.
When you show someone the £30k hole in the floor, they stop debating and start fixing.
That's the job: not knowing more, but getting the order right.
Without the why, you aren't leading a mission. You're just managing a commute.