The law of the situation and indicator's own life

[Sébastien Damart]

Today, I worked with nurses and healthcare managers in a small healthcare unit on the implementation of a set of indicators about absenteeism and strategies for dealing with it. It has been collectively admitted that monitoring the phenomena of absenteeism is the best way to discover adapted strategies for reducing it. Of course, I think that this has something to do with the law of situation: highlighting choices that the law of situation may lead to make and discovering these choices collectively. But...

During the conversations this afternoon, I was troubled to see that part of participants to this work were actually trying to discover how they could use indicators to satisfy their claims (maybe I have been a little bit naive too). In fact, everyone was trying to see how indicators could help them to satisfy their own interests, which is not really an integrative behavior. No one had in mind to think about indicators as tools for highlighting strategies that were satisfying the whole set of interest (thinking the organization as a whole). 

(Of course, this has changed my facilitation strategy during the day)

MPF spoke about the joint study as a way to make people discover together the law of situation. Tools that are used to "study" the situation (indicators for example) live their own life: they are interpreted in a sense by some people and in an other sense by others; they give sense to some claims; it is often very hard to "control" them.

Any experiences to share about this thought ?