Latest Blog Posts

goat
The Medical “Expert” Problem
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Scapegoats. Sidney Dekker wrote about a nurse who was criminally charged after accidently injecting epidural pain medication intravenously, after which the patient died. A hospital review...
Patient
What Do Patients Want?
By Gerrit Van Wyk. The health care product. In the movie What Women Want, Nick Marshall is an advertising executive and chauvinist. One day he gets drunk and falls into the bath holding an electric dryer,...
Smuts
On Systems And Wholes
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Clever Jannie. After losing an election as prime minister, and his seat in parliament, a South African politician, Jan Smuts, published his Holism and Evolution in 1926, a remarkable...
Elevator
Opinions and beliefs are not facts
By Gerrit Van Wyk. The emptiness of an elevator pitch. Many years ago, I met with a high-powered head hunter at an airport lounge about a job I applied for. I told him I had some ideas about it, and he...
education
An Education And Learning Is Not The Same Thing
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Communities of practice. I visited someone I know well recently, and during conversation he remarked that he is uneducated. Yet, he is one of the most insightful people I know. In the...
Organization
Organizations are strange beasts
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Little Eichmann’s. Henry Mintzberg made the point that whether we like it or not, we live in a society of organizations. We are born in them, registered, and then educated by them so...
Commons
The Tragedy Of Neo-liberalism
By Gerrit Van Wyk. The Tragedy of the commons. Garrett Hardin wrote a story called The Tragedy of the Commons. Imagine a shared commons in a medieval village on which everyone can graze their cows. The...
Shoot
Decisions When Things Are Complex
By Gerrit Van Wyk. Shoot! Aim! Ready! Kahneman’s type 1 and 2 thinking, in terms of which we developed simple rules to make decisions quickly but must knuckle down and think and reason when they don’t...
Moon
Ideals Planning
By Gerrit Van Wyk. We’re going to the moon. On May 25, 1961, US President Kennedy announced that America would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. In doing so, he gave the country an...
Universe
What Is Reality like?
By Gerrit Van Wyk. A Philosopher’s Stone The way you imagine the world around us looks like and works determines what you can know about it, and in turn how you go about gathering that knowledge....