Avoiding the broom-cupboard effect….
… open the cupboard door, step on a broom head and out of the darkness, the handle whacks you in the face.
Ouch!
The surprise effect. You’re not to know what was in there and you’ve got the lump on yer head, to prove it.
The Prime Minister is under fire for not asking enough questions about the Mandelson security clearance issue. The rights and wrongs will be argued to exhaustion, but…
… step back. There’s a bigger point. One that matters to every leader, in every organisation. Keeps them awake at night. As explored in Roy Lilley’s commentary on learning from mistakes in the NHS, the real danger often lies in what organisations fail to surface early enough.
The broom cupboard effect… how do you find out what you don’t know, you don’t know?
Attributed to Donald Rumsfeld, businessman, naval officer and former US Secretary for Defence, the phrase sounds like wordplay…
… the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns…
… actually, it’s a warning.
The real risks in leadership are rarely the things on the agenda. They’re the blind spots. The assumptions nobody challenges. The questions nobody asks. This echoes wider concerns about NHS culture and silence around risk, where issues persist because they are not voiced.
Curiosity, in leadership, isn’t a personality trait. It’s a discipline. It has to be built into the way organisations work.
Curiosity with a sharp stick, poking about, will get people running away. Curiosity with a smile, a ‘why’ and ‘how’, and they’ll form a queue to show you, but…
… if everyone agrees with you, you’ve learned nothing. Every leadership team needs someone whose job is to properly challenge the prevailing view.
Not a token sceptic, or contrarian, but someone with licence to say; ‘What if this is wrong?’ Without that, what looks like consensus is often just hollow silence.
The boardroom is the worst place to understand what’s really going on. The truth sits at the edges… in complaints, near-misses, in the workarounds staff invent to make broken systems function.
The daily improvisation that keeps the show on the road…
… stay at the centre and you’ll hear reassurance. Go to the edge and you’ll hear reality.
The quality of curiosity matters as much as the quantity. Asking more questions isn’t the answer… asking better ones is the real trick. As discussed in data, information and intelligence in the NHS, insight comes not from volume but from how well information is interrogated.
Not ‘are we on track?’… but ‘what would have to be true for this to fail?’
Not ‘is this working?’… but ‘what are we assuming that we haven’t tested?’
That shift… from reassurance to exploration, is where blind spots begin to surface.
There’s also the small matter of how organisations treat bad news.
In many places, it is quietly discouraged. Not overtly, but enough that people learn to filter what they say.
The upshot? Leaders are the last to know. If you want to uncover unknown risks, you have to reward the messenger.
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II…
‘… the first bringer of unwelcome news…hath but a losing office’…
… is not the way to do it! Instead…
Elevate the near-miss.
Thank the person who spots the flaw. Make it safe to say; ‘we don’t understand this yet.’ Without that, ignorance becomes institutional. This aligns with thinking around patient safety and reporting culture, where openness determines how quickly risks are addressed.
Speed matters, too.
The longer the gap between the decision and the consequence, the bigger the blind spot.
In complex systems like the NHS, feedback loops are slow and often distorted. By the time the problem surfaces, it has momentum.
Smart leaders make loops shorter… faster data, more frequent ground-truthing, less reliance on retrospective reports that explain yesterday.
With the plethora of data the NHS has these days, there is no excuse not to be on top of this.
Watch out for the gaps.
Most failures don’t happen within silos, they happen between them.
Policy doesn’t see theatres and operations.
Finance doesn’t see interfaces.
National bodies don’t see local reality…
… unknown unknowns thrive in those gaps. As highlighted in integration and silo working in healthcare, fragmentation is often where risk hides.
The only way to flush them out is to force conversations across boundaries, departments and silos.
Finally, humility.
The best leaders work on the assumption they’ve missed something. They ask themselves; ‘what am I missing’, and they encourage their teams to ask; ‘what are we missing?’
Systems are complex. The closer you get, the more complex they get.
Omniscience is for deities, and silly boys…
… acknowledge; you can’t know it all.
Success is in the gift of people whose daily work is your unknown. They are the guides and the signposts to working without surprises.
Curiosity may have killed the cat but as far as leadership is concerned all it can kill is ignorance.
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
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