Blood Draw

I had a blood draw today. Oddly, it made me think of organizational theory.

Blood draws don’t stress me out or make me queasy, but they do make me tense up during the actual procedure. Much like the dentist, I find myself staring at the wall intensely and inadvertently clenching my fist, almost becoming balmy.

The phlebologist checked in with me, asking if I was okay. I said yes and then I asked if it seemed like I was not okay. She laughed and said that she usually likes to check-in with patients and that it did seem like I was avoiding looking and staring off to the side. She made me feel comfortable and we talked a little bit more while she pulled the necessary samples.

When she was done, I looked down at my arm and saw that she was pulling the samples from the elbow joint (the normal place where they always pull from), but when I wasn’t looking, it felt like it was in the middle of my forearm.

I told the phlebologist this, she then traced the vein she used down my arm and told me that it’s all connected in there, so it’s not a surprise to her that I felt it down the arm.

The pain point on my arm wasn’t where I thought it was or where the actual needle went into my arm. It was somewhere else, or at least it felt like it was somewhere else. In business it can often feel like your pain point is so obvious, that once you take care of that one area everything will smooth itself out. You spend time, resources, money on fixing the issue only to see the problem still exist. That’s because your departments, processes, etc. are very connected even when they don’t feel like it. Integrating yourself and the different parts of your business is as important as isolating or fixing those pain points. Seeing the veins of your organization and where and how they lead to other departments is essential to being able to uncover where the actual pain is coming from.