I Can’t Force It!

One more post about inefficiencies and failed attempts at work (this is my therapy so feel free to ignore).

My work partner, Goodluck, and I been working with a group of 8 health facilities to try and help them increase the quality of the data they collect, improve their analysis of the data, and put their analysis into action to improve the health of the communities they serve.

Through our supervision of their work we’ve learned that some of the main things they are lacking are basic organizational skills (they don’t have scheduled meeting times with the rest of the staff to go over data, they lose track of where the forms are or run out of them, they don’t coordinate transporting the data together, etc). Working on this problem has seemed like an easy way we can improve the system

However, organization relies on order and dependability. (Here comes the story)

Goodluck and I have had problems in the past with others scheduling things at the last minute, miscommunication of scheduling, and general flakiness. This always results in things not getting done, things taking much more time, and losing faith or trust in those we have tried to meet with. Because of this, we’ve tried to schedule meetings well in advance and follow up with whom we’re meeting to avoid scheduling problems.

Yesterday we had scheduled to meet with a team of 7 at a local health facility to review the data they collected over October. We scheduled the meeting the last time we visited them (two weeks ago), then we called them last Friday (5 days before the meeting) to confirm, finally we even passed by the facility the morning of our meeting and spoke with our contact to again confirm our the time he had suggested for that afternoon.

2:30pm rolls around and we arrive at the health facility with presentation and meeting agenda in hand.

Our contact isn’t there but another staff member is so he calls him for us and says he’s on his way. We wait. 15 minutes later, another staff member comes and greets us and says she has one more patient and then will be happy to meet. 15 minutes later we go to meet with the staff member. She is confused why we are there so late and explains that “everyone” thought we were meeting in the morning. We explain that our contact, whom we had seen and spoken with that morning, said we were confirmed for the afternoon meeting time. She calls him. He’s still not around. Apparently, he doesn’t mention why he had confirmed that morning for our afternoon meeting. She asks if we can come the next day…

Afternoon gone.

After putting my “there’s not a problem that can’t be solved” cap on for a few hours, I concluded that there was nothing we could have done to avoid what happened.

Today (the day after the previous failed meeting) we are schedule to meet with 3 other facilities that are up to 80 miles from where we live. We scheduled our transport days in advance. We called each facility to confirm we were coming today (after scheduling with them well in advance). We scheduled with someone from the district management team to join us.

Our transport was scheduled to arrive at 8am for the long day of meetings ahead of us. We confirmed the time yesterday at 4pm. We learned at 9:30am this morning that it is now scheduled for 11:30am.

Morning gone.

It takes 1.5 hours to drive to our first meeting place and the workday tends to end very early for people here.

Afternoon gone.

Again, after putting my “there’s not a problem that can’t be solved” cap on for this one, I’m stuck with the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do to avoid this happening again.

To be honest I’m a little lost right now. How do we expect to organize anyone when we can’t be organized ourselves? All our work is dependant on meeting and coordinating and that seems to be virtually impossible. Should I get used to having whole days or even weeks wasted because of miscommunication and broken plans? Or will I be incredibly frustrated for the next 9 months?

I know there’s a happy medium to be found. I’m just not finding it right now.