In all my years of running a business, I have never been able to understand the “it never rains but it pours” phenomenon. It seems that there is never any happy medium when it comes to how busy one is, or in your flow of customers. In my world, that translates into our occupancy or how many rooms or beds are filled. When we were a guest lodge, it made a little bit more sense as there are predictable (or at least supposedly-predictable) peak- and off-seasons, but even then, we would sometimes be inexplicably quiet or fully booked and having to turn people away. I really thought that moving into the medical support field would have alleviated much of this problem because illness, surgeries and the need for end-of-life care don’t have a peak-season and certainly never take a break, even when we want them to, but alas, the feast or famine pattern continues. Some weeks or months, for no predictable reason whatsoever, there is a strange lull in activity and our long-term patients seem to be the only ones needing our attention, but then, suddenly and without any rhyme or reason, we’re beyond capacity, juggling rooms, moving people to different spaces and hiring additional carers to keep up with the demand. As I am typing this there is an insurer desperately delaying her patient’s discharge from hospital until we have a room available. There is also a 92 year old British lady sitting in our lounge. She is in a wheelchair, black and blue after a fall and has stitches all over her face. Her daughter got her discharged, popped her in the car and drove straight to us. She just knew we would make a plan as she just could not bear her mom to stay in an institution a second longer. ( we did manage to get her a bed, but I aged about ten years! )
If I could just spread out our guests in a uniform pattern and preferably, spread the complicated cases and difficult personalities, or unforeseen disasters and business interruptions out across the month and the year, my life would be so much easier. If Eskom would not surprise us with stage 6 load shedding, and a thunder storm would not wash away our wifi-access points and our borehole pump would not all break on the same Sunday afternoon, life would be a lot easier. But life doesn’t work like that, does it? Things like to come at us in a barrage when we least expect them.
There is a well-established psychological phenomenon known as the Goldilocks effect or principle. Basically, human beings tend to want to reject the extremes in favour of the middle ground. Like Goldilocks, the bear-house breaking-and-entering porridge burglar, we don’t want things on the extremes (too hot, too cold, too big, too small) but tend to gravitate towards things in the middle that feel “just right”. Infants will focus on stimuli that are neither too complex nor too simple, but things that are somewhere in the middle. In sales, people try to price their items in the perfect “Goldilocks category” that is neither at the top-end nor the bottom-end of the market, because people are more likely to choose things in the middle range. In communication, strategists work hard to achieve that golden moment when people completely understand what they’re trying to communicate, but before information becomes redundant and annoying. So much of life is a push-and-pull between too much and too little, and we are constantly seeking that elusive Goldilocks moment, but rarely find it.
At our lodges, we work hard to give people the best of both words and to find these “Goldilocks” situations for our guests in lots of ways every day. We provide 24hour care and trained medical support, but a sense of comfort and home without the sterile harshness of a hospital. We provide help and support but privacy; comfort, but honesty. Pursuing these optimal experiences is complex, especially because we’ve learnt that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach and that everyone’s Goldilocks experience is slightly different. While it can be enormously frustrating to keep pursuing the impossible happy “middle ground”, I’m so grateful that we get to do it so personally, intentionally and individually for each of our guests.
There are many things in life we never seem to be able to get “just right” – including the weather that seems always to be too hot or too rainy, my kitchen tap that always runs too hot or too cold, or the influx of new guests that always seems to come in crazy batches. I guess I have to resign myself to that… but at least we have the privilege of helping our guests find the “sweet spot” of care during difficult times in their lives. Maybe that is the real art of hospitality?