Espresso: Henry Dimmbleby - The Strange Way Finland Solved Their Catastrophic Health Crisis

0:14Henry Dimmbleby:What is the head of the Finnish health system? said he got so fed up with black people scientists coming to finland to stick needles in them and try and work out why they were so unhealthy that he decided that they had to do something about it and he he selected this young doctor pekka paska and he joked i'm not sure he joked about that one of the reasons that he selected a young doctor was that it was going to take so long to to sort out that they needed someone started young to try and work out what to do and they started in north keralia which is up in the north country and you know there in that kind of in that place uh you had very high incidence of smoking um vegetables were thought of as things that you gave to your animals so like the most the most common yeah the most common stew was like you know just basically butter and pork and salt and water you know this was yeah yeah yeah really bad diet it was uh long periods of the year when it was dark a lot of physical inactivity and what pasker decided he talked about he people criticized him after saying we can't tell what you did like you did so many different things i'll talk about what he did in a second that we can't tell what worked because you can't isolate them and get evidence on each one and he was like that is completely to misunderstand the system if i had done that first of all you probably wouldn't need wouldn't have got change because you need to hit the system from all angles like to get it to get it to change and secondly would still be here today you know we wouldn't have time to do all of those things so he did what he called what he said is boots deep in the mud he called it you got to get so in north kralia and then they rolled it out to the whole of finland they did everything they could think of they literally created a new cookbooks with stews with vegetables in them and they trained like big training program across the whole population we train them what to cook they as you said they took salt out of sausages and put less fat and mushrooms in they actually turned out to be more popular than the other sausages they created a cooperative that took berries in the summer and froze them so people could eat berries during the winter they lit snow paths so people could exercise more they gave older people snowshoes so they could get out they even created a television show where villages would compete against each other like x-factor but with villages for who could be the healthiest yeah and it was the most watched uh At its peak, it was the most watched TV show for Finnish men.

3:37Henry Dimmbleby:So they did all of this stuff. And as a result, they managed to get their coronary heart rate diseases way, way down. And it's one of the few really successful public health interventions. and so you know the argument that we used in terms of intervention is you've got this broken feedback loop you genuinely don't know how the system is going to respond to intervention because the system fights back against interventions and so you have to hit it like hard from multiple multiple directions to get it to shift and so you know it's so it's it's it's fascinating and linking this back it's almost back to what we started about a restaurant being a system and that sort of nudging theory uh i interviewed oshan rogers who's i don't know have you been to the devonshire yeah i know os yeah i haven't been to the devonshire but i've known os for years oh he's he's brilliant and um yeah i'm going going for lunch actually with him next week but we were talking about the one percent he was saying we we do all these little things like so it could be their equivalent of mushrooms sausages could be the the the bar menu on the on the beer map right it's a tiny little thing no one thinks about another little thing he does is we've we'll never you know when you go to a pub and it's like they run out of glasses in the summer and stuff like that it's really annoying you've got to have a guinness and a plastic it's just a horror yes horrible they've got loads of glasses up the back so they're prepared that's another little thing they've got a medicine cabinet upstairs which has to be used which is basically if someone comes in being a bit of an arsehole or in a mood they'll they'll give them a nice little shot or something but what osh was saying is all these little things that add up you nudge as you say i love that henry attack it from all angles and then you get this this kind of this change and that's what he was saying at the demonstration he's constantly trying to think about those little one percent the other thing about that is you you which is similar to systems is you actually don't know what combinations of things you do works so i think you know one of the one of the common mistakes people make with the business is they think that they actually understand exactly what it is they're doing that works and very often that's not the case so you often see people think well i can take this restaurant i can do it instead of doing it in a 5 000 square foot i'll do it in 1800 i'll do the small version absolutely bombs because what you didn't realize was a thing that people really loved about it was the scale or the vibe or you know the other way around so i think you know the the system that you create in this you know it's a very closed system a restaurant you're basically pretty much in control of everything that comes in and everything that goes out but you still don't really know how it works you have a guess yeah yeah you post rationalize it don't you be like that that's exactly why it was going to work and yeah but it's all it's all it's all i always say people who are rolling out restaurants come and ask advice to say like just do it until you really have run out of spaces that you can go to that are the same just do it the same don't risk changing it because you it's not that you're a genius it's that you are talented and you've somehow lucked upon a formula that people really like and it works Thanks.