I must be an unpleasant creature to share a room with. I snore. I smell. And I’m seemingly addicted to my way of doing things.

Knowing this, I booked two single rooms for me and a friend to go walking in the Peak District. For reasons that remain obscure, the app I used to make the booking failed. We ended up sharing a horrifyingly intimate, and mutually disturbing, twin room.

Complaining threatens to become a full-time job. I’ve just got off the phone; I had two goes with the AI assistant before speaking to a human. Before that, I sent the same message three times on the app. Before that, I tried sending an email, which is what the person I spoke to has ended up doing. Who knows how – or indeed whether – this ends.

Every minute consumed could have been spent more productively. And every demand I’m placing on the company is a consequence of failure.

John Seddon, management consultant and systems thinker, was the first to coin the concept of ‘failure demand’ to describe just such a situation. It followed his work with telesales in the computer industry, where Seddon saw organisations struggling to keep up with demand that resulted from their failure to resolve a customer’s needs.

Not getting things right first time led to repeated calls to already overwhelmed call centres. Demand followed from, and subsequently caused, failure.

Seddon saw a solution in the problem. Reducing failure demand opened a route to increasing value: instead of busily remedying mistakes, organisations could concentrate resources on giving people what they needed, when they needed it.

The idea of failure demand has since been translated to the NHS. The concept is broad. It might cover avoidable contacts, appointments and workload arising from missed opportunities to properly address patient needs. It might follow from failing to diagnose a condition in a timely way, when it is more readily treatable; it might cover extended waiting times leading to reduced efficacy of surgery - or repeated tests to check whether surgery is still appropriate; or it may cover failing to support a patient to address a lifestyle risk, leading to avoidable morbidity.

Even this brief description shows that the concept of failure demand might be so broad as to become all-encompassing. This would severely limit its use in the NHS. And so, working with our partners in the Health Foundation, we are beginning a short project – led by Alison Turner - to see how the NHS might make best use of this potentially powerful concept.

Drawing upon literature, the insights of experts, and collaborative workshops, we will suggest the most fruitful ways of defining, applying and measuring failure demand in the NHS. Results can then be used by system leaders and policymakers to target and formulate responses.

One possible application is productivity. Frequently taken as a synonym for ‘working even harder’, productivity could be improved by reducing failure demand. Missed opportunities, delays, unmet needs: each represents a productivity loss. And ‘reducing failure demand’ might be a more clinically attractive route to improved productivity than cost-cutting or service rationalisation. Results will therefore also be fed into the Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission.

We are in the foothills of this project. The work is mapped out, we are excited at what we might find, and who we might find it with. Results will be ready to share in around eight months, when I will hopefully also be able to report on a hotel refund…