Concept of Leverage

Was chatting with Eric today and thought his idea of leverage was really interesting. Basically, the idea is that operationally there are three types of leverage in increasing order of potency: rules, tools, people. Interestingly we seem to always gravitate toward the least potent form of leverage to solve our problems by throwing people at it. However, people are often the source of the problem due to their inconsistency, irrationality, etc etc. Interestingly in medicine similarly to other industries, we have tried to solve the problems of poor quality and increasing costs by throwing more people at it when in fact what we might need are better rules in the form of evidence based checklists and procedures and tools in the form of diagnostics that would help to risk stratify patients.