In the early 2000s, a London hospital had a problem nobody really wanted to say out loud. After a child went through open-heart surgery, the highest-risk moment wasn't the surgery itself. It was the handoff. Moving the child from the operating room to intensive care meant disconnecting and reconnecting monitors, passing along critical information, doing all of it fast, under pressure, with a small human life depending on getting every detail right.
And it was a mess. Too many people talking at once. No one clearly in charge. Small miscommunications that, in this context, were never actually small.
Two doctors, Martin Elliott and Allan Goldman, were watching Formula 1 one evening when something caught their attention. A pit crew can change four tires and refuel a car in under ten seconds. No wasted motion. No raised voices. Just total, choreographed silence.
So they did something most people in their position probably wouldn't think to do. They didn't call another hospital. They called Ferrari.
Ferrari and Williams agreed to look at footage of an actual hospital handover, and their verdict was blunt. Shoddy. Noisy. Uncoordinated. No clear leadership. What struck them most was how many voices were competing for attention, compared to the total silence of their own crews mid pit-stop. So the doctors went to Maranello and studied, in person, how a pit crew choreographs something that has to be fast, precise, and survivable, every single time, with zero room for error.
What came out of it was a new handover protocol, built directly on pit-stop logic. One clear leader, modeled on the "lollipop" operator who signals when the car can leave. Defined roles for every person in the room. A structured sequence instead of organized chaos. The hospital adopted it, the protocol spread, and it's credited with saving thousands of children's lives in pediatric cardiac units around the world.
Here's the part I keep coming back to. The doctors didn't go looking for a hospital that handled handovers slightly better. They went looking for any process, anywhere, that shared the same shape as their problem. Extreme speed. Zero margin for error. A high-stakes handoff between people who have to trust each other completely in a matter of seconds. That shape happened to live in motorsport. It could have lived almost anywhere.
I don't think this is a failure of intelligence, by the way. I think it's just easy to lose sight of, even when you already know it deep down. Most of us, by habit more than by choice, benchmark against our own industry. A restaurant studies other restaurants. A founder studies other founders in the same category. A community studies other communities. It feels like due diligence, and most of the time it is. But somewhere in the daily pace of actually running things, it's easy to forget that your closest competitors are often boxed in by the exact same assumptions you are. Not because they lack imagination. Because nobody has time to look up.
A pit crew has never met a patient in their life. They had zero medical training and no business being anywhere near that hospital's strategy meeting. What they had was an answer to a question that turned out to be the same question underneath: how do you get a group of specialists to perform a high-stakes, time-critical handoff with no wasted motion and no confusion about who's in charge. Strip away the surface, and surgery and motorsport were never that far apart.
I think about this a lot with the women I work with. When you're stuck on something in your business, the instinct is to look sideways at someone else doing the same thing you do. But the better question is usually: who else, in a completely different world, is dealing with this exact shape of problem? Not what industry they're in. What the actual structure of their situation looks like. Speed and trust under pressure. Scarcity and fast decision-making. A group of people who need to move as one. Once you start looking for the shape instead of the label, you start finding your own Ferrari in places you never would have thought to check.
The best ideas rarely show up wearing a sign that says relevant to you. Usually they're sitting somewhere completely unrelated, quietly solving your exact problem, in a language you just haven't learned to recognize yet.