A House Divided
This Tuesday's fourth-season premiere of the Emmy-nominated medical drama House might have had a familiar feel to many a corporate manager tuning in. The acerbic, maverick doctor Gregory House, played by Brit Hugh Laurie, opens the season resistant to the idea of hiring a new team to support him in his ongoing task â€" diagnosing and treating patients with rare and baffling symptoms. He claims he is capable of taking on the task himself and is hesitant to bring on unfamiliar people who he would have to trust and to whom he'd have to delegate. But more to the point, he had recently lost his long-standing three-person team -- two of them resigned and the third was fired -- and is unsure that he'd be able to adequately replace them. So instead, he decides to take a new case and solve it himself.
As the episode progresses, we are treated to the usual high hospital drama as well as something of a primer on team dynamics -- and we're reminded of why even the most innovative and dedicated minds can benefit from teammates, especially when taking on non-routine tasks.
House is an innovator -- great with ideas, but also dependent on others to help him test and refine his ideas. He is in constant need of conflict, team members to question his diagnoses. However, at present, he is hesitant to pull together a team because the last one disbanded, leaving him without the personalities, skill sets and approaches with whom he was familiar and with whom he held a proven working relationship. His fear of bringing in new blood hampers his approach to the task.
His patient, a severely burned victim of a gas main explosion and building collapse, nearly dies, not because House isn't coming up with great diagnoses and treatment ideas, but rather because he sorely needs others with whom to brainstorm. An administrator reminds him that the reason his former team worked was that one person always wanted to prove him wrong (giving him the conflict that spurs him to aggressively question his ideas), one wanted to prove him right (providing valuable support), and one would have never believed that the devoted boyfriend of the patient would know so little about his mate as it seems as the show goes on (pointing out the small details that escape those who look at the big picture.)
Alone, House is too regimented in his thinking and is afraid to change his approach because his diagnoses seem to be right and his treatments seem to work, though new problems keep cropping up. Turns out that, caught up in solving these vexing and mysterious medical riddles, House relies too much on his powers of diagnosis and doesn't realize that the burn victim is not who he thinks she is, she's a similar looking coworker with a whole different set of conditions, allergies and circumstances.
Throughout the show, while House is struggling with the young woman's persistent problems, his boss tries to threaten, extort and coerce him into hiring a team, but it's only through showing him how his work would turn out better with that crucial support that he finally acquiesces. Turns out House, like most people that are well suited to their jobs, is primarily motivated by the quality of the end product, not the glory of accomplishing it alone.