Musings from the CU Suite

Written by Anthony Demangone, Powered by NAFCU

Ask 100 people what the normal body temperature of a human is, and you'll hear a consistent answer. 

98.6. degrees Fahrenheit.

That's the correct temperature, right? 

Well...

As I listened to a Freakonomics podcast recently, I began to have doubts. 

It turns out that we can thank Dr. Carl Wunderlich for that number.  Back in the mid-1800s, he was the medical director of a large hospital in Germany. He took the vital signs of roughly 25,000 patients. The average temperature? 

You guessed it. 98.6. 

But his thermometer was not as good as current models. You took the temperature under the arm - not the mouth. And the thermometer was hard to use.

In 1992, researchers at the University of Maryland did their own study. And guess what they found as the average?

98.2. 

But those researchers found more than that. The human body's temperature fluctuates throughout the day. Temperatures as high as 99.5 can be found in a healthy human.

This got me thinking.

• What other norms, rules-of-thumb, and other guidelines are outdated? How would you know?
• This happens in many organizations as well. Why do we do something? Well, that's how I was told to do it. And that's how I tell people to do it. How often do we break down decisions and build them up again to see if our assumptions are still correct?
• Finally, you can never spend enough time staying on top of changes. Consumer norms. Regulatory changes. New technologies. What was the norm and SOP five years ago, may not be so today. 

***

Speaking of staying on top of things, we still have seats available for our Regulatory Compliance Seminar in San Diego, October 10-13. Come network with the country's best compliance officers and learn from NAFCU's team of compliance attorneys. It is a fantastic event.