Innovating Beyond Bullet Points: Eight ideas on turning talking points into action-points.

Innovation is not just a bullet point in a drab strategy presentation. And although I boldly stated that as the first line of this article… I realize that sadly, that’s exactly what it is for many organizations. Often times just mere lip service and an empty promise of greener pastures, ticking the box to make the board or some other group of stakeholders think we’re being innovative.

So innovation is relegated to living in a world of bullet-pointancy, an ideal in a presentation rather than something actionable. This inaction doesn’t happen because leaders don’t want to innovate. I think they do; they just don’t know how to innovate.

The hope is that by throwing the word around and including it in strategy documents and corporate stump speeches, people will “be more innovative” translating into the products and services producing a competitive advantage. However simply “being more innovative” isn’t going to cut it. ICU Nurse Jerry, or Susan from Supply Chain Management aren’t just going to start coming up with brilliant new ideas because a PowerPoint calls for it. And what’s worse is employees see and hear the word “innovation” used in such haphazard ways that the word eventually begins to lose its impact.

In the world today, disruption is the new norm. Smart leaders and organizations recognize this shift and are taking steps to ready themselves for the next big change, or better yet planning to be the next big change. Especially in healthcare, innovation is far more than a talking point, it’s an absolute imperative. Quality, affordability, sustainability, scalability, accessibility, adaptability: whatever “ity” you’re organization is chasing, you’ll need more than a buzzword-cliché-filled slide deck to get there. It will take actual things — as in actions people take and projects undertaken to create an infrastructure to support the ideals in that slide deck.

Here’s a cursory look at what some organizations are doing:

1. Sharpen the (organizational) saw

There are soft skills and hard skills of innovation, and both need development. Sure, if you hire right, your employees will come “pre-loaded” with some of the more useful skills needed to drive innovation. Most, however, need a little more work, and at the very least, some sharpening from time to time.

Recognizing this need in 2012, the Dignity Health Performance Excellence team started what is now known as the Innovation Academy. They saw that to really push innovation and improvement efforts across their healthcare system; it was going to take common language, approaches and methods. This level-set on an enterprise scale brought everyone into the same conversation.

It included online and in-person training components aimed at not only giving employees the skills they needed to solve gnarly healthcare problems, but also supported a culture of improvement and innovation. The Innovation Academy now includes courses on Lean Six Sigma, Project Management, Human Centered Design, Crucial Conversations, and Culture of Innovation. Most courses involve some type of practicum that offers up coveted certifications like Black Belts, Green Belts, and PMP.

Senior Director and head of the Dignity Health Innovation Academy, Lacey Newbry says “The Innovation Academy is about creating leaders and empowering them to lead by example. It’s about fostering a culture at Dignity Health that focuses on creating and solving vs. knee-jerk-reacting.”

“It’s about fostering a culture at Dignity Health that focuses on creating and solving vs. knee-jerk-reacting.”  - Lacey Newbry, Sr. Director, Performance Excellence, Dignity Health

Graduates of the Innovation Academy have gone on to do great things for Dignity Health. Newbry says “students apply newly learned skills and understanding to the teams and leaders they work with further spreading the methods throughout the organization.” Graduates have been a part of or lead numerous bottom-line boosting, patient-impacting projects with savings in the millions.

A snapshot of those successes include: decreasing patient length of stay by 15%; decreasing Emergency Department left without being seen by 55%; improving co-pay collections by 34%; improving patient experience scores across the system by 30%.

Other organizations like the Center for Care Innovations (CCI) and Carolinas Healthcare System created their own “innovation training” programs, both coincidently titled: Innovation Catalyst.

Veenu Aulakh, Executive Director of CCI says their Innovation Catalyst program “is an exciting opportunity for people in healthcare to learn new skills and apply new ways of thinking to the same, traditional programs, but have a new lens to it.” The organizations that CCI serves are in particular need of this type of education. They work with Safety Net hospitals, providing them with resources, tools and education to develop and spread novel solutions across their network and beyond.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, innovation-related activities are gaining serious momentum at Carolinas Healthcare System, and it’s turning into a big undertaking. Realizing this challenge, Jean Wright, MD, Chief Innovation Officer saw that her “Innovation Engine” team wasn’t going to be able to do all the innovating themselves. “We knew we could never build an Innovation Department big enough to meet the needs of an 8 billion dollar company. We needed to stay focused on being the ‘engine’ and driving innovation — but not doing all the innovation ourselves.” In launching their Innovation Catalyst program, Dr. Wright believes they will help achieve one of their organization’s key goals of building a sustainable environment for innovation to thrive.

2. Plant thought leaders in a room: just add coffee (and seed funding)

The first mistake we make, confusing suggestion-boxes with idea curation. Unless you think “a wider selection of K-cups in the break room” is innovative, you’ll need to actively encourage and seek out actual innovations from your employees. They have ideas, trust me. You just need to give them a platform to stand on: a place to share and further develop their ideas. You might be surprised what employees are capable of when properly resourced and empowered.

California-based Adventist Health started seeking out and funding novel ideas in 2009 and has been reaping the rewards ever since. Chief Human Resource and Innovation Officer, JoAline Olson created Adventist Health’s In:novation Council, a collection of internal and external thought leaders aimed at permeating the culture at Adventist with innovation. Olson formed the council because she “believes in collective wisdom and stakeholder ownership.

” Through their annual innovation challenges, the council funded projects across their system, including LivingWell, an employee wellness program that saved $5 million and is going strong six years later. Other projects include health literacy “Telenovelas” for their Hispanic populations, way-finding apps for patients and families to navigate campuses, “genius bars” for patients to get answers to health-related questions, empathy class and kits for employees to better care for patients and an HR system aimed at speeding up and streamlining hiring-related communications. The list goes on, but you can quickly get a sense of this program’s impact.

Healthcare systems across the country are beginning to see the benefit from this type of crowdsourcing effort, and it’s easy to see why. The boost employees get from seeing their ideas come to life and implemented in large organizations is empowering. So in addition to increased employee engagement, you get the added benefit of turning their ideas into difference-making innovations.

3. Don’t just stand there… partner, invest, accelerate and scratch your own itch along the way.

Complacency is a company’s quickest route to being disrupted. And often times it’s not that we aren’t trying, it’s just hard enough to keep up with “putting out fires” let alone thinking about creating the next big thing. That being said, resting on your laurels will quickly set you on “the Blockbuster Video path.” A place where none of us want to go.

Resting on your laurels will quickly set you on “the Blockbuster Video path.” A place where none of us want to go.

Savvy companies are not only setting themselves up to be more nimble in preparation for potential immense market shifts, but are actively seeking out to create those changes to begin with. Companies like Dignity Health, Ascension Health, Cedars-Sinai, Kaiser Permanente and Inova Health are strategically investing in and partnering with tech startups to create more value for patients while continuing to secure their positions in their respective markets.

Rich Roth is the Chief Strategic Innovation Officer at Dignity Health, where he leads strategic investing and innovation efforts for the fifth largest not-for-profit healthcare company in the United States. He calls himself a “match maker of tech and care,” and for good reason. In a recent article, Roth shares how his “triple bottom line” investing approach has lead to partnerships with startups like Augmedix and SharedClarity.

Roth says “As the industry continues to change and the needs of our patients and communities evolve, health care systems must employ new technologies and look for nontraditional ways to remain viable.

Dignity Health takes a “scratch-your-own-itch” approach when it comes to partnering and investing. Sanjay Shah, Director for Strategic Investments at Dignity Health, says “We only partner and invest in companies where we believe in the technology, we’re actively using it, things are going well, and we’re planning to scale the solution across the enterprise.

In addition to seeking external partners, Roth’s group also looks internally to support “intrepreneurs” and inventors by acting as an incubator, offering up resources to help make employees’ ideas become reality.

4. Steal the wheel, don’t reinvent it. You’d be surprised how open and willing other innovators are to sharing ideas, methods, and tools.

Comedian Sid Caeser once said, “The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.” That quip of observational humor points out what many of us already know: an invention only becomes innovation when it provides value and impact.

The best way to be the “genius” in that story is to put yourself out there, talk to as many other thought-leaders, innovators and change-agents as you can and you might just meet “the guy who invented the wheel.” In the book, Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson talks about “liquid networks” as places where connections and ideas from multiple people come together and form new ideas… which can ultimately lead to innovation. It’s these random, serendipitous collisions of insight that help innovators develop their ideas over long periods of time: Johnson calls these “slow hunches.

And fortunately, idea-colliding opportunities abound. If you haven’t figured out yet that healthcare is chock-full of smarties, please pay close attention: Healthcare is chock-full of smarties. They are everywhere. The trick is knowing where to look. And what’s better, is that most of those forward-thinking change makers are willing to help you. That’s right! The world of change and innovation (especially in healthcare) can be a lonely one, and because of that, many innovators are willing and eager to connect and share ideas.

If you haven’t figured out yet that healthcare is chock-full of smarties, please pay close attention: Healthcare is chock-full of smarties. They are everywhere. The trick is knowing where to look.

One great place to look for those smarties is in an external network. The Innovation Learning Network is a good example, and it’s founding director, Chris McCarthy, has been in the connecting-game since 2006. McCarthy says, “sharing among innovators in healthcare tends to be a little easier than other industries” mostly because “we all have strong social and community missions to keep people healthy; this is a natural unifier.

He also equates healthcare innovation to “the Wild West in some ways” saying that because much of what we do is new territory, “we need each other to show the value of innovation across the industry.

Another great way to meet other innovators is by attending both general innovation and design conferences along with healthcare innovation specific ones. Mayo Clinic’s Transform Symposium is top notch. TEDx events are often closer and much cheaper to attend than their bigger-more-hyped-counterpart, TED. If you love TED talks but want them to be more health and medicine specific, TEDMED is your best bet. Fast Company puts together a fantastic Innovation Festival, pulling business thought-leaders from across industries.

The key to making conference-gained-insights more valuable is by sharing. Whether you personally attend or send a team member, time should be set aside after conferences to debrief what was learned. Even a lunch-and-learn discussion about those conferences can be really impactful for a team.

You might also consider a BYOC approach: build your own conference. The downsides are resources and bandwidth required to put on an innovation conference. It’s not an easy undertaking. The major upsides however, tailoring it to perfectly fit your needs; finely crafted theme, hand-picked speakers, silo-busting internal collaboration, cost-effective-yet-fun location and you even get to pick the hors d’oeuvres. Although it started off small, my group at Dignity Health created an annual innovation/change/improvement summit in collaboration with several other departments. Our last summit highlighted a dizzyingly good lineup of speakers and showcased the amazing work done in our organization over the past year.

5. Create space for innovation to thrive

Innovation centers in healthcare are cropping up all across the world and for good reason. They provide a much needed place where people can go, away from their daily distractions to think about, plan for, and test the future-state of their companies and new ways to interact with patients.

These spaces don’t need to turn the last few remaining hairs on your CFOs head gray; meaning they don’t need to cost a bunch. Some companies convert large conference rooms or under-utilized portions of an office building into innovation space. Others opt for more polished and built-out centers. There’s no right or wrong way, it just depends on what you’re going to do with the space.

And the good news is, even if you opt to build a bigger, bolder version, it doesn’t necessarily need to take as long as you might think. Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente talks about how their 37,000 square foot, Garfield Innovation Center went from “PowerPoint to bricks and mortar” in just 18 months: a testament to the urgency for such spaces.

What you will find in common with most healthcare innovation spaces is the room to build high and low fidelity prototypes, the ability to test out new technology, space to try out new clinic configurations, adaptive space for varying projects and simulation space to test solutions and processes.

Mark Smith, MedStar Health’s Chief Innovation Officer and Director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2) says of their center, “It helps bridge the gap between designers, developers, clinicians, and technologists,” and ultimately ends up “creating a bridge between ideas and reality.

6. Free your “Radicals” to empower real change in your organization

You may not have ever heard the following Japanese proverb, but if you’re an innovator, you know exactly what it means: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered.” It’s a fate all too common for organizational change agents, but luckily our friends at the National Health Service in the UK are giving the “nails” the education they need to not only make change happen, but also some helpful tips on how not to “get hammered” along the way.

Organizations should cultivate this type of behavior in employees. Now I’m not completely naïve; I understand the implications of having everyone questioning everything, all the time and doing things their own way. It would be pure chaos. However, identifying those individuals with change-agent tendencies, and developing them to use those powers for good will drive change in your organization. The problem is that more often than not, those individuals are seen as disruptive boat rockers and don’t last long enough to see any of their ideas come to fruition.

Identifying those individuals with change-agent tendencies, and developing them to use those powers for good will drive change in your organization.

Helen Bevan, the Chief Transformation Officer at the UK’s NHS Improving Quality Group, recognized this unique trait in countless people throughout her organization (and not surprisingly, in herself).

Her team embarked on creating a unique education experience around a personality and work trait that was deemed mostly undesirable to the rest of the corporate world: free thinking, do-it-their-own-way, unconventional, change-agent, rebel, organizational radicals. The program has roots going back to 2002 with a “One Day School for Organisational Radicals.” Since then, iterations in delivery and additional content (community organizing principles and social movement thinking) have led to what’s now called the School for Health and Care Radicals. As the world’s 5th largest employer, the NHS has their work cut out for them in finding the right people to attend. But they’re on the right track: since the course’s launch in 2014, they’re already boasting over 10,000 participants and 900+, certificated graduates from around the globe.

The great thing about this School; you don’t have to recreate it. They offer the online course free of charge to anyone interested… but living in the US, you’ll just need to get up in the middle of the night to attend.

Healthcare isn’t the only industry to see the value in cultivating the fringe. Best-selling author, organization psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant has dedicated much of his professional career studying the dynamic of success in the workplace and recently authored a book on the topic Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. In the book, Grant shares tips, tricks, anecdotes as well as academic research to support the notion that being an “original” can not only be a good thing, but a great thing for an organization.

You’ll even find networks of professionals coming together around this idea in a group called Corporate Rebels United. Complete with a Manifesto that mentions things like “relentlessly challenging the status quo, saying the unsaid, going after the un-named quality” to name a few.

Perhaps the most famous, widespread recognition of the value seen in these rebels and radicals was in Apple’s “Think Different” campaign from the late 1990’s (and what’s an innovation article without mentioning the incomparable, Steve Jobs — the unofficial patron saint of innovation). The entire ad campaign was aimed at not only inspiring customers to do great things (with Apple products) but also served as a glimpse into their companies core values; a look at how they saw themselves in a world of IBMs, HPs, and Microsofts.

7. Build diverse teams who focus on innovation (from incremental to disruption)

Just saying “everyone should innovate” sounds nice in theory. However, the majority of people in a large healthcare organization don’t have the time, skills, or resources to create truly new value beyond very incremental changes. It’s just not a realistic expectation of the average Joe/Jane employee. Plus, the status quo is kind of a comfy place to be. Everyone knows what’s expected of them and upsetting the apple cart can be, well… upsetting. Therefore folks’ interest-level in innovating is sometimes lacking.

So more often than not, healthcare companies look to external consultancies to help fix problems or design new solutions. And that extra help comes a wealth of creative and analytical thinking, and deep business knowledge. With their uncanny aptitude to act as “situational barometers,” consultants are quick to understand client needs. In many ways, this ability makes them a plug-and-play part of any team.

However, some things you miss when bringing in an outside firm are the softer (but in no way less important) company-specific skills. Like understanding and believing in the mission, knowing the people, having previously cultivated relationships and fully grasping the complex political landscape. The value of this “tribal knowledge” can’t be understated, and as a result, healthcare organizations have been developing their own internal innovation-type consultancies for some time now.

A short list includes: Carolinas Healthcare System’s Innovation Engine, Cedar Sinai Design Thinking Consultancy, Cleveland Clinics Innovations Team, Dignity Health’s Performance Excellence/EPMO, Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation, MedStar Health’s MI2 Group, UK National Health Service’s Improving Quality, Partners Healthcare’s CIMIT.

Although these groups all achieve innovation goals in very different ways, they do share one commonality; they are made up of professionals with very different backgrounds. My group for instance, Performance Excellence is operationally focused and acts like a “Swiss Army Knife” for all of Dignity Health. The reason we are so nimble and flexible is because our team alone has people that have been nurses and physicians, launched large IT systems, managed the building of medical office buildings, been accountants, ran imaging departments, copy-edited for newspapers, recruited for HR departments, project managed, designed communications, and even done Bald Eagle handling. Yes, you read that right, we’ve got a former Bald Eagle handler on our team.

The architect behind the Dignity Health Performance Excellence/EPMO team is the group’s VP, Joan Beach. I see Joan as a “scanner and collector of unique talents,” from all corners of the organization and beyond. Joan (a former consultant herself) said of her groups’ diversity, “The idea is to have SMEs (subject matter experts) who could really understand their clients both technically and culturally. One of the consistent frustrations from working with outside consultants is they don’t understand what it’s like in the environments staff work in everyday.” In the year and a half since I’ve been a part of the group, I’ve seen it morph from a pure performance improvement team to an “all things innovation and improvement team,” tackling a wide range of projects.

Adam Grant, Wharton professor and best-selling author of Originals, drives the point home when he talks about building diverse teams. He says to stop hiring for cultural fit because all that homogeneity weeds out diversity of skills and thought. A much better idea is to hire for cultural contribution: identify gaps in the culture and hire to fills those gaps.

8. Get senior leaders actively involved in the innovation process

Sometimes we forget that before our executives were “keepers of our culture,” they were frontline “doers.” That’s how they got to where they are.

Don’t be afraid to ask executives to get actively involved in projects they’re sponsoring. You might be surprised how many executives would jump at the opportunity to take part in some small portion of a project that gets them outside of their everyday duties.

We know they can’t be there for the entire design process, but we do know what they can gain from taking part in the early insights and empathy-building: a deeper understanding of your process and an increased sense of ownership, excitement, and interest.

Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles is one health system that is embracing this approach. Manager for Care Innovation & Design at Cedars-Sinai, Joseph Castongia says that executive involvement resonates with leaders because it “makes the projects more real for them rather than just looking at data or listening to some third-party group presenting-out their findings."

They schedule “at least one interview, observation, or empathy gaining activities with the executive sponsor of the project. We also like to try and include them in at least one unpacking session.”

Castongia said that long after their involvement, executives still tend to reflect on the effect that those empathy and unpacking experiences had on them. Leaders mentioned increased understanding of the problem area context, increased leverage to move ideas forward and the ability to more succinctly create buy-in for other executives.

A little more action please…

A core tenant of the of Design Thinking is to have a “bias towards action,” and as a student and practitioner of Design Thinking, I tend to err on the side of action. I’ve found that it’s so much better to start something and stop, or pivot, than to analyze something to death. Making ideas real, even if imperfect, is the quickest way making an impact.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of healthcare and non-healthcare companies from every level of the innovation-ready-spectrum. Sharing the “joys and pains of innovation” was not only a job but quickly became a passion. And as I talked to more companies struggling to make their mark on the healthcare innovation landscape, I realized that many of them struggled with how even to begin; surely the hardest part of the journey.

Mark Twain famously wrote, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable task, then starting on the first one.”

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable task, then starting on the first one.” — Mark Twain

So take a long, reflective gander at that well-meaning, innovation-cliché-filled slide deck and ask yourself what you can do to turn those bullet points into action points. What’s your first step in transitioning from talking about being innovative, to actually being innovative?

This article was written by Tim Rawson and published on Medium

Region: North America

Country: USA