Re-Designing Healthcare: The Race is On

Today I had a fantastic, far-reaching chat with a couple of entrepreneurs about the emerging field of healthcare redesign.  We talked about designing user experiences the way we design products; the difficulty the healthcare sector has in following fresh approaches through into implementation and how design-thinkers who are focused on problem-solving over profit can make a living doing what they do best (and what society sorely needs).

I've had many such chats over the past several months; in fact, there's a whole emerging field of healthcare designers who are doing projects, bridging the gap between such fields as social media and health service delivery, essentially trying to adapt our healthcare model to the 21st Century reality.  At the same time, I've talked to many policy makers, searching for new solutions but wary of committing to anything in politically and financially volatile times.  I've sat down with health service providers who are anxious to see systematic change but concerned about what that change will do to their niche areas/"clients"/jobs.  You'll find a bunch of them meeting here.

There's a real appetite for new approaches to healthcare in Canada, with players in different spaces touching different parts of the elephant, but not connecting in the middle.  The question on everyone's lips is: "how do we close the gap?"

When I first wrote this piece on how social entrepreneurs will be tomorrow's innovation consultants, I had healthcare (in particular, mental health) in mind.  Health is at the root of everything - family life, productivity, even commuting is tied to how healthy we are and where our headspace is at.  It just so happens that healthcare costs take up the biggest chunk of government spending, too.

The same goes for this piece on the changing nature of Government Relations - the emerging spaces for PR/GR folk to play in ties to health management and increasingly, design.  As the landscape around health, healthcare consumption and society at large grows increasingly dense, we need a map to find our way towards the destination of a modern, sustainable healthcare system.

So, with all this in mind, here's what I see happening next:

- These healthcare designers/social entrepreneurs will increasingly find each other through networking events or online and begin to realize they have an entire community of health-problem finders looking for a home.

- Smart healthcare providers/stakeholders will start walking the walk on innovative health landscape mapping/service provision, applying new approaches and ideas from varying fields to healthcare delivery/user experience.

- As some of the healthcare design folk connect with these stakeholders (either as hires or on contracted out projects), it will become increasingly clear just how profitable this design field can be.

- Existing consultancies will start growing into this market space, competing for both healthcare design work and healthcare design talent.

- As competition grows/demand runs up against the ability of existing funding to match, health design stakeholders will increasingly push against policy makers to get with the times.  New healthcare management and design businesses will crop up (treading ground first covered by The Courtyard Group) and existing players will try to catch up.   

- Seeing the chance for good policy and political wins (and recognizing the risk of not doing anything), Political Parties will start paying closer attention.

- Some of the original batch of healthcare design-thinkers will start valuing profit more that problem-solving, as will newbies to the field seeing the opportunity to find success in a growing field.  At the same time, there will be a large percentage of players who continue to see accomplishment as the goal, rather than wealth.  "I solved that" will become the new "I built that", which in itself replaced the feudal "I inherited that."

- It'll take time and a few iterations, but healthcare as we see it now (a product/service to be consumed) will be transformed more into a partnership that involves individuals, their employers, doctors, holistic health providers and other proactive providers.

The big question now is: Who are the far-sighted players who are going to recognize and benefit from this trend first?  Which employers are going to snatch up the amazing, innovative talent that exists out there but is not presenting itself in a traditional way?

What will the resulting innovations look like?  I'd love to tell you more, but the future is a bit like a stereogram; unless you're invested in the idea, I can't guarantee you'll see that third dimension.

The race is on; whichever providers/designers win in the short term, we will all benefit in the big picture.

Collaborate by burning the midnight oil, like Edison (Harvey Schachter)

I would have to agree with this.  After all, understanding is the place where diversity meets and innovation develops; understanding, of course, is a cognitive function.
WAKATA isn't just a concept - it's intended to be a solution.

Midnight Lunch

By Sarah Miller Caldicott

(John Wiley, 284 pages, $25.95)

It was common for the scientists hired by Thomas Edison for his innovation factory in Menlo Park, N.J., to toil into the late evening or early morning hours, their boss alongside them. He often ordered a midnight lunch of meat, bread, cheese and beverages for the entire crew, to fuel their overnight discussions and theorizing. Gathered together over food they were – take your pick – innovating, collaborating, or both.

 

Innovation is a hot item these days. Mr. Edison’s great-grandniece, Sarah Miller Caldicott, found that in the first five months of 2012, 250 books were published with the word innovation in the title. But she wonders if in seeking the Holy Grail of innovation, companies (and authors) are actually looking in the wrong direction.

 

After studying her famous relative, she believes the secret to success is in the collaboration that those midnight lunches reflected. “Perhaps it is a culture of collaboration that we should be seeking as the Holy Grail,” she writes in Midnight Lunch.

 

Obviously, one doesn’t preclude the other; innovation and collaboration can go hand in hand. The problem is that most people think of innovation as solitary, stunning breakthroughs that emerge through the power of a singular mind, a Newton lying under the apple tree, Archimedes in his bathtub, or Mr. Edison in his laboratory. But Ms. Caldicott reminds us that the inventor of the light bulb, the phonograph and the motion picture camera (among many other devices), was not a solitary creator.

 

“He viewed collaboration as the beating heart of his laboratories, a sustained resource that fuelled the knowledge assets of his sprawling innovation empire,” she writes. “From his earliest days renting space in workshops and small laboratories, Edison collaborated with others. Realizing the value of sharing his inspiration with people who held different skills than he did, Edison felt a unique bond with those who laboured with him.”

 

She stresses that the modern fascination with teams does not necessarily mean we are collaborating. Teams too often operate as individuals working alongside but separate from each other. Collaboration involves interweaving a group of people’s work so the talents of everyone are leveraged for a significantly greater gain.

 

Ms. Caldicott pieces together four phases of collaboration, each containing two elements, so eight factors in all to consider:

Phase 1: Capacity

It starts by creating the foundations for collaboration to thrive. For Mr. Edison, the first element was creating a “collaboration soup,” formulating a diverse group that represented a cross-section of experience, thought styles and creative potential. He relished, and sought, diversity. “It is not always necessary, perhaps not always desirable, to be a specialist in a subject in order to make suggestions to it which starts useful angles of research,” he noted. “We specialists are likely to get into ruts of our specialties out of which it is difficult to progress.” The second element is to assemble small teams of two to eight people who, through collegiality and the nimble search for discovery, can make a breakthrough in understanding.

Phase 2: Context

The team must then focus on developing a new context to frame the problem. That happens through a combination of individual learning plus hands-on collaborative working, which Ms. Caldicott dubs “solo meld” and “group meld.” First, the individual team members pursue their own learning process, questioning their assumptions, reading widely, and considering analogies that might broaden their thinking about the issue at hand. “Individuals prepare insights without locking down on any specific idea or direction,” she says. Then they come together as a group, discussing their insights developed in that solo meld, and pushing each other to new ideas, through methods that include experimenting with prototypes and developing stories to explain possible solutions.

Phase 3: Coherence

The team needs a central, binding force to integrate the collaborators. “Like a kind of gravity that permeates the entire group, coherence connects team members with an invisible grasp that allows the team to keep functioning even if there are disruptions,” she observes. That collaborative momentum comes as the members emerge at various points to inspire each other to move ahead and, secondly, through communication of the progress they are making toward their collective goal.

Phase 4: Complexity

In complex projects, teams must jettison the hierarchical mentality and organize in more fluid patterns that allow them to adapt to shifting conditions – what she calls “smart layers” that can connect the actors in different ways. Keep procedures, structures and other entanglements to a minimum. Document what the group is doing so you can track what has been accomplished (Mr. Edison constantly wrote about his ideas and progress in notebooks).

 

Midnight Lunch comes at innovation from a useful, different perspective. It’s not always easy reading, and readers can get lost in the details of the eight elements of collaboration. But Ms. Caldicott provides a nice blend of storytelling about Mr. Edison and other creative thinkers that can add to your knowledge about collaborative innovation.

 

 

Special to The Globe and Mail

Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter

7 Things That Set Real Entrepreneurs Apart (Steve Tobak)

Love this description.  I know a few folk who match it - and there's no question in my mind that they're going to change the world.

7 Things That Set Real Entrepreneurs Apart

Just because you wear a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers doesn't make you Steve Jobs. This is what makes an entrepreneur.

 

Lou Dematteis/Corbis

 

A VC whose name escapes me once said, "There are entrepreneurs and there are Entrepreneurs!"

I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but I'll tell you what I think. I think the term "entrepreneur" has become more than a little overused, watered down, diluted.

 

That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. This is supposed to be the era of the entrepreneur. Practically everyone has a business, a brand, a blog. Everybody's a CEO of one. And yet, relatively few actually embody the true meaning of the word "entrepreneur." So what does it mean?

 

To me, it means assuming significant personal risk in forming and running a business.

 

And of those real entrepreneurs, few manage to create a profitable, growing enterprise that delivers unique products, meaningful employment, and shareholder value. What makes those Entrepreneurs unique? What sets them apart from the pack? That's a very challenging question. And the answer may surprise you.

 

They defy characterization. You really have to get to know these people, work with them for years, maybe even get inside their heads a bit, to understand what they're really all about. Here's one thing I know for sure. They're each one of a kind. The real deal. They don't try to be unique. They just are. And they don't try to be like someone else, either. They know that wearing a black mock turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers doesn't make you Steve Jobs.

 

Money means little to them. It's sort of ironic how little money matters to those who are true entrepreneurs at heart. After all, the really successful ones end up with so much of it. For them, money is just a means to an end. And since money's not a distraction or a temptation, they can truly focus on what really counts: doing what drives them, what they're passionate about. Challenging themselves, proving it can be done. Building a company, wealth and all that are secondary.

 

They're on a mission from God. No, they're not really. But when they speak about their vision or idea, you'd swear they've been possessed by some sort of demon that, instead of inciting chaos and mischief, inspires innovation and creation. There's definitely an aspect of fanaticism in their zeal for whatever has captured their imagination. That could be because they truly think they're special or need to prove something. Interestingly, that aspect can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

They don't take risks for the sake of taking risks. Just as they don't set out to make money, true entrepreneurs don't usually set out to take risks, either. They just don't let anything stand in the way of whatever it is they're driven to do. They'll pursue it come hell or high water. Risk just comes with the territory. Despite being driven to do what's never been done, I just think that motivation is stronger than their fear of what might go wrong. Or maybe they just don't think about it.

 

They weren't born that way. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I've known started with nothing or at least from modest beginnings. Some had parents who did their own thing, but most didn't. They usually had mentors or people who inspired them to trust their gut and have confidence in themselves. That, to me, is a key ingredient in the making of an entrepreneur: the motivation to go for it despite the odds and conventional wisdom.

 

They're not iconic leaders. Our society loves to create heroes. We hoist them up on impossibly high pedestals. But in my experience, the entrepreneur as iconic leader is a myth. Successful founders usually have partners. Bill Gates had Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak. Larry Page had Sergey Brin. Also, entrepreneurs are often better at founding and creating than they are at running and sustaining companies.

 

They're not very patient. Whoever said patience is a virtue was definitely not a VC or anyone in the startup business, for that matter. Successful entrepreneurs don't usually care much for social convention. They have little patience for convention. They don't want to hear how things are done, have been done, or should be done. They do things their way. But here's a twist. While they will fight you tooth and nail over a key decision, as soon as they realize they're wrong, they'll turn around in a heartbeat.

 

To me, it all boils down to this: If you want to become an entrepreneur for the sake of becoming an entrepreneur, that's probably not going to work out so well. If, on the other hand, you're driven to accomplish something cool and unique without a safety net, then I think you should go for it.

Steve Tobak is a management consultant, executive coach, and former senior executive of the technology industry. He's managing partner of Invisor Consulting, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consulting firm. Contact Tobak; follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. @SteveTobak

The Best Innovations Start Free

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Commercial services soon followed, and though they started life as a free service – because operators hadn't figured out how to charge for them – it was quickly realised there was money to be made from texting as the number rose dramatically.

Texting started off free, and turned out to be quite profitable.  But, again, it started off free.  If the strict profit model had been applied here, we'd never have had texting - it needed to exist first for its value to be proven.  Someone had to take the risk by going pro-social with the service, first. The evolution of Facebook has followed a similar pattern - what starts off as fun, innovative and free becomes commercialized over time as the money people start to smell opportunity, then start to fear loss.

It all goes to show us - innovative value-add isn't tied to capitalism and can therefore exist independent of it.  Capitalism, on other other hand, can only exist where it has innovation to manipulate.  When time was, such was the case with feudalism and entrepreneurialism, too. 

When it becomes solely about profit and related status, personal risk ceases to be desirable; consequences get downloaded to those with less to gain and more to lose, reducing the opportunity for innovation.  Instead, sure things are what get bet on.  In changing times, there's little that's 100% certain - even the buckets one tends to think of as immutable, like natural resources, aren't the cornucopia we often take them for.

Innovation is essential for growth, but it's dependent on vision first, capital second.  Something to think about.