Innovating in healthcare: Best practices

• Be selective – just because best practices worked for some organizations, doesn’t mean they will work for you
• Expertise is important, however, leveraging expertise from different perspectives leads to limitless innovation
• To build an innovative team, leaders need to understand the personalities and strengths at an individual level and create an engagement strategy to follow

Innovation in healthcare is a crucial aspect of improving patient outcomes and transforming the healthcare industry. With the rapid advancements in technology and the increasing demand for more efficient and effective healthcare services, healthcare organizations are constantly seeking new ways to enhance the quality of care they provide.

By understanding and implementing best practices in healthcare innovation, healthcare organizations ensure that they stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and processes and that they are able to pursue the strategies that will drive positive outcomes for patients while improving overall efficiency and reducing costs.

In this article, we hear from Stephen Shapiro and explore some of the best practices in healthcare innovation that are transforming the industry and delivering better outcomes for patients.

HT: You have a book entitled Best Practices Are Stupid, however, best-practice sharing is very often encouraged among and across organizations. Could you please elaborate on what you mean?

Stephen Shapiro: Best practices can be beneficial when implemented within an organization, but relying on external best practices can lead to disastrous outcomes. Let’s look at three reasons why:

1. You are replicating, not innovating. Copying external best practices, especially from competitors, can leave you behind as they move on to new practices. It may be useful to look externally for certain things, but not for something that will set you apart from others.
2. What works for one organization may not necessarily work for another. Blindly copying a practice may not work due to factors such as culture, industry, and unique business models. Understanding the context of the best practice is crucial.
3. The undersampling of failure. Focusing only on successful best practices ignores the failures of many others who attempted the same thing.

The combination of these three reasons can lead to best practices being stupid. If you do use them, be skeptical and use them in a targeted fashion.

Stephen Shapiro: To recognize best practices, you need to understand the difference between core activities and differentiating activities. Core activities are those that customers value, but are not differentiators. Differentiators are those that set you apart from the competition. For core activities, because the goal is efficiency, replicating what others have done can make sense. They aren’t a source of competitive advantage. So best practices can work. In fact, there may be times when we can take a tool, technique, or process that is core in the market and add our special sauce to it, and that makes it a differentiator.

It is great to use those tools to optimize your core because you want this to be a well-oiled machine that you can build upon and use to augment your differentiator. Everybody’s going to have different differentiators, which is why just copying what somebody else is doing is difficult because you need to understand what is right for you and your environment.

HT: You have said “Experts are the enemy of innovation”, however often we lean on experts when trying to develop new and innovative ideas. Can you elaborate on this and why we shouldn’t be looking to experts for support?

Stephen Shapiro: Expertise is important, but when it comes to innovation, we need to be able to see different perspectives, or else you have a very narrow and limited perspective.

Let’s look at an example:

HT:  Personality Poker® is a game that you’ve created. By playing, you say that you can discover valuable information about yourself. These include “your preferred innovation personality and innovation blind spots”. Could you please explain these concepts and why it’s important for leaders and team members alike to know them?

Stephen Shapiro: Personality Poker® is a simple and fun tool I developed about 20 years ago to help people understand where they contribute most to innovation and who they need to partner with because of their blind spots.

When it comes to innovation, there are two big mistakes that leaders make:

1. They assume some people are innovative and that they’re the only ones who have a role to play when it comes to innovating. Not true. Everyone contributes to innovation, just in different ways.
2. They assume that opposites attract.  However, there’s irrefutable scientific evidence that opposites repel. Birds of a feather like to flock together. We want to be with people who are like us. As a result, we hire people who are similar to us. This reduces our ability to innovate as we limit the diversity of thinking.

Watch this video to learn more about Personality Poker® and how this insightful game works:

Stephen Shapiro: Identifying blind spots is crucial for building high-performing teams. To create a successful innovation team, it’s important to appreciate the value that each person brings to the table, especially when they have different personalities or skill sets.

HT: How do you help clients ask the “right “questions?

Stephen Shapiro:  Asking the right question is crucial, but it’s often challenging due to hidden assumptions and confirmation bias. The first step to asking better questions is to challenge our assumptions and beliefs. What do we believe about this problem? This situation? This opportunity?

Confirmation bias can occur when we have strongly held beliefs. This causes us to subconsciously focus only on the parts that reinforce our beliefs, no matter what evidence there is to refute them. Assumptions and confirmation bias, leave us focused on past-based solutions, which prevent us from asking future-oriented questions. To ask better questions, we need to challenge our beliefs and look at problems from multiple angles.

Sometimes the best way to challenge our assumptions and to deal with confirmation bias is through collaboration with others so that we can see things from their point of view. Their assumptions will be different than ours which can help us see new perspectives

HT: Innovation is not just about having one great idea but is rather about consistently staying one step ahead of the competition, what should leaders be doing to help stay ahead of the curve?

Stephen Shapiro:  One of the questions that I always ask myself is not, ‘What’s next?’, but rather, ‘What’s now? Where do I double down? Where can I achieve greater value?’. At the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was pivoting and spinning around in circles. And people asked me, “Steve, how are you going to pivot?” And I said, “I’m not.” I’m not going to pivot because that means I’m shifting from a lack of power and a lack of stability, and I’m moving in a new direction. I stepped back and asked myself: What do I do better than anyone else? How can I build a deeper relationship? My business largely has been traditionally focused on giving a lot of speeches, which are transactions.

And I asked, “Given I have a lot of content, why am I only delivering hour-long speeches? Why not deliver year-long programs that are transformational in nature?” So, during the pandemic, I launched an apprenticeship program where I help people to learn and scale innovation throughout the organization. For your organization, ask yourself, “Where can we go deeper? How can we add more value to our customers?”

Stephen Shapiro: Innovation often faces resistance from the old guard, like a rubber band wanting to go back to its original place. One of the keys to keeping innovation alive and maintaining momentum is sometimes to change the leadership team. It doesn’t mean we get rid of leadership, but we move them somewhere else.  When the pandemic hit, people suddenly couldn’t go to hospitals so we had to meet people where they were. That’s a whole new capability that needs to have its own set of people leading it, running it, and moving it forward alongside what you have traditionally done.

When you make a shift like that, an innovation, or a change in healthcare, it doesn’t mean that what you did in the past was necessarily wrong. It might be right for certain situations, certain patients, and certain environments. What we need to ask is, how can I look at this problem from something other than a one-size-fits-all perspective? There are multiple right answers, whether it’s different patients or types of situations, and then we can design from there. The reason why people tend to slide back is they have this one-size-fits-all mentality, but that’s not the case. If we can change the leadership, the organization, and the measures, incentives, and structures to be aligned with the new as well as what we’ve traditionally done, we have a much better chance of not backtracking.

HT: What are 3-5 key steps leaders need to follow to build a successful and innovative team? Or, how would you identify what is missing from your team that is limiting innovation and success?

Stephen Shapiro: Building an innovative team requires people who are doing what they do best, collaborating with others who do what they do best, all moving forward in the same direction. When you break that down, no matter what industry you work in, healthcare or otherwise, in order to foster a culture of innovation there are four things that leaders need to do.

1.  Communicate the direction and differentiator. Ensure that everyone in your organization understands how they contribute to your differentiator. Then focus on direction over specific targets and goals, allowing flexibility for adaptation and decision-making based on new information and insights.
2. Communicate deep structure, not surface structure. In linguistics, the surface structure consists of the words used to communicate an idea. The deep structure is the actual meaning you are trying to convey. Prioritizing the wording of mission statements and values for posterity fails to convey the visceral relationship employees should have with the organization’s purpose. It is crucial to ensure all employees understand the organization’s mission to ensure they are moving in the right direction.
3. Make sure people are doing what they do best. Leaders may make false assumptions about their team members’ strengths, leading to burnout and dissatisfaction. It’s important to understand what motivates each individual and align their work with their strengths and interests. Even a simple conversation can help leaders better understand their team members’ preferences and passions.
4. Get people to collaborate and work together. Teams cannot perform at high levels without appreciation. To create a thriving and sustainable innovation engine, teams must discuss their work, collaborate, and identify intersections. By playing to each member’s strengths in a collaborative environment with a determined direction, organizations can build a powerful and long-lasting culture of innovation.