Let’s talk a bit more about change. There are two approaches to change. Change that manages us or our management of change. Examining the current state of healthcare, we quickly notice that change mostly manages us rather than vice versa. We need to look no further than the disruptive change caused by the pandemic to see this on a massive scale. But insistent change can also have detrimental effects: physicians are inundated with increasing amounts of disparate data from insurers, patients, and bloated EHRs, exceeding their ability to assimilate it all; imposed disruptive workflows driven by the ill-planned implementation of technology that disrupts workflows and delivers poor clinical outcomes and higher costs.
Peter Drucker, regarded as the father of modern management, was so concerned about managing change that he wrote one of his 39 books about it, Managing in a Time of Great Change. Drucker believed that creating change was the most effective way to manage it. Permitting change to be in charge means letting go of control and allowing chaos to reign. Instead of letting change manage us, we must take control of and manage change ourselves – individually and collectively.
And this applies to everyone in a healthcare organization – the cleaning crews, valets, clerical people, pharmacists, therapists, nurses, and doctors.
The first critical success practice for creating positive change – the change we can be in charge of – is having a strategy. Strategy is defined as how you achieve your intended objective. And how do you identify that objective? The first step is to examine your organization’s mission statement. That guiding light sets a path for your strategy and subsequent plans.
In my next podcast, I will explain Drucker’s ideas on strategy and the steps to implement change.
I look forward to your thoughts, so please submit your comments in this post. And subscribe to my weekly newsletter, “What’s Your Take?” on DocsNetwork.com. Thanks for your time today.
