In Healthcare, Transformation Is Opportunity Management

Transformation is a fancy word for opportunity management, though healthcare leaders rarely hear it that way. They have spent years talking about crisis. Workforce shortages, burnout, cost pressure, shrinking margins and patients who expect the same ease from their health system that they get from every other part of their lives. It's easy to see why so many executives feel they are always on defense.

I understand the instinct. But I've come to believe that the way leaders frame change determines what they are able to see in it. As we adapt to new situations, we get the chance to create opportunities we either didn't see before or weren't ready to pursue.

The question is how to see change as an opportunity and not a threat.

What Comes First: Technology or Thinking?

In May 2023, I hosted the Healthcare in the Age of Personalization summit, where health system leaders gathered virtually for two days to work through a hard problem: how to personalize care in a field that also depends on standardization. One question has stayed with me ever since. What comes first, new technology or new ideas?

Technology can expand our possibilities in ways we don't yet recognize. But we can't recognize those possibilities if we haven't examined how we think, and how our thinking needs to change. Health systems keep adding new tools for documentation, scheduling, triage and patient communication. Used well, these tools give caregivers time back and make care feel more personal. Used on top of old assumptions, they simply automate the same impersonal experience at greater speed.

Technology is a tool for restoring humanity to healthcare. It is not a substitute for the leadership work of deciding what that humanity should look like.

The Four Barriers Standing in the Way

Framing is everything. I once asked 450 directors and senior directors at Fortune 500 companies what "change management" meant to them. Their answers: our department is doing something wrong. Leadership doesn't listen. Budgets are going to get cut. Someone is going to get fired. Then I asked the same people what they feel when they have the opportunity to influence the evolution of their company's future. The answers flipped. We begin to believe our department can be part of the solution. We begin to feel that anything is possible. Same people, opposite emotions.

In healthcare, four barriers surface in system after system. They are the reason so much change feels like a threat.

1. We start off dehumanized. We talk about patients as disease categories instead of individuals who are likely facing the most difficult moments of their lives.
2. Shifting the culture feels daunting. Breaking decades of attitudes and behaviors that are deeply ingrained in a culture can seem overwhelming.
3. People resist change. We've asked teams to absorb enormous change over the last several years. How do we ask for more, and sustain it?
4. Entrenched systems persist for no good reason. Healthcare is especially guilty of keeping procedures in place with no rationale other than "that's the way we've always done it."

Notice that none of these barriers is technical. Each one is about how leaders and organizations think about people.

Clarity Makes Experimentation Safe

Uncertainty causes anxiety, and anxious teams hold on to what they know. Your caregivers are still carrying the weight of the last several years.

Asking people like that to embrace change requires two things at once. First, clarity: where the organization is going and why it matters to the patient. Second, permission: room to experiment, to try something new and to fail without penalty. Leaders who offer clarity without permission get compliance. Leaders who offer permission without clarity get chaos. You need both.

It also requires coaching. Leadership is harder than we often admit, and managers need help leading their own teams through change. Don't assume they know how.

Borrow From Outside Healthcare

Patients now judge their care against every other experience they have as a consumer. They expect to be known, remembered and served on their terms. Healthcare doesn't have to invent that capability from scratch. Other industries have spent years learning how to personalize at scale, and health systems can learn from them.

That also means revisiting what you measure. Metrics built around a sick-care model will keep rewarding sick-care behavior. If you want care organized around the whole person, stop leading like a cottage industry and start measuring what matters to the individuals you serve.

Manage the Opportunity in Front of You

Start with the procedure you keep only because it's the way you've always done it. Look for places where you are deploying new technology on top of an old assumption instead of questioning the assumption first. Ask whether your teams have both clarity about direction and permission to experiment, and which of your metrics reward sick care instead of whole-person care. Then ask what a patient would say you still get wrong about who they are.

Threats alone do not make us vulnerable. Our inability to be resilient and to reinvent in the face of those threats does. The health systems that thrive will be the ones whose leaders treat every disruption as an opportunity to manage, not an attack to survive. That is the heart of the work we explore through our executive summits.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.