We keep repeating the same paths, solutions and strategies as before.
It is not that we must throw in the trash previous experiences, but we have to exercise our critical spirit, know why the current solution, check if it is still valid, question and compare with new ones, before validating its continuation.
In almost every business we have to adopt a new mindset and be creative enough to question everything around us.
Health needs renewal, but then we put in positions of responsibility people who have “many years in the house” and to assign these we look for people with experience in: “how we do things here” and then we complain, because we do not have the necessary innovation and changes that we need. At this point in history, the experience is decidedly overrated.
Don’t blame yourself, we all do the same thing. Much of the primary cause lies in our inner fear, or deep fear, which we do not perceive or analyze. We have a hard-earned job that we have to preserve, we have family, prestige to take care of and we have become extremely defensive. We’re afraid of making mistakes and we forget to get better. And of course, substantial improvement is a challenge, a risk we may not want to take.
But in exponential times, we have to be bold. We already say, “improving only 10% doesn’t solve it.”
We do not refer to new technologies: IoT, AI, 5G, Blockchain etc, that will force us to make huge changes. Because under this layer of “new technologies” we still have many things to do well to have a management adapted to the times, modern and economical, to measure everything, to know how to evaluate the incidence of each factor, process, or cost. Let’s look at an example:
- An assistant retired after doing the same job for many years: packing a medical product to be used in the hospital. When they studied the workload, to assign a new assistant they found that the income was only 30% of its working time, for 25 years.
We have to MEASURE, CRITICIZE and VALIDATE all procedures and question their usefulness.
The critical and innovative spirit of solutions must be promoted, knowing that experience, although it protects us from certain problems, has an implicit disvalue, which is continuity in procedures. Many examples indicate to us that the solutions were good at the time they were implemented and that now after a period, they have changed the conditions of the context and we must at least adjust the solutions, strategies and others, or change totally, as explained in the chart below.
Entropic evolution of our procedures
To create a culture with more innovation we must create mixed groups of deliberation, with experienced people and people with new blood, weighted groups and with authorization to risk proposals, very focused on offering an innovative solution, recycled, or revised and validated.
“The hero of the day is the one who brings a solution”
The culture within these groups must be horizontal. The hero of the day is the one who brings a new solution and not the boss. The figure of the latter remains necessary in the chain of command. We just need him to embark on the process of renewing procedures and innovation.
We do not doubt that prudence is the greatest of virtues, so the good manager should maintain a balance between security and process innovation.
Victor Basso
Director of Opuspac University (corporate university)