13. WHY DON’T WE?
•Because we are trained to work individually
• It’s called cheating
•Because it’s easier
• If nobody challenges your assumptions, it’s a lot quicker.
Until it’s not.
•Because the larger the organization, the more
silo-ed it becomes
• We are encouraged and rewarded to look only at our
own domain, not overstep our boundaries
•Because we want to keeps our cards close
14. WHY SHOULD WE?
•A better understanding of the problem
•A better understanding of the environment it
lives in and there for how to approach it
•Solutions you didn’t think of
•Obstacles you didn’t think of
•Backup where you need it
17. Then the
only thing
you have to
do is…
Healthcare
Consumer
ClinicianMarketing Hospital
IT
HealthIT
Vendor
Hospital
Admin
??LegalDesigner
18. NO ONE VIEWPOINT PAINTS THE WHOLE PICTURE
• Get them in early and whenever you need
their expertise
• You’re not looking for permission from
everybody.
• Just that they know what is coming and they know that
you have taken their viewpoint into consideration
• Think about your solution from their point of
view
• Validate assumptions
19. THE BEST SOLUTION FOR THIS PROBLEM
•More likelihood of creating a
solution that
• Solves a relevant problem
• Fits the organization
• Delivers better care
BETTER SOLUTIONS THROUGH MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
GAINING PERSPECTIVE FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
COMPLEXITY REQUIRES GROUP SUCCESSorSURVEYING MT. ESJA
As you can tell from my tick accent, I’m not a Bostonian. I come from a volcanic rock in the middle of the north-Atlantic called Iceland. I’m telling you about this not so that I can tell you about the scandinavian way of looking at universal healthcare. No, I want to take your minds off that for a moment and tell you a little bit about Mount Esja.
Mount Esja has the same effect in Reykjavik as the Eiffel tower in Paris. If you have view over it the price of your real estate takes a hike.
These would tell me I don’t know anything about Mt. Esja because I have not tasted the sweetness of its vegetation
The geographical survey people also know this mountain intimately. And the geologists. What if this mountain is a still active volcano? I would have no idea.
Ever been on a project that’s turned out to be a volcano?
They all have a different viewpoint and they all have a different story. None of them is right, none of them is wrong. Together they can describe the mountain. Separately they just describes parts of it.
The reason I tell you this story is that it illustrates a theme that I often come across when I work with teams that work in cross functional, enterprise IT and have identified an issue they want to address. A common goal, if you will. You see, we all live by this illusion that we share a viewpoint. But we don’t. We use the same words, the same language but we really aren’t talking about the same thing. We assume that and therefore we also assume that we don’t need to reach out to anybody else to help us fill in the details or validate our ideas.
There are basically two things that I would like you to take from my talk today:
No one viewpoint paints the whole picture
How to identify who you need to talk to.
Hospital website
Typical situation:
Contacted by marketing
– information about the hospital, out patient information, appointments, look up your health records,
Marketing focused on their goals
All of these reasons are so common and all of them are keeping us from our A-game.
Hospital website
Typical situation:
Contacted by marketing
– information about the hospital, out patient information, appointments, look up your health records,
Marketing focused on their goals
Some idea that patients need to be involved
Little understanding on developing or running a website
If we were to go ahead we could end up
Solving a problem that we don’t fully understand
Creating a lot of design documents that look pretty but don’t do anything
Making a website that never gets implemented into full use
And this is a fairly common situation that we find ourselves in
Hospital Admin: How will this make their work easier, less paperwork, more throughput, better prep for the clinician
Clinician: Emphasize the efficacy of your product, how this will make their work easier, how it will enable them to provide better care
IT vendor: These are the folks that will implement the solution. It’s inspiring working with people in HealthIT because there is no problem they cannot solve. They’re eager and enthusiastic. Like most technophiles they see the possibilities for tech rather than the obstacles. They do have a tendency to just start running. There is no mountain unscalable for these folks In this case you won’t need to convince them to get on board. You’ll need to convince them to hold their horses while the mountain is surveyed.
Hospital IT: Because they are the folks that will set up and support the thing. Here it is important to emphasize that you have thought of the security, HIPAA, how this thing will run and be maintained and supported.
These are also the people that hold the purse. You may have the clinicians on board but if you’re trying to implement in a large institution then it’s quite rare that the clinical departments have budgets for IT, that falls under the IT departments.
And here is an important distinction: The clinical departments are revenue generators, at the very least you’re making them more efficient, more money gets retained at the institution. But the IT departments are cost centers. Every year there is someone who looks at their budget and thinks “well this is getting out of hand, we should cut this” and you’re there trying to dip your hand into that ever shrinking pool.
You better impress them with your solution and convince them that it will not create problems for them.
Legal: Will this thing get us sued.
And who else? Who am I forgetting that I should also include in the design of a website for a large hospital?
When you think you have exhausted your list of stakeholders for your project, let me teach you a trick to verify that. Have a conversation with your stakeholder which mainly consists of you saying “and then what”. They’ll take you through the process, as it looks from their point of view, and if you ask often enough they’ll end up by saying: “and then we’re done.”
The key here is not to stop. Continue. Ask once more: And then what.
And then they’ll say something like this.
If they’re graceful and enthusiastic about the project they may say “we” but most likely they’ll say. Then the only thing you have to do is…
And listen for what that is. They’ll minimize it, trivialize it because it’s outside of their domain. It might be “deploy this into the live environment” “get accreditation” “find someone to pay for this”
Whatever they say, they are pointing you to the next stakeholder you need to talk to.
One misunderstanding I’d like to nip in the bud right here and now is that even though I’m talking about pulling many people into your project I am not talking about every single decision has to be vetted by the whole group, that every toss and turn of the project turns into a consensus building exercise. It’s about keeping them informed, enthusiastic and confident in that you’ll keep their concerns in mind.
You’re still making the puzzle
We talked about that this is a goal we all like to work towards. That’s what this conference is about. And this conference is also about bringing together people from different view points. So I would like to urge you all to use the opportunity in the upcoming lunch break to break away from your herd and seek out those that have different view points than yours. You’ll learn something new about something you thought you new very well and you may build a connection for future projects.
Remember:
One viewpoint can’t paint the whole picture.
And
There’s nothing as effective to shutting down alternative viewpoints as being convinced that you’re right, Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
BETTER SOLUTIONS THROUGH MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
GAINING PERSPECTIVE FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
COMPLEXITY REQUIRES GROUP SUCCESSorSURVEYING MT. ESJA