Innovation by SIT

Last week I visited MSR - The Israel Center for Medical Simulation –in the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, and met with Dr. Amitai Ziv who heads it. We talked about innovation and simulation and possibilities for cooperation, and following the meeting, Amitai referred me to a recent interview (published in the McKinsey Quarterly, March 2008) with Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, apparently one of the leading and innovative medical institutions in the US.

© iStockphoto.com/Steve Luker

The interview’s title was “Innovation in health care”, and indeed innovation was the central theme. Dr. Cosgrove mentioned three “seismic shifts” (his expression) in health care, on which Cleveland Clinic was taking the lead. What struck me about them was, more than anything, how these three trends, touted as the absolute cutting edge of novelty, were exactly what any grandmother with common sense would probably have recommended. Please judge for yourself:
1) The importance of prevention. For example, the clinic’s cafeteria has stopped serving foods containing trans fats.
2) The importance of value, i.e. defining precisely the results that the hospital is trying to achieve, and monitoring the extent to which the objectives are being met.
3) The importance of the patients’ experience, meaning, as far as I can understand, that hospitals should shift from the “garage mindset” (my analogy), and realize that their patients feel pain, have emotional needs, and care about being treated like human beings.

So, to sum up, the three big innovations are: if we can’t cope with the amount of illness, let’s try to stop making people sick; let’s try to understand what we are trying to do; and let’s treat people as if they were…people.

So what am I trying to say here? That Dr. Cosgrove and the Cleveland Clinic are not innovative? By no means. If you read the article, I am pretty sure you will feel, as I did, that these are words of a great innovator, leading an important revolution. What is my point then? It is that

Innovation is not about doing amazing, unimaginable, breakthrough things, but rather, it is the ability to think and act differently from what one is accustomed to.

I am convinced that this misunderstanding is responsible for a large part of the lack of innovation in many organizations. Managers often believe that innovation is all about creating totally new products or services that will wow their clients. In reality, most effective innovations are not so much about the “what?” as about the “how?”. Very often, as in the Cleveland Clinic, what has to be done is clear. The task is only to figure out how to do it, and most commonly, how to convince employees and managers to cooperate and change their ways. One could say that the type of thinking needed can be called second order innovation, since it is serving, other, “first order” ideas that had been floating about anyway, waiting to be realized.

So, my recommendation: listen to grandmother, and then innovate to figure out how to follow her advice. This doesn’t solve the problem of actually coming up with the required second order ideas, but, at least, it allows you to focus on what you really need in order to change.