Three tips for building strategy operating systems
While hype around new technologies often places pressure on healthcare systems to adopt new processes through radical transformation processes, this overlooks an important factor in the sector. With lives on the line, organisations are rightfully built not to dive headfirst into constant overhauls – and according to Curzon Consulting, a strategy operating system may be a better alternative to chasing another impractical transformation.
When companies launch a classic transformation, featuring PMO, stage gates, and business cases, for all the plans and promises, many never realise the return on investment that they hoped for. Many aspects, from a lack of training, to technology debt, to cultural ‘resistance’ can be the cause of this failure.
In the healthcare space, that ‘resistance’ is not just a quirk of employee traditions, though. It is a loadbearing feature – centred on patient outcomes. So, when management picks out another ‘classic transformation’ in a healthcare organisation, the culture often does “what it was designed to do”, Curzon Consulting finds. “It protects reliability, by converting your strategy into process” – and “quietly neutralising it”.
Commenting via LinkedIn, Serban M Suvagau, principal and subject matter expert in healthcare at Curzon Consulting, said, “Most “transformations” fail in healthcare and insurance for a reason that leaders rarely say out loud. Your organisation is not anti-change. Your organisation is anti-uncontrolled risk.”
This leads to some striking statistics. A Beer & Nohria (HBR) study notes that about 70% of change initiatives fail here, while Bain & Company argues only an estimated 12% of transformations hit their original ambitions. And Gartner reports only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed outcome targets.
It is time for organisations in healthcare to try something new, when it comes to change. Rather than traditional transformation programmes, which “fight the system”, Curzon Consulting recommends a strategy operating system, which “works with it”.
Pairing the hierarchy of an organisation with a strategy network, organisations can create a dual operating system for “continuous execution”. This moves beyond a request for “culture change”, and designs a system that “makes new behaviours the default.”
Particularly as AI implementation stalls at the piloting phase in many organisations, workflow redesign is becoming an attractive way of pushing ahead. Curzon Consulting pointed to three key methods to build such an operating system:
Small wins
Building early momentum is key to any kind of business change. Identifying low-hanging fruit, where teams can see early pay-offs for a wider alteration, can be essential for securing their buy-in in further change.
Integrated delivery
Building integrated delivery can help consolidate those successes. Outcome pods, made up of product, ops, data, tech, and risk and compliance teams, can help monitor and translate changes across an organisation.
Education
Operating with high-reliability learning is also important. It enables organisations to anticipate problems, surface them, and empower staff to fix them rapidly.
Suvagau concluded, “Stop launching transformations. Start building a strategy operating system. If you are pursuing double-digit growth while reducing your opex ratio, you will not get there with a traditional change function. You will get there by turning strategy into an operating system.”
