Michelle Histand

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As businesses strive to innovate, be it through strategic initiatives or formal innovation teams, it’s important to define what we mean by innovation. Innovation can be incremental, addressing small improvements, typically to core business. Or it may be adjacent, closer to business as usual but venturing into new territory where the company can likely excel. Last, it can be disruptive, pie-in-the-sky, man-on-the-moon kind of stuff.

As you think about what innovation means to your organization, there are some key principles that are true no matter where you land.

3 Ways to Make Healthcare More Innovative

Not to trivialize what goes into true innovation, but in a sense, all you need to know about innovation can be learned from 

. To start, innovation is a journey. In business, it’s generally not a eureka moment of inspiration. Rather, it’s often about putting in the time and following a well-designed path to get where you’re trying to go. Sound familiar? Then follow the yellow brick road to learn more.

A farm girl, a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin man? 

. You need people with different perspectives and backgrounds to create something fantastic, no matter what you’re going for. Homogenous teams come up with homogenous ideas.

. Building on an existing process or developing a new one requires a strong understanding of the people you’re building for.

The scarecrow was looking for a brain-and you should be looking for 

. Give explicit permission for people throughout your organization to think about things outside of their everyday jobs.

You know where this is going by now, right?

. After being shut down for years in corporate settings, people need to feel like they can share their ideas and try new things while being supported.

You’ll have detractors and naysayers along the way. Cue the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys! Along with your wizards, you must 

-Glinda the Good Witch and the people who will support your efforts throughout the organization.

. Remember when they make it all the way to Emerald City, only to be told they have to go back for the witch’s broom? You’ll have brooms along your path, but don’t get discouraged.

. What’s driving you to innovate and keeping you focused where you need to be? For Dorothy, it was Toto and Auntie Em. Who’s yours?

Maybe you’ve been on your innovation journey for quite some time and it’s a good time to stop and take a rest (beware poppy fields) as you evaluate what’s next. Maybe you’re just starting, and you don’t want to overthink it. Or maybe you just need to connect with others who are going through a similar journey.

Michelle Histand is director of innovation at Independence Blue Cross, one of the organizations hosting an innovation festival, called 

, October 15-17 in Philadelphia. The event will feature three days of talks, workshops, exhibits, and more-focused on all industries and cross-disciplinary innovation. Oh my!

Articles

What a movie can teach you about innovation in your organization.

Innovation Isn’t So Hard After All

We’ve all been to a traditional corporate brainstorm session. You know the ones-someone rustles up a couple of not-quite-dried-up markers and everyone gathers around the conference table. Some light jokes are made to break the ice and we’re off and running. We shout out responses to the posed problem and they’re furiously captured on a flip chart-and we leave feeling triumphant and exhausted. A good day’s work-with little to no follow up, typically.

Sometimes when I say my team runs idea sessions, people respond, with barely contained smirks and eye rolls, “oh, you mean brainstorming.” And I like to respond, “no, actually, my team does brain-hurricaning.” Because what we do is more powerful than a brainstorm-what we do is we dig deep into the problem at hand, we use tools to elicit a lot of ideas, and then we build them into viable business solutions with actionable next steps.

Try these tips to run a successful idea session that people will remember and that could actually get you to your next big idea.

You wouldn’t ask people to cook in a microwave in the bathroom, would you? (Please, don’t.) Similarly, don’t invite people to an idea session in a windowless conference room with 25 people around a table and no supplies.

To run a successful session, try to find space with some light (we think better when we’re not in a cave) and ideally, space for people to work in small groups. Scatter brightly colored sticky notes and markers and maybe even spring for a few snacks. I like to play music as people are coming into the room. These are all signals that we’re in for a different kind of meeting and it may even be fun.

Go in with a clear ask and give some context. In 

, we often frame challenges starting with “how might we…” “How” implies there are solutions to the problem; “Might” says we’re going to come up with a lot of solutions to consider and there isn’t one right answer; “We” says we’re going to do it collaboratively.

A good “how might we” statement also includes qualifiers or constraints, as this helps provide some of that context. For example, if you’re looking for new ideas to improve service: “How might we improve the customer experience for our senior citizens, in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition and ensure seniors leave feeling confident, not confused, about their next steps?” 

The goal of getting people together is to get their ideas-and sometimes that can be stymied because people are afraid to share, or they think only certain levels of people can contribute ideas. It’s also useful to make sure everyone in the room knows the expectations for the sessions. We often set expectations like “be open minded,” “ask questions,” and “be willing to speak up.” It can be helpful to include one that says “leave titles at the door” to signal to everyone that their ideas are valued regardless of their level.

By creating a verbal contract in the beginning, you can mention it again if you notice the behavior you want isn’t occurring. We come up with a verbal signal and ask the group to agree verbally to each expectation. We’ll often use something silly, like a line from a song; then it becomes a rallying call for the group, often far beyond the idea session.

We like to start sessions focused on quantity over quality, because if we have more ideas to work with, we’re more likely to end up with something great. To that end, we start with silent brainstorming, so everyone has a chance to get out their ideas. To do so, everyone uses sticky notes and writes their ideas down, one per note. Then we group them into like categories and do a deeper dive to build them out-how would the idea work? Who would be responsible for it? What’s the budget? We build out each grouping from thoughts to ideas that we can later vote on and prioritize.

Before leaving the session, there should be clear direction and agreement on next steps. We typically will vote on the top three to five ideas that we think will solve the problem. Then we get back into small groups and each group takes an idea and begins mapping out next steps. What would we want to do immediately to consider moving this forward? Who do we need to get on board? When will we next meet to discuss?

We also like to assign a point person before leaving the room, so we have a designated point person to keep moving things down the line.

Try these tips to give your employees a memorable, engaging, and productive session that will truly make the ideas rain!

Michelle Histand is director of innovation at Independence Blue Cross.

Typical idea-creation meetings are dull and don’t actually result in actionable items. Here’s how you can change that.

How to Run a Brainstorming Meeting that Actually Works

No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit. Intelligence and success can be developed through effort, and brains and talent are just the starting point.

If you agree with the above statement, congratulations! You have a growth mindset. Researcher Carol Dweck, a leading expert in the field of motivation and a psychology professor at Stanford University, uses two simple statements to begin assessing our mindset. The statement above is related to a 

, while the following statement is related to a fixed mindset:

You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are. Intelligence and talent are things you either have or you don’t, and they indicate how successful you’ll be.

As the statements indicate, people with a growth mindset believe that with hard work, anything is possible. They appreciate challenges and see failure as an opportunity to learn. They believe they’re only limited by the effort they’re willing to make. People with a fixed mindset feel that they’re either good at a given skillset or they’re not; they find failure frustrating and don’t want to be challenged because it’s uncomfortable. They think the outcome is forgone based on our natural abilities and talents.

Maybe you initially leaned toward the fixed mindset but are now trying to tell yourself you can change. Or maybe you agreed with both statements. That’s entirely possible because most of us move between a fixed and a growth mindset. There may be some areas where you see endless possibility, and others where you think no amount of work will matter. Perhaps you are a whiz in the kitchen and feel that you’ll just keep getting better, but don’t think any amount of effort or lessons will turn you into a star singer.

Can you guess which mindset is better for innovation?

If you guessed growth, you’re right. Growth mindset is essential for innovation because innovation means taking risks and failing, and then learning from the experience and doing it all over again. Thankfully, mindset is something you can train and reset with a few key exercises.

. The first step to changing any behavior is being aware of what you’re trying to change. If you find yourself not wanting to try something new, check yourself to see what’s really going on. You can build a habit of trying new things if you learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable. How do you do that? Well, you have to allow yourself to be uncomfortable sometimes and to realize it’s not so bad.

. Behavioral psychology says that you have to rebuild the thought patterns in your brain by gaining small wins. For example, if you hate to run, that might mean waking up a little earlier for a few days in preparation for a run. Then taking the next day or two to get dressed to run. And then on the final day, actually putting on your sneakers and taking a walk. Accomplishing these smaller steps helps rewire the self-talk that says I can’t run and builds to the larger goal.

. Pick an area where you feel fixed and, using steps 1 and 2, start taking note of your accomplishments. When it happens slowly it can become invisible to us, so it’s important to remember to celebrate wins. Once you’ve been able to open your mindset up to one area, try another. Soon it will be second nature and you’ll be spending more time in a growth mindset rather than a fixed.

. Our mindset comes from our own beliefs. That in some ways makes it easier to change, but also harder since we can be our own worst enemies. If you fail at something, talk to yourself the way you would to a friend. What did you learn? What could you change next time? And above all else, remind yourself that it wasn’t catastrophic. Think of each “failure” as a seed that grows your experience, expertise, and ability. Doing that will help you grow something wonderful.

Why you need to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset-learning from your failures and changing how you see your abilities.

How to Create an Innovative Mindset

Peter Drucker, a well-known management consultant, once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”-meaning, despite our best efforts to develop a strategy that will work for our company, it’s the culture of the company that will determine the direction it takes.

Companies will often name their culture, declaring “we’re a customer-first culture!” or “we have a culture of wellness!” sometimes forgetting that culture isn’t defined by what we 

This ties into innovation because so many of us are striving to create-you guessed it-a culture of innovation So if our actions truly define our culture, is it possible to create the culture you want?

I think so-but be prepared for it to take many, many years, because first, you have to build it. Remember one of the greatest movie lines of all time from Field of Dreams, “

”? The same can be true of your innovation efforts.

Here are some tips on how to get building:

1. Define what innovation means to your organization

Innovation is an ambiguous word used just about everywhere these days. You have to decide what it means in your context.

Will you be happy with incremental innovation, such as process improvements that shave time off of daily work or reduce the need for additional staff? Are you interested in developing some small changes to products? Or are you looking for transformational and disruptive innovation, such as revamping your entire business model and selling to a new segment of customers? You must articulate the vision in order for others to follow it.

Tell a claims analyst who has followed steps to process claims the same way for the last 10 years that you want her to innovate and watch the look of panic flood her eyes. We can’t tell our people we expect them to innovate without giving them a structure or a framework for doing it.

 because it’s the basis for what we use in our innovation process, peppered with a mix of tools from other methodologies like 

. There are many processes out there-Creative Problem Solving, Agile, Lean Start Up, Lean Six Sigma, Design Thinking.

3. Provide clear, actionable opportunities to innovate

Teaching them how is the first part, but you also have to give employees outlets for innovation. By giving explicit opportunities to innovate, you’re giving permission for them to question the status quo.

Four Ways to Spur Innovation at Your Managed Care Organization

At Independence Blue Cross, we do things like run ideation sessions to elicit suggestions for specific needs in the business and run challenges where high performers are chosen to participate and contribute their thoughts. By providing specific opportunities to engage, we’re building a place where employees can go back and think about their own work differently.

4. Follow through and send the right message

Everything you’re doing as a leadership team is sending a message. One of the most basic actionable things I’ve seen organizations do is put out an idea box. “See! We’re asking employees for ideas, so they know we encourage innovation!” And often, that box idly sits and the ideas never see the light of day-much less get implemented or celebrated.

You’ll actually hurt your efforts by asking for ideas and never following through, because you’re sending a message that it’s all lip service and you don’t care about their ideas. For each opportunity you provide, think about how it will be carried through. It doesn’t mean every idea has to be implemented, of course. But it may mean that each idea is responded to or the efforts of the submitters are celebrated.

If you want employees to have more ideas, reward each idea submitted with something small. If you need more process improvements implemented, invite departments to submit their changes to a quarterly contest, where the best one is awarded a catered lunch, for example.

This doesn’t have to be an expensive solution – don’t underestimate the value of praise and face time with leadership. Many employees are already intrinsically motivated to be creative and innovate-this gives them the extrinsic push as well.

With this five-step plan, I’m confident that you will start to see innovation behaviors emerge and they’ll begin to shape the values of a culture of innovation.

Good company culture doesn’t just happen, you have to take charge and plan for it.

Five Tips to Build a Better Culture

 and why it’s important for those of us in healthcare to understand and adopt it as a way of doing business. What I didn’t get a chance to highlight in detail is how incredibly practical Design Thinking is and the plethora of tools available that should make it into your regular repertoire-and I’m not just talking about markers and sticky notes!

I have a lot of tools I love using, but since I’m limited on words here I’ll focus on three of my favorites and how to use them. While these are often used during a particular stage of the process, there are no rules about when you use them other than when it feels right or when doing so will solve a need.

This tool is just what it sounds like-asking questions and getting answers that can provide a foundation for the project. It’s also a great way to challenge assumptions in the middle of a project, to force a team to step back and reset, or to help get unstuck.

To use 20 Questions all you need to do is get the key players into a room and give them sticky notes and markers (yes, we really do use markers and sticky notes!). Everyone gets three minutes to write down questions-and only questions-about the project, one question per sticky note. At the end of those three minutes, a facilitator collects the questions and you spend time walking through them as a group. When appropriate, you can get the project sponsor in the room to provide some answers.

We often ask questions like: what’s been tried before, why is this important to the organization, and what does success look like. In his new book 

, Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, provides great insight on why asking questions is the best thing you can do. We agree!

This is a favorite because it forces us out of our own world view and gets us inspired by what others are doing. Here’s how it works: you start by thinking about the basis or core of your challenge and then move into thinking about players completely outside of your industry who are doing that core thing really well. After dissecting why they’re so good at it and how they do it, you think about how you might apply those same principles back to your challenge.

So if you’re thinking about customer loyalty, it might be a good idea to visit a place like Lululemon-where they have a cult following-and read articles on how they do it.

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If you’re thinking about customer experience, like so many of us are right now, you can’t 

 think about The Ritz-Carlton. How does The Ritz-Carlton make each encounter special? Well, for one, they keep a file of what you like, so when you arrive they can have your favorite M&Ms in your room. Knowing and storing patient or member preferences? Yeah, we could do that.

One of my favorite examples of this is when we were building our new customer experience center, 

, our chief marketing officer knew we needed someone special to run it. She wanted someone who would inspire the right attitude, who would keep the people working on the floor motivated, and who could stay on top of the various missions of the space. Who did she hire? A former basketball coach. Because when she looked at what she needed, the core of it was a coach. Her instinct was right on!

This one has a special place in my heart. The Need/Know Matrix helps identify the assumptions you have about an idea and shakes out which of those assumptions are critical to success and need to be tested.

Start with a matrix that has “critical” at the top of the Y axis and “not critical” at the bottom. This is to indicate how important a particular assumption is to your idea-critical means if your assumption is wrong, your idea is dead. Not critical means it may limit the idea, but you can work around it or change the idea. The X axis has “known” on the left and “unknown” on the right. Known means you can access and find information about this assumption fairly easily. Unknown means you would have to create an experiment to find out.

Next, write out all of your assumptions about the idea, one per sticky note. Assumptions can be hard to come up with, but there are always more than you realize! Usually the very first assumption is, “people want this.”

Once everyone has their assumptions written out, map them on the matrix by asking the following: is this critical to my idea, if I’m wrong will it fall apart, and do I know this or is it an unknown. Once the sticky notes are placed in their appropriate quadrants, you’ll want to pay attention to the critical unknowns-the top right quadrant.

A “critical unknown” signals you need to run some tests or experiments before moving forward to prove those assumptions.

We can look to Zappos for a great example of how to use this tool. When Nick Swinmurn, founder of Zappos, had the idea for the online store it was before people were buying shoes on the internet (yes, there was such a time). He had one major assumption: that people would buy shoes, sight unseen. Other assumptions included that there are enough annual shoes sales to sustain business, that people would buy men’s, women’s and children’s shoes online, and that people would pay for shipping. We can map these assumptions to see how this tool works.

The first assumption-people would buy shoes online, was the crux of his idea. It was absolutely critical that this assumption was true, and also absolutely unknown. The assumption that there are enough annual shoes sales to sustain the business was also critical-but known, because information about overall shoes sales could be determined with basic research. The thought that people would buy all types of shoes-men’s, women’s and children’s-was not as critical. If this wasn’t true, via research Nick could determine which type of shoes would sell most (and we’ll take a guess that it would be women’s!). And finally, the assumption about shipping was unknown, but would not be critical to the success of the idea. If people would not pay for shipping, shipping cost could be “baked into” the price and offered at no charge.

You’ve maybe heard the story of how Nick ran his test to prove out his critical unknown. He went to his local mall and took pictures of the shoes, which he then posted online. When someone wanted to buy a pair, he went back to the store and purchased them and sent them out. He was able to test that critical assumption without having any inventory of his own-very low risk.

I hope you’ll get to try some of these tools in the next several weeks. These are just a few that will sell you on the need for Design Thinking in your organization.

Michelle Histand is an innovation director at Independence Blue Cross, where she has fostered and advanced the organization’s design thinking approach to problem solving.

Design Thinking is a great way to get your organization focused-here are three Design Thinking tools that you could put into practice today.

Three Organizational Tools Your Organization Should Be Using

I had a ninth-grade science teacher (hi, Mr. Capatosto!) who challenged us to think of something that doesn’t change. We eagerly shouted things out like rocks and mountains, but were quickly told “nope, they both erode.” And I remember, at the end, not being able to think of a single thing. Now I’m going to give you a similar challenge and ask you to think of something that hasn’t been designed. I’ll give you a few minutes.

Ten Simple Ways Healthcare Providers Can Make Patients Happier

How did you do? Was “nature” one of your answers? I was recently in Yellowstone National Park with my family and it was breathtaking. As city folk we were surrounded by more nature than we’ve ever seen in one place, but even amidst all that beauty, it was clear that someone sure took a lot of time to design the roads we drove on and the hiking trails where we clutched our cans of bear spray. Did you think of any others?

Other than a few instances in nature where humans have not intervened, and the brush grows wild and untamed, everything is designed. Let’s look at the healthcare spectrum: emergency room check-in, medical charts, equipment and labels, the pre-authorization process. It’s all been designed-but often, poorly. And this is why we need design thinking.

Design thinking is an approach that helps us do a better job of creating products, processes, and services. Many times, it’s an approach housed under our innovation practice because we see it as a formula by which to change the way business is done, a methodology that helps our teams approach business in new ways and create value differently. It’s a five-step process often illustrated by a graphic like the above image.

What’s unique and should interest all of us in health care are the first two phases, 

. Empathize means understanding the audience for whom you are designing. For example, rather than the business side of the house sitting in a room and deciding what patients need, this approach encourages actually talking to patients. It sounds so simple on the surface but how many of you do it as a regular practice? Maybe some of you already are or maybe you’re starting to. And this is why design thinking is becoming a hot ticket.

We’re in a changing landscape. We are all savvier consumers, better educated and attuned to the choices available to us. If something isn’t working for us we’re quick to move on rather than accept the status quo. Some things in health care have changed in response to that-others have not. We are a position to think about our customers more than ever before. Design thinking helps us do that.

In the empathize phase of design thinking we spend time talking to our customers, observing them, putting ourselves in their shoes, trying the things we’re asking them to do. Only then can we really understand and define their point of view-what they need. That’s the 

 phase. In this phase we are making sure we have a clear line of sight into the opportunity and framing it: 

this customer has this need because of this problem

. How often are we reactive, rushing to solve an issue and using a band-aid only to wonder why it doesn’t get better? This helps stop that.

 phase. This is the phase where we can start to develop solutions that might actually work.  I say “might” and you may be thinking, I’m going to spend all this time talking to customers only to develop what “might” work? This is where the tail end of the process, the 

You’ve heard the word prototype-have you done it or supported others doing it in your organization? This is where we choose the solutions we believe will best solve the defined opportunity, and we make rough, low-cost versions of them to test on the people who will eventually use them. Rather than spending a year developing a new app and then holding our breath while it’s launched and barely used, this is about mocking up some screens with little to no coding and having people try them. Then, we can see quickly what works about our navigation and what doesn’t. This can work for tech, for products, and for processes. It can save you a ton of time and money, and it shows your customers that you care about their feedback.

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Design thinking is that simple, yet can be difficult to implement in organizations that are used to doing things “the same old way”. The good news is that there are tools for each of these phases to make them easier and there is a ton of great information available online, much of it for free. I would recommend starting with Ideo’s 

, full of practical tools and case studies. And tune in next month, where I’ll do a deep dive on a couple of my favorite tools.  Until then, start by noticing all of the design around you-it’s everywhere!

It’s the hot new skill showing up across the resumes and job postings-but what does if have to do with healthcare?