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Leadership Toolkit: From Strategy to Execution

By The SHSMD Team posted 10-26-2020 02:26 PM

  



Without execution, strategy fails. Without strategy, execution creates a default future that might be far from the one your organization wants to build. But with the right alignment of strategy and execution, operational leaders and strategists throughout the organization will know which actions to take, even in a dramatically changed environment like the one that the health care he field faces today.

Mayo Clinic, based in Rochester, Minnesota, developed a toolkit for team leaders to align their execution to the organizational strategic goals. The process consists of four activities:

  1. Step into the future.
  2. Chart your course.
  3. Stress test your future.
  4. Backcast there to here.

This process ensures that individual teams throughout the organization are all working toward the goals and know how they are contributing. This understanding can help to build individual engagement and resilience through the sense of being part of a greater whole and contributing to a greater good.

Step into the Future

The first step is to create a shared understanding of the likely future by identifying and discussing the implications of different big picture forecasts. These forecasts could include, for example, widespread use of personalized genomics to improve health, the majority of observation being performed at patients’ homes rather than at a hospital, and artificial intelligence (AI) guiding the majority of prevention and treatment.

For each of these factors, participants consider and answer questions about:

  • Their role in this forecast.
  • Their organization’s value proposition in this forecast.
  • The external market environment based on this forecast.

Each participant or participating team could be assigned questions about the attributes of a high-value team in this future or what new skills the team and organization will need to succeed in this future. This results in a set of strategies and priorities for the team.

Chart Your Course

The next activity is to align strategies and priorities developed in the last exercise with the organization’s overall strategy. Just like the first step, this step calls for each team and member to reflect on and answer questions about their roles and work. This step, though, has a different framework for the questions:

  • People.
  • Processes.
  • Outcomes.

Participants might answer questions about what kind of team culture will be needed (people) and how care models will need to change in this future (processes).

Stress Test Your Future

According to folklore, famous baseball catcher Yogi Berra once commented, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” That’s why plans that are built on only one set of assumptions about the future are so vulnerable and why organizations that are ready for multiple possible futures are resilient. For example, Rush University Medical Centerl, which serves greater Chicagoland, built a facility with the possibility of biological terrorism attacks in mind. This served Rush well when COVID-19 happened, because the facility was ready for a widespread infectious condition.

To perform the stress test, the team takes each of the major forecasts for the future and imagines that forecast coming true more strongly than anticipated and the opposite of the forecast happening. If one of the forecasts assumes significant population growth in a region, the team might imagine that population growth being twice as high as anticipated and the opposite, the local population shrinking substantially. As another example, if the forecast was for widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within five years, the team might imagine that within five years AI reaches the level where it can perform half of all diagnoses and for the opposite, that five years in the future, AI has made no significant progress.

Within these possible futures, the team then notes the impact of these different scenarios on their strategy and considers the implications. If necessary, teams might adjust plans that are too reliant on a factor that is especially uncertain.

The final step in this stress testing is to develop an ideal future based on the forecasts and the discussions and answers to the strategic questions. This ideal future assumes that the organization made the right decisions, seized opportunities and avoided pitfalls.

Backcast from There to Here

The very last step is for the team to take that ideal future and perform backcasting. Backcasting is the opposite of forecasting, which takes a planner from a known today to an unknown tomorrow. Instead, backcasting assumes a particular tomorrow, in this case, the ideal future, and analyzes what decisions and strategies could lead from present conditions to that ideal future.

A hospital or health system’s ideal future might contain elements like these:

  • Reduced burden of preventable disease by 30 percent in its community.
  • Increased financial stability.
  • Strengthened position as a regional employer of choice.
The team would then ask what steps it took to get to that ideal future, considering the environment in which it will be operating? In other words, how did it get there from here?

This approach to planning reduces organizational vulnerability and results in a plan that can withstand change, no matter how disruptive.

To learn more about this leadership toolkit, watch for the recording from the Mayo Clinic program entitled, “Leadership Toolkit: From Strategy to Execution” at this week’s SHSMD Bytes virtual conference. It will be available as part of a special post-conference, on-demand offering in early November.

This blog is by:
Sarah Poncelet, Director of Business Strategy and Planning, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
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