Leading Innovation in Disruptive Times
Lessons from Healthcare
The meme above captures a profound truth about this moment. The pandemic and lock down have done more for digital transformation than all the reports, presentations and lost sales combined could have. Necessity has forced everyone to enter into a new space where the old rules do not, and cannot, apply. Creativity, adaptation and innovation have become the keys to survival, as well as success. Call centres are now staffed from home. Zoom has become the essential infrastructure for many companies. Restaurants are now delivery or take-away only.
Beyond the obvious examples, new business opportunities are being created. For example, Nova Blooms, a florist outside London partnered with some produce suppliers in their neighbourhood. The florist had the infrastructure and experience in delivering door-to-door, but their customers had cut back on all non-essential purchases, like flowers. The farmers had produce that people wanted, but likely had no experience in selling direct to customers because they primarily sold to restaurants, which now have drastically reduced order volumes or have closed. Now you can order a box of fresh vegetables for a very good price, delivered to your house from the florist’s e-commerce site.
Understanding the environment
In addition to accelerating transformation, this period is also giving us a good example of how the environment determines the type of innovation that works. Innovation takes place within an environment that is constantly changing. If we are not sensitive to what is happening in the environment, the likelihood of choosing the wrong type of innovation response is high. Sometimes the environment is stable and innovation is about “building a better mousetrap”. Innovation is about improving what you do, giving customers better service, new features or more efficient service through technology or through different business processes, for example.
There are moments, like this one, where the environment is disrupted. As a result, there is an opening and, in it, new needs, conditions and opportunities appear. This opening means that the old relationships, methods and solutions no longer work. While not an exact analogy for Covid-19, I witnessed one of those moments in the 1980s and 1990s working for Kaiser Permanente when HIV first hit the US. There was a coming together of the gay rights movement, the rise of Christian conservatives and the virus that profoundly disrupted the healthcare system there. The impact went far beyond the hospitals and clinics treating patients. It changed the pharmaceutical industry, reducing the time it took to test and release drugs and challenged the global business model for drugs as the need for drugs came up against licensing and patent agreements designed to create national monopolies for privately-held pharmaceutical companies. Globally, its impact is still being felt, 30 years on. In San Francisco at that time, it accelerated the idea of holistic, team-based care where doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, pharmacists, insurance companies and patients all worked together to manage all aspects of what was then a terminal disease. As the disease spread, it also changed social relations, opened up a space for compassion and acceptance where there had only been prejudice, fear and violence.
These disruptions are not temporary, like a flood for example, but are systemic, producing long-term effects. It is not enough to “make do” and then get back to normal. A new normal is emerging and the companies that are responding to, and are shaping that new normal, are more likely to succeed. In order to do so, they have to abandon what they know and look at what is happening as an outsider. In the case of Kaiser, they brought in outsiders to serve on the board of the HIV/AIDS team. Often, the outsiders were more knowledgeable about treatments, research and side effects than the doctors themselves. The team model was then translated into other areas where a holistic approach to patient health made a difference.
Right people, right place, right time
It isn’t enough to know that the environment has radically changed. Successful innovators in disruptions are people who combine vision and operational delivery to lead the project. They have an entrepreneurial spirit, are able to make things up on the fly, abandon them when the situation changes and go forward with something else. The Kaiser team succeed because it was led by people who had experience in starting up social service organisations. They were able to step in and make things happen as well as communicate the vision. Not only were they experienced social entrepreneurs, they were “outsiders”, not Kaiser staff. As a result, they were not constrained by what Kaiser had done. They were in tune with the new reality and yet had experience working within the existing structures to bring everyone along on a journey that many of the Kaiser “insiders”may not have wanted to take. The team had to unlearn their old roles and relationships in order to succeed. It was thanks to these leaders, outsiders, yet familiar with the inside, that the Kaiser team could balance the pressing need to be completely different and the fear of leaving the known. In a nutshell, they were pragmatic visionaries who wanted to build something new, not just tear down what was no longer working.
Post-Covid-19 innovation leaders
Drawing on the experience of Kaiser and the AIDS crisis, as well as 20 years of experience and research, it seems evident this period is one that will require leaders to be attuned to the fact that we are in a paradigm shift. As a result, these leaders will need to be able to articulate a vision of the “new normal” and then have the adaptability and agility to guide their teams through uncertainty, adjusting course when needed, yet be focused on the aim of responding to and shaping the new environment. These leaders will be outsiders, able to see beyond the old normal and let go of what they thought the world was and engage with what is unfolding in front of them today.
They also need to recognise the level at which the paradigm shift is happening. There are many different levels of paradigms and the successful leader needs to understand at what level the paradigm is changing in order to adapt their organisation successfully.
