AVOIDING BEST PRACTICES
The opening keynote by Dr. John Kenagy, whose expertise is with organizational change, provided both contrast and perspective to the main conference focus of individual behavior change. Kenagy's lens into behavior change is through the work he has done researching and advising on the characteristics of successful market innovation, as a physician, healthcare executive, scholar and consultant. "Successful innovators adapt and thrive by developing opportunities and choices that most everybody else doesn't," stated Kenagy. Innovation does not come from applying best practices; in fact, advised Kenagy, strategies and thinking, successful in the past, tend "to slow, stall or stop [the development of] new adaptive opportunities." He stated that the key is to develop a new capacity within the organization - the ability to think adaptively - such that the new default response to problem-solving and opportunity identification is applying an adaptive design mindset. It first starts with knowing what you want to accomplish and then not being afraid to acknowledge "what got us here today is not the thing that will get us to where we want to go," added Kenagy.
The major components of adaptive design are on-site "innovation incubators" and real-time, data-driven opportunity identification and development. According to Kenagy, successful innovators, the ones who achieved "second curve innovation...chartered spaces within their organizations in which they could say that we are going to use this space to do something different." As markets have become more dynamic, complex and unpredictable, it is critical to capture and utilize information that is timely, role-specific and verifiable, as well as to shorten feedback loops. "Otherwise," stated Kenagy, "we're predicting where we are going by looking in our rear view mirror." With this process, "you can create the environment in which an organization can, in fact, improve itself, capturing the knowledge and creativity of the people doing the work themselves."
Kenagy pointed out that this approach is in contrast to the notion of disruptive innovation, a theory his mentor, Harvard University's Clayton Christensen, developed to capture how established industry products and players can become displaced by radically new products that are initially dismissed as simple, cheap and inferior, but whose makers gradually move upmarket over time. During his work with Christensen, however, Kenagy had the opportunity to witness and document the approaches of established companies, such as Toyota and Intel, unique organizations that were able to successfully drive real innovation within their own walls and uphold market leadership. These insights coupled with his background as a long-time physician and healthcare executive insider convinced him that this is the most viable path for fixing the healthcare industry. And the overriding goal of healthcare, and the way to tap into unprecedented new value, said Kenagy, should be to "provide much more and better care for patients, and at continually lower cost," but from within existing organizations.
While his remarks mostly focused on organizational behavior changes, Kenagy highlighted a number of themes that are generalizable to the pursuit and challenges of individual health behavior change, many of which were touched on in other presentations throughout the conference. Given the natural wiring of the brain to stick with the status quo and our current beliefs as well as to distrust the unknown, we tend to become defensive and irrational when faced with the prospect of change. Data are necessary to shift beliefs, but are insufficient. "It is when you give people experiences that they value," offered Kenagy, experiences comprised of meaning, connection and inspiration, it is then that their beliefs start to change." The key, he said, is to recognize that "you can't think your way into a new way of acting...[but rather] you have to act your way into a new way of thinking."
enagy's talk was given at Consumer-Centric Health: MODELS FOR CHANGE '11, a conference that featured more than 20 presentations on all facets of health behavior change. The presenters represented diverse fields of medicine, employer health, mobile technology, health insurance, gaming, public health, research, and anthropology. The 1½ day conference, held at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington, began with an opening keynote on Oct 12, with the main sessions on Oct 13, divided into three sections (1) WHAT'S WORKING IN BEHAVIOR CHANGE; (2) HOW TO SCALE BEHAVIOR CHANGE; and (3) WHAT ELSE IS NEEDED TO MAKE BEHAVIOR CHANGE MORE EFFECTIVE AND SUSTAINABLE.
Models for Change '11 was convened by Health Innoventions ([ Ссылка ]) with support from Bastyr University's Center for Health Policy & Leadership and Seattle University's Organization Systems Renewal Program.
