Change Training in Healthcare
Moving towards a patient-centered, circular, and sustainable future, the healthcare industry has entered into what might be their most impactful transition yet. In the midst of these challenges characterized by uncertainty and complexity is a critical driver for success: human behavior.
We co-created this evidence-based change training in healthcare with our anonymized client as per their policy. In a two-day conference, we delivered a keynote on leading evidence-based change combined with three workshops in which the attendants implemented these proven behavioral change interventions.
Situation
Our client is a leading organization and research institute in treating chronic illnesses like diabetes and obesity. With over 47.000 employees working in 80 offices that distribute in over 168 countries, they rely on constant innovation to keep up with a rapidly changing world. At the center of this lies their People & Organizations (P&O) department, responsible for driving change throughout the organization and its people.
Aware of the fact that change is a constant, not just a phase, they seek to develop tools that empower their employees to respond to change in an agile, adaptive and resilient way. We helped them achieve by leveraging in-depth knowledge of behavioral drivers & barriers, and designing interventions that enable positive behavioral change.
Approach to Change Training in Healthcare
Based on their case-specific organizational challenges, we designed a training that mixes essential Brain & Behavior theory with practical real-world cases and actionable tools & tactics for P&O stakeholders across North West Europe. To ensure learnings are put into practice immediately, we set up three workshops in which participants teamed up to design and implement evidence-based interventions to manage change.
We built this interactive training around a set of core principles of human psychology and behavioral science in rapidly changing environments. For example, people are hardwired to resist change, as it brings unknown risks and uncertainty. This results in various behavioral barriers like reactance, disengagement, and sometimes even sabotage.
Our change training in healthcare provided evidence-based tools to create an organizational environment that helps their people embrace change instead of resist it.
Results
Together, we constructed three real-world cases that model relevant change challenges the organization is dealing with. During the workshops, the participants implemented evidence-based change interventions to solve their specific challenges. Roughly, these interventions aid three change components: de-risking, communication, and reinforcing. This approach results in unique solutions for (future) challenges an organization faces.
De-risking
To de-risk specific change challenges, we implemented a premortem. This intervention challenges stakeholders to envision the best and worst outcome scenarios of a change and work backwards to identify unseen risks, roadblocks and red flags. The premortem actively mitigates against planning errors, overoptimism, and groupthink by prompting stakeholders to think outside of the box. It also invites debate and discussion without finger pointing, making it an ideal way to mitigate risks while prompting speaking up and collaboration.
Communication
Another key element of any evidence-based change training in healthcare is communication. Transformations where senior leaders communicate openly about change are 8 times more likely to succeed1. At scale, this requires managers across the organization to communicate clearly and consistently.
To achieve this, we helped P&O managers craft a public narrative, a communication technique that underlies almost all great speeches from world leaders, to business executives. Structuring the change narrative around empathy, unity, and urgency, enables anyone to mobilize large stakeholder groups and organize them around strategic objectives.
Reinforcing
In order to succeed in the long-term, changes need to stick. This can be achieved by helping stakeholders create positive habits that reinforce the desired changes. But instilling habits in tens of thousands of stakeholders that hold up under conditions of stress and uncertainty can pose quite a challenge. We tackled this by designing if-then plans, a field-tested approach to quickly activating and scaling habits.
We challenged the managers to identify prompts (the if-conditions) on the workfloor and link them to specific behaviors that are reinforcing change. For example: If I facilitate a cross-departmental meeting, then I make sure we have at least one shared goal. By co-creating, communicing, and executing if-then plans, organizations can vastly speed up change by tapping into habit formation.
Next steps
Moving forward, our client will move to implement and scale these interventions by tailoring them to their unique organizational context and stakeholders. As said before, change in the 21st century is a constant, not a phase, in which experimenting and learning are key objectives for success. Above all, we aim to help them keep mindset, context, and behavior at the center of all change initiatives as their dedicated behavioral business partner.
1 McKinsey Transformational Change Survey 2014, n = 1,713 respondents
