Adaptive Strategies Blog

The post-Christmas, pre-New Year time tends to be a bit slower for many of us. Take some time to reflect on the past year and honestly assess your role in both the successes and challenges of your team or business. What did you do (for better or worse) that impacted the performance of the people around you.

Reflecting is a hard-won skill found in people who are really trying to prepare for their future. It’s one of the eight skills I highlighted in my first book and it’s one of the top three skills least  used in most businesses. We have plenty of reasons for not reflecting (too busy is top-most) but no real excuses. It something we need to do if we want to improve.

The past is the past — spend a few minutes thinking about what you did right and wrong in 2011 and get ready for 2012. More adventures lie ahead of you. Happy New Year.

I’ve been away from this for a while but have decided to return in a more focused manner. My intent is to issue a weekly thinking exercise to help anyone interested in improving their critical and strategic thinking skills. I hope you find these comments and exercises helpful.

Assumptions Gone Bad:  Assumptions are the foundation of personal and business strategy. Sears assumed they understood the  needs and wants of middle-class America. True for about a century; wrong for the past fifteen years or so. Martgage and financial service companies assumed that the price of a house would always go up. Right for fifty years — bad assumption starting around 2007.  Kodak assumed that film would gradually decline and that they had time to shift to a digital world. Oops.

Look at the assumptions you have been using in your personal and professional life. Are any of them “going soft” on you? Do you have a big decision coming up? Document your assumptions, vet them with people you trust, and review them every six months or so. Watch for “assumption erosion.” It’s a killer.

For the past six years I have been conducting workshops on “critical and strategic thinking” for some of the better corporations in America. And in these workshops I cover the key attributes of critical thinking. Two of them seem to be lacking in the congressional “debates” we see played out in the news.

First, an aspect of critical thinking (or just plain good thinking) is the willingness to look at a situation from multiple points of view.  Every time I hear that congress “voted along party lines” I realize that the people who are deciding things that affect my future have abdicated their responsibility to think! This is “groupthink” at its best/worst. If all we need is a tally of party votes, we should fire all of our senators and representatives (and save a TON of money) and let a clerk tally the votes.

Second, good thinkers realize that complex problems (like healthcare, like the national debt, like the wars) do not have known or even knowable solutions – they require experimentation to discover possible part-solutions that can be combined to find a reasonable total solution. As long as both parties see this as a win-lose situation they will never undertake the bold experiments that are needed to find real solutions. They are unwilling (as seen by their actions) to risk their party reputation for the good of the country. Sorry, but that seems gutless to me.

What do you think?

One of the harder aspects of critical thinking is to be willing to accept that your point of view is only one of many points of view addressing a particular situation and that they are just as real as yours . You may not like them; you may disagree; but they are real.

The challenge you face is to consider them and take them for what they are – legitimate expressions of concern. If you ignore them, you are guilty of lazy thinking.

Consider our health care system and the many points of view that need to be considered by those attempting to improve the system.

• To people with good company paid insurance, the system is just fine and they see no need for change.
• To the uninsured, the system is divided into “haves” and “have-nots” and all that they know is they are not even in the system.
• To insurance companies, the system is part of a business ecosystem and they know that they have to keep their shareholders happy with decent profits.
• To a Medicare recipient, healthcare is a promise from our government for a lifetime of work.
• To a patient with long-term illness, the system is slowly driving them into bankruptcy.
• To a healthy young adult, the system is something they may need sometime, but not right now.
• To a hospital executive, the system is overly complicated and rife with administrative duties.
• To a doctor approaching retirement, the system is the reason to give up a lifelong passion because it’s “just not worth the hassle.”
• To a conservative, the system has no need for government.
• To a liberal, the system needs government involvement.

And on, and on, and on.

Take a look at our healthcare system and consider some of the points of view.

Now, without falling back on a predisposed ideology (which is a single point of view) consider actions “we” could take to improve the overall performance of the system.

Not so easy, is it? How would you like to be an “independent” in Washington? Must be lonely.

We need people who will think about the problems with health care, not simply use ideology to drive their position.

What do you think?

The medical community refers to high blood pressure as “the silent killer.” It’s a disease without obvious symptoms and many people, unfortunately, don’t even know they have high blood pressure until a stroke or heart attack kills them.

The “high blood pressure” of strategy is the set of assumptions that the strategy is based upon. The assumptions may have been fine at one point in time but may have degraded over time and may well be wrong when the strategy is stressed.

The roll-call of strategic irrelevancy often finds degraded assumptions at the heart of the matter.

• Manufacturing companies assumed they needed lots of raw material and work-in-process inventory until the Japanese surprised us with “just-in-time” manufacturing.
• Airlines assumed a hub and spoke system was best until SouthWest Airlines got real good at point-to-point.
• Kodak assumed that film-based cameras would have about three more years of sales than they actually had.
• The entire housing and mortgage industry assumed that the price of houses would continue to rise year after year.
• Sears assumed it had a lock on middle class Americans.

Staying with the health care theme of the last few posts, what assumptions do you see your local healthcare providers making? What assumptions do you think they are making with respect to:

• Who will control your “medical home”
• Telemedicine?
• Insurance rates?
• Your attitude about safety?
• Defensive medicine?
• Medical tourism?
• Hospitalists and surgicalists?
• Electronic medical records?
• Elective surgery?
• Patient education?

All industry “truths” are built on assumptions that were true at one time or another.

How many of these truths do you think will prove invalid in the coming couple of years?