Healthcare professionals are not used to strategical thinking. Strategy is about choosing a future for your idea and about defining how to get there. Strategy is about choice, which affects outcomes. Healthcare start-ups can survive for short periods of time in conditions of relative stability and little competition. But, guess what, in the real world there is no such thing as stability or little competition. So, you need to have a strategy.
Strategy is more a science than an art. It is difficult to encapsulate in just one post how to design a strategy, but from a conceptual point of view, strategic thinking should follow these steps:
#1 Understand the drivers that influence your future profits. Any variable that will affect your profit and loss and therefore can create or destroy value for your start-up needs to be deeply understood. Your future profits depend on what? The objective of this first step is to learn why can we have better or worse results.
#2 Understand your environment, both the general environment (economic, social, technological…) and the healthcare one (healthcare value chain). Who is your competitor, who is your provider, who is your client? Are there trends that could change the marketplace in the near future?
#3 Understand your scope, where are you competing, from a geographic (where do you want to sell?), product (which products?) and segment (to which clients?) point of view.
#4 Understand the resources you use, and your capabilities. Can you develop a future capability that could give you a competitive advantage over your competitors?
#5 Where are you then? At this point, by combining what you learnt from the previous steps you can build a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) matrix. Strengths and weaknesses are internal characteristics of your start-up (#3 and #4), and opportunities and threats are external issues from your environment (#2).
#6 Formulate your strategy. After detecting the opportunities and threats around, and knowing about your capabilities today, you can define how you should compete in the future. Is what you do today sustainable? What do you want to be when you grow up?
At the end of the day, a strategy chooses a position for your company, that is, a scope and a set of activities able to benefit from your capabilities and able to protect you from the “forces” that will try to limit your profits. Obviously, when choosing this positioning, you are forced as well to decide what new resources or capabilities you will need in order to compete in the future. And this is strategy.
Strategic thinking has no end. Once you define a strategy, you need to anticipate again future changes and go back to #1 to dynamically rethink your strategy again and again.
1 comments:
Health care professionals have an intense training in strategy. It is just a question of re-focusing the issue.
Let's think about "clinical problema solving", or more specifically "complex medical problem solving" (a old chronic pluripatological patient).
As a medical doctor you are constantly applying strategy. Following yuor example:
#1 Understand the drivers that influence your future profits... The objective of this first step is to learn why can we have better or worse results.
Consider your profit as "healing the patient". So clinical translation:
#1 Understand the patient signs and symptons and available test results, and from your clinical knowledge consider the most probable scenario (diagnosis) but also the most dangerous (although improbable).
#2 Understand your environment, both the general environment (economic, social, technological…).
A clinical translation:
#2 Understand the patient enviroment, his social resources, his basal health status. And also your resources. Are you in a tertiary hospital or in a rural primary care setting?
#3 Understand your scope...
Clinical translation:
#3 Understand what problems are priority and which ones doesn't need to be adressed by the moment.
...
#4 Understand the resources you use, and your capabilities.
Clinical translation:
#4 Are you able to manage all the potential scenarios? Will you need the help of other specialists? Which specialists? Do you know how to obtain that help in the time needed for the patient?
...
#6 Formulate your strategy. After detecting the opportunities and threats around, and knowing about your capabilities today, you can define how you should compete in the future.
clinical translation...
#6 Formulate your strategy. Practicing medicine is not only about taking decisions in the present but much more about having a plan in advance for the different scenarios. It is not as playing a videogame (fast response) but as playing chess (planning future threaths and their solutions).
In brief, clinicians develop a lot of abilities and a strong mind framework useful for making a strategy and taking critical decisions with limited information in a uncertainly scenario.
And that is what business is all about!
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