HEALTHCARE’S 11TH COMMANDMENT: THOU SHALL NOT FAIL

Over the past weeks, I’ve had the “perfect storm” to think through a few ideas. I’ve shared the platform with Lt. Col. John Nance, who speaks on adopting aviation safety ideas to healthcare, Dr. Jeff Bauer, a healthcare futurist, and also listen to a variety of speakers in a symposium on innovation. And combining these ideas with my construct of MVI, mutual value integration has been a fertile experience.

At the heart of it is my often stated 11th commandment in healthcare, “Thou Shalt Not Fail.” This week I’ll blog just a bit on some thoughts about our 11th Commandment and the need to qualify “failure.”

It is the nature of healthcare, and physicians, to eschew failure. But this has created the “halo effect” that Lt. Col. Nance refers to. That people in a position of healthcare authority are perfect and incapable of failure.

Well, of course, that’s nonsense. It’s the nature of people, even highly elevated people in healthcare, to fail. That’s human nature. And, although some have a hard time admitting this, we’re all human. But although intellectually we can all agree on this, in practice, especially in healthcare, we insist on our revered individuals to be perfect.Â

To survive the future of healthcare will require innovation and adopt ideas from non-healthcare environments of business, product development, and service.oxygen cylinder

But to innovate and develop creative solutions for future problems, we must learn to allow ourselves to fail.

Failure that allows avoidable death to occur is one thing. (And here we must hold to high standards that prevent these errors.) But in non-life and death situations, failure must be accepted, and even promoted.

At the heart of innovation, we must accept, no CELEBRATE, a degree of failure. Failure must be accepted as an essential step in stimulating innovation. Because that’s how we grow. If we punish failure and people who take the risk of thinking differently, we stifle innovation.baby care at home

Healthcare is hierarchical. And therefore, a cultural shift to encourage EVERYONE to have a free flow of ideas and creativity, to acknowledge that EVERYONE should be viewed as a prospective innovator is daunting. But if we don’t allow failure, without criticism or ridicule, we will never harness the potential innovation power of any institution. Healthcare or otherwise.