← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone, this is Lucas Voss with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Beckers Healthcare podcast series. It's fantastic to have you. Today we're talking about how to ensure innovation efforts and deliver meaningful, measurable value without sacrificing creativity or momentum. And joining me for today's discussion, I'm so excited to have him, is Dr. William Reese. He's the president and CEO of Mayo Clinic Laboratories. Dr. Maurice, thanks so much for being here today and taking some time for us. It's great to have you.
- [00:31]
B
Yeah, it's great to be here. And you know, you mentioned my current role. Just for the audience that might not know me. I'm actually have been on staff at Mayo clinic since 2000 in a variety of leadership roles, including most recently the department chair for Lab Medicine Pathology. And I've been really passionate about innovation from at all levels. So from first going on staff all the way to where I am today. So I'm really pleased to be joining you for this conversation. It's an important one.
- [00:55]
A
It's great to have you. And you already mentioned the I word, which I like to call innovation. The I word. Everybody talks about it, everybody wants to innovate. It's certainly important. And I'd love to ask you, how do you actually ensure that the innovation you're part of an organization is part of delivers value?
- [01:17]
B
Yeah. What a great way to start. And I think the way you even introduced it kind of is the call to action, particularly from a leadership perspective. So innovation is sort of the buzzword, right? In business, in healthcare, in. In society, it's. But I think as a leader, the first thing you have to be clear about is what is the value you expect innovation to create for your organization. Right. So innovation is about solving a problem or, you know, creating a solution. So, so what, what really do. Where do you see the value, the innovation, creating value for your organization and being clear about that and validating that. And then once you have that, then you need to put a strategy in place to achieve that value. Right. That that incorporates innovation. So it's really, I think the first thing is not to just be doing innovation for innovation's sake and get caught in the buzzword of innovation, but to really think about what's the problem you're trying to solve with innovation. What are you trying to create anew with innovation? Because if you don't have that, then you're not going to be able to formulate a strategy to achieve it based on that approach.
- [02:18]
A
Then once folks are understanding this and taking this approach. What would your advice be to then actually resourcing this innovation and making sure that, okay, great, we have a strategy now. It needs to be in place, it needs to be scalable. What advice do you have for organizations to actually achieve that?
- [02:36]
B
Yeah, well, my advice might be from missteps that I've learned from as much of things I've actually accomplished. But it's really interesting because then it gets really to the heart of the other way that you set up this topic. And that is okay, you're talking a lot about strategic intent, which seems top down. But on the flip side, you know, innovation often happens very much at the local level. You know, I go back to the story about 3M and how 3M was really founded on sandpaper. Where did sandpaper come from? A guy that had some mind grit and some glue and some water resistant paper and decided, what if I put these three together right? And that. So, so how do you balance both of those? And I think one of the first things is a clear dedication of resources. So early on, you know, when I was running the department of Lab Medicine and pathology, we had a lot of focus on productivity to get tests out to the patients that were waiting for them, which is super important. But we resourced that as well as our innovation efforts out of the same pool of resources. And if you do that, you're going to always be prone to starving innovation for the sake of production, because that's the most pressing need that you will often feel in the day to day. Whereas innovation, you're playing more of the long game. So having a dedication of resources that are pointed towards innovation is number one. Number two is really once you do that and you have to be accountable for that as a leader, you need to have some centralized oversight and also transparency of utilization. And that's for a lot of different reasons. It gets to equitability, it gets to ensuring that the resources are being applied to achieve the strategy that you want to achieve, but also trying to create enough autonomy that the innovators can actually have the freedom to create around the solutions that you're looking for. And so to balance that, then the last thing that you need is you need a common set of expectations for all the stakeholders about how those resources are going to be utilized and how you're going to really be crisp in your decision making. Because the reality is with innovation, you're trying to do something that's new, you know, a priori, right? So that means that sometimes even though the, the effort has value, and the solution that you're seeking would create value. You might not be able to achieve it with the current technologies or the current conditions or whatever. And so once you recognize that you have to have a stringent decision making process that, that says we are really invested in this, but the reality is we need to stop and we need to pivot to something else because then you start throwing good resources after bad, if you will, good money after bad. Right. So. And my own personal experience with that, just so you know, I think I learned that the hard way actually when I was in graduate school because I also have a PhD. My first research thesis failed after three years and I was just like, I had to, I kept going after it because I wanted to get done with my PhD. I had to, I actually wasted probably a couple of years and I had to pivot. And that's true at the individual level, but it's definitely true at the organizational level as well.
- [05:33]
A
Yeah, it's a great analogy, I think. And a lot of us can, can relate to that. I feel like you mentioned one important thing here, which is autonomy. And I. What's really connected to that too is the creativity piece, right? Autonomy and creativity, they generally go in hand. People like to work on, on things that their own way, in their own way. And I'm wondering with this structured approach that you have in place that some organizations already have in place, how do you approach this without negatively impacting creativity? So we have structure, but we also want creativity. How can we do that?
- [06:10]
B
Yeah, it's not easily done, right? I mean, what the glib answer is, you try and connect the grass tops with the grassroots, meaning that, you know, at the grass tops level you have to be understanding what is the, what's the value you're trying to create, you know, which is your strategy need to be pointed towards. And at the grassroots level, it's like the ability of the. That's Bill Maurice, the department chair. What about Bill Maurice, the guy that's running the laboratory and what he sees as a need? And how do you start to connect those two? Right. And where he sees an opportunity with his colleagues to create, to solve a patient need. Easier said than done. I think what it requires really then is a lot of, is a lot of balancing of the need for the, you know, getting the right people in place to really go after the, what you're going after, to have that creative bet, marrying that with real transparency around what needs to happen, what the strategy needs to achieve. And then that's how you start to get the Alignment because you have to have a high trust environment. Right. The person that's that wants some autonomy and they need some autonomy to create. They have to trust that the strategic alignment that they're working towards is going to create that value which is going to solve their overarching need to, you know, to do something new. And conversely, you need enough trust from a leader that I don't have to micromanage. There's a difference between clarity and oversight and micromanaging. So I'm not going to micromanage the innovation process because I trust that that innovator sees where we need to create value for the organization through the resources that are being allocated to the innovation effort. So it really is ultimately becomes marrying the grass tops with the grassroots through a high trust environment. Bidirectionally.
- [07:44]
A
Yeah, I want to dig into this a little bit deeper because here's another buzzword for you. Change management. Right. Everybody's talking about change management as well. It's really, really crucial. You've just touched on it in terms of the trust, the buy in itself. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about the buy in in itself. Right. When there are strategic approaches, we know change is hard for people. When things are changing, how do you get that buy in? What are some of the strategies that you've implemented that you've seen work really well to be able to enable innovation instead of just stopping it?
- [08:17]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one that again, I have a lot of my own personal experiences all the way through my career. Right. Because when I stepped into my role as department chair, really the system in place was the one that I had grown up in, if you will. And that is where really resources were managed and time was managed and projects were managed very much at the local lab level. Right. And so the big change to say, hey, we need to, you know, that was all well and good, but these days, now we have to think differently about how we're aligning those efforts across the organization. Right up and down. And so probably the most important piece of change management is on the stakeholder engagement. Right. And for me, that meant actually engaging my CEO at the time, Dr. John Noseworthy, to say, you know, what do you expect out of innovation from the department of lab medicine, pathology, which, you know, touches every department at Mayo Clinic? Where do you see, you know, what, how does my CEO or whoever I'm reporting to? You know, even if I'm the CEO of publicly traded company, that means I have shareholders that have expectations around what my innovation is going to achieve, right. And so getting that buy in at the very top to know, okay, I need to create value in this context. Right. And then translating that with your own internal team, your leadership team and then those reporting to your leadership team and then really use through them engaging down into the work units. It has to be a lot of stakeholder engagement, which means it's a lot of in person kind of. You know, you have to be really intentional. It might not be in person, but you had a lot of intentionality around your communication. For me, what that meant as department chair was spending a lot of time with the division chairs, the divisions reported into the department chair to, with their leadership to say, okay, this is. How about. This is how our organization is seeing us needing to create value with innovation. Here's we need to think together about what this means for all of us. I can give you some guidance in terms of the things we talked about with centralization of oversight and other things and then, then a lot of back and forth about what that means. Right. And how we're going to execute. And that communication has to be ongoing because you know what the, the real challenge with trying to be strategic with innovation is you can end up with one or two things. Either disproportionate allocation of resources towards something that's a pet project or specific interest of the leadership team and you're going to miss the boat. Right. Or you're going to have a one size fits none where you're trying to put a system in place that might apply great for one area of the organization, but not for the other. So I think having that communication about what's working and what's not and making that clear and creating those forums for that to happen, which gets into governance. Right? Those are, that's kind of the change management. That's the path that we took. I don't know that I think it was reasonably successful and I think those are kind of the building blocks, at least from my perspective.
- [11:03]
A
And it comes back to the analogy that you use the grassroots, right. The picture of the roots and the connection of both, which is so key for this to work, really. I hosted a conversation with several leaders last week and we talked about all of the change that's happening in healthcare, specifically healthcare technology, but all across the space. And a lot of them said it's incredibly fast and it's hard to keep up, which was one of the main talking points in that conversation. I'd love to ask you here too. As we close out our conversation Here today. How does this accelerating pace of change that we're seeing, there's something new almost every single day impact your approach to actually innovating?
- [11:47]
B
Yeah. Wow, you did your homework. These are all really good questions and challenging ones. And so you take me back to, again, leverage my experience when I was department chair of stepping in, and it's sort of the why do we need to even think differently about things? Right. When you get back to change management. And I started to look outside of even our organization and I had the good fortune to do that because we have members of the Mayo Clinic board of trustees like Bill George, who had been innovators in other industries or healthcare adjacent industries, not necessarily in the lab. One of the things that became clear that I came across as I did that work is that, you know, how often do you need to rethink strategy? If you're in an industry where the barriers to entry are high and the pace of technological innovation is relatively low, you might be able to put a strategy in place for like five years. Right. And that's kind of that you don't really have to revisit that. You can just say, this is our, you know, this is our guidepost and this is what we're working towards. And on the contrary, I should say if you're in an industry where the pace of change is high, the case of technological innovation in this case is high and the barriers to entry are low, you have to be rethinking strategy regularly and frequently. And where I saw the lab at that time was exactly on that journey. So this was now 10 years ago. And so we were just transitioning from a period of time where a piece of equipment in the lab maybe change every 10 years to changing every two years. Right. And all sorts of new kind of companies and entrance into the diagnostic space. And so that was my kind of back to my team was like, we need to, we need to really be able to rethink our strategy. We can't just have things hither and yon. And to do that kind of counterintuitively, you need more structure around your innovation. If you're going to be rethinking strategy more frequently around innovation, you actually need more frameworks in place to keep you from just drifting. Because the danger with innovation is it can become directionless, really, and rudderless really quickly if you don't have some kind of framework to balance decisions on. Right. And to balance when you need to change what needs to change, what doesn't. Right. And it really gets back to the other key question for all of us in health care, and that is the resources. Right. It's, you know, all of us are strapped. There's downward pressure on reimbursement. There's increasing expectations of us creating value for patients and for our payers and for other stakeholders in healthcare. So it really gets down to A, the acknowledgement that all these things that you described mean that we need to be rethinking strategies, healthcare organizations. B, if we're going to do that, we really need frameworks in place to help us go through that change process. And then last but not least, we need to align the resource allocations to those changes and be honest about what resources we have available to us.
- [14:31]
A
And again, it also means that you can have structure without sacrificing creativity and momentum at the same time.
- [14:39]
B
Lucas, thank you for the opportunity. And one thing I wanted to just add on, append on to that whole structure because of the pace of change being so fast is it allows us as healthcare organizations to form deeper partnerships. I think that's the other call to action. There's a lot of the changes happening outside. I mean, anthropic, I didn't even know what anthropic was, you know, two years ago. Now it's made a big, you know, want to change healthcare. So the other thing that frameworks give us as healthcare organizations, it actually increases our ability to form partnerships with new entrants into our space. So anyway, so that's, that's where I'll close. But thank you so much for the time, Lucas, and the opportunity to come and join you today.
- [15:11]
A
Absolutely. It's so great to have you. And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, Mayo Clinic Laboratories. You can tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by seeing our podcast page@beckershospitalreview.com.