Collaborative Tools to Facilitate Physician Engagement: Post 84
For me, understanding physician-hospital relations is a never-ending iterative journey rather than a task with a finite beginning and end. As I prepare for this year’s presentation to the ACHE Congress (82 x, Physician Recruiting, Contracting, and Retention Strategies, 3/24/10), I recall my first presentation, where I asked the audience, “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘tool’?”
The most common response was hammer, followed by gun, and then chain saw. For a number of reasons, I felt fortunate to get out of the room alive.
I can understand the fascination with tools and building a toolkit. It offers a readily comprehensible framework for the question, “What do you do,” i.e., ”I fix problems.” We value problem-solvers. They rise through an organization to become its senior leaders.
For a different way of looking at tools, I salute Chris Warner, who wrote High Altitude Leadership and has led over 150 international mountaineering expeditions. He lists Danger #3 for high-altitude climbers as Tool Seduction:
Cho Oyu has become such a popular mountain, that the same level of infrastructure that is built on Everest is applied to climbs on this peak. Each tent is equipped like a hotel room with sleeping bags, ministoves, bags of food, and bottles of oxygen.
Climbers waited for the storm cycle to play out… Precious time was wasted because Sherpas needed to move even more gear into place…. And when the tiny window finally opened, a small handful of us, those not needing all sorts of tools and comforts, snuck to the summit. The largest groups watched helplessly from base camp.
An overdependence on Sherpas, tools, and infrastructure can limit talented climbers. Similarly, a parade of consultants packing the latest tools and theories can bog down progress and distract companies from focusing on vital issues. Of course, tools are important. But in critical moments, even the best tools break or fail in some other way- yet you must still survive. The problem isn’t with the tools; it’s in how you relate to them.
Tools offer hope, and they make people feel that they have the right answer. But a problem occurs when people use tools as crutches for safe answers. Both dead climbers and dead companies are found grasping great tools.
Act in the face of real fear; subjugate your personal desires to the greater goal of the group; fight arrogance with humility; seek out and nurture partnerships; be seduced by passion and not by tools.
As I wrote in Collaborative Listening, the most important tool for hospital leaders and physicians to grasp is dialogue. In “Embracing Complexity,” in Better Communication For Better Care: Mastering Physician-Administrator Collaboration, I stated that face-face conversations are the only sustainable way that people can deal with complex situations in which predictability is diminished, experience does not guarantee success, and relationships are key.
Physicians can help because our training prepares us to make major decisions based on limited information. When lives are at stake, we often do not have time to obtain perfect information and have to rely on our clinical intuition. Act-learn-adapt, or as we say in surgery, “Ready, fire, aim,” characterizes clinical practice.
What do you think?
- Do we use tools as crutches
- Are there tools other than dialogue that improve physician-hospital relations reliably
- Can you fathom extensions of act-learn-adapt into administrative situations
As always, I welcome your input to improve healthcare collaboration.
Kenneth H. Cohn
© 2010, all rights reserved
Disclosure:
I have not received any compensation for writing this content. I have no material connection to the brands, topics and/or products that are mentioned herein.
Posted in Physician Engagement
Comments
Comment from Forgive me for somehow clicking on the wrong place, and submitting the incomplete comment. I had not even gotten to my main points. (And was in the middle of editing that last garbled sentence. (I couldn’t figure out how to get back in to the comment to fix it, so I’m concluding my thoughts here.
I am so pleased to find this site and all the great work that is being done to integrate collaborative thinking and practices in health care, particularly in regard to physicians. Research has proven over and over again that the most critical factor to changing behavior, provoking insight, and solving complex problems is by motivating active engagement.
The comment from your book “Collaborative Listening,” that “the most important tool for hospital leaders and physicians to grasp is dialogue,” is profoundly important. I say this as someone who has studied, taught, and led numerous, high stakes efforts to overcome tense relationships and find common ground from which to make difficult steps forward.
However, I do not view dialog as a tool. I see it as an inherent competency in the practice and skill of performing successfully in certain professions. As a former instructor for Outward Bound, I know that a skilled mountain climber does not regard careful placement of his or her next foothold as a tool. It is part of many interlocking, smaller skills that contribute to the larger competency of mountain climbing.
In terms of your other questions, I can think of many other “tools,” or as I prefer to see them — competencies — that can be developed to build physician-hospital relations and increase effective use of collaborative approaches. I’m sure you are aware of many. I applaud your work and cheer you forward in your commitment to advancing collaborative endeavor.
Comment from Thanks Beth,
I appreciate your making the time to comment on my post
I understand and appreciate your distinction between tools and competencies. We hear often in healthcare administration the importance of building a tool-kit; I wholeheartedly support dialogue and engagement over “using the hammer”
Comment from Your article passed by me from contacts at Forbes. We’re getting surprising traction in the Health Care industry from our book, High Altitude Leadership. Thanks for helping support our research. Keep climbing!
Comment from I must say that the way you have connected the work “tool with physician engagement” is really impressive. Initially every one will think what the tool is about and how it can facilitate the physician engagement but i am really impressed with the words you share here in this article. thanks for sharing.
Comment from Thanks to Kehn for pointing out the relationship between the collaborative tools and the physicians. I am very much impressed by your article. This question always comes in my mind that is there any tool that improve physician-hospital relations. Now I got the answers of my questions. Thanks for posting your thoughts with us.
Thanks Kristina for making the time to comment.
Face-to-face dialogue is is the key to building long-term relationships.
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