What’s real?
Last year, while having dinner at a conference, I sat across from two women – I’ll give a quick shout-out to Judy and Devona without identifying them by their last names, in case they don’t want the shout-out.
We were talking about the people that we had separately observed at concerts who, instead of actually watching the concert, were filming the concert on their phones. In essence, they weren’t watching the concert live, they were watching a video screen of the concert.
Is that even watching a concert live? I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem to be. You’re focusing your experience on a screen instead of everything that’s going on around you.
Which makes me wonder if that same phenomenon of focusing on a very narrow object or viewpoint doesn’t also impact many others in healthcare.
Someone else, not at that dinner, was commenting on the difference between the old Siegfried and Roy act in Las Vegas, which required Siegfried and Roy. Even though they had around 400 employees, they needed to have Siegfried and Roy there for every single performance.
Compare that with the Blue Man Group, in which there are the original “Blue Men” who came up with the concept but no longer need to perform: They have multiple touring groups of performing “Blue Men.”
Many people in healthcare, certainly many physicians, are hands-on like Siegfried and Roy. They’re not the equivalent of Blue Men, working only on the high-value concepts and then supervising those those who carry out the work.
The problem with being so personally caught up in the delivery of the performance is that you lose sight of many of the elements around yourself, elements that impact your business. The classic example of this is the medical group leaders who are shocked when their hospital contract goes out to bid via RFP; after all, they exclaim, “we deliver first class medical care.”
Avoid the problem of the concert-goers who focus so intently on their cell phone screens, focusing on what they think is reality. Take time to sit back, open your eyes, and look at the bigger picture.
