In writing Designed to Adapt: Leading Healthcare in Challenging Times, Dr. Kenagy brought the key features of Adaptive Design to the world in hopes that, collectively, we could fix healthcare and halt the trend of increasing cost without decreasing quality patient care. He wanted to help fix a broken system. This system has never needed Adaptive Design or Dr. Kenagy’s book more than now. As Dr. Kenagy writes:
When I started writing this book, my goal was to show how our struggling healthcare system could benefit from combining the strategy of disruptive innovation with the leadership and management capabilities of adaptive, transformational companies — particularly Toyota.
Now Toyota has stumbled; many of the developed world’s economies have been shaken, and the role of government in U.S. healthcare reform has become a fractious, partisan debate. The world has become increasingly complex and unpredictable.
Despite this instability, there are a few realities we can depend on. The U.S. healthcare system will continue to struggle with the highest costs in the world, but it’s not just an American problem. Every healthcare system in the developed world faces severe challenges of rising costs and declining sources of funding. At the same time, our aging, baby-boom population will get sicker and need more care. More care without increasing costs? That seems impossible. These are challenging times.
However, challenging times also present great opportunities. The history of innovation clearly shows that, in periods of instability, highly adaptive organizations have a great advantage. They do wonderful things. They do what previously seemed impossible.
This book is about how you (and others like you) can link together to do the impossible: provide more and better care at lower cost. Each chapter describes real-life healthcare experiences that show how success in challenging times is dependent on accepting and practicing three principles of successful adaptive innovators:
- Your future success is not dependent on what you have done in the past or are doing now, but rather on how you adapt what you are doing to a constantly changing environment. This is the challenge.
- The structures and processes of your current organization and the mindsets of the people embedded within them will always seek to slow, stall, and usually stop adaptive change. These are the facts.
- Those few organizations strategically and operationally “designed to adapt” have competitive advantage in a rapidly changing world. They do the impossible. This is the opportunity and that is Adaptive Design!
The evidence is clear on what to do. To achieve lasting results means more than holding your ground, implementing best practices, or changing strategic plans, facilities, people, processes, product lines, technology, or organizational charts. Solving healthcare’s current problems requires you to change minds and develop people to continually adapt to new opportunities. Adaptive Design is the proven method for making a difference in healthcare.
John Kenagy, MD
January 2011
