HFMA 2019: Mindset and diversity key to success

Speaking on the opening day of the HFMA annual conference, author and broadcaster Matthew Syed (pictured) said that in organisations with a fixed mindset, everyone wanted to look the smartest and saw errors or other people’s success as a threat to their ego and self image.

Instead he said organisations with a growth mindset were full of ‘learn it alls’ rather than ‘know it alls’. ‘You should want to know where sub-optimality resides and how others are tackling problems,’ he said. And referencing Silicon Valley’s iterative test and release approach, he suggested that successful organisations were the ‘ones who fail fastest’.

‘In healthcare that might mean you need to do small experiments – pilot schemes – but don’t underestimate the value of mistakes,’ he said.

Alongside adopting a growth mindset, he encouraged organisations to embrace cognitive diversity ensuring that decisions were informed by people with different perspectives.

Speaking later in the conference Michael Allen (pictured), chief financial officer of OSF Healthcare, an integrated health system in Illinois, called on finance professionals to move outside their comfort zone. His theme as national chairman of the US HFMA is Dare you to move and he said that ‘making yourself uncomfortable is where the growth is’.

Describing playing safe to avoid criticism as ‘engineering smallness’, he also encouraged delegates not to be afraid to ‘fail a few times’. ‘When was the last time you did something for the first time?’ he asked.

OSF Healthcare has recently revised its annual budget process. ‘We spent a lot of time and energy doing a lot of detailed work but the pace of change is so great that by the time the budget was in place it had very little meaning,’ he said. ‘So we took it out.’

People had been spending time compiling the budget rather than thinking about how to make something different and better. ‘Suddenly this summer, the process, dialogue and strategy got better and we believe the execution will get better too.’