How do you plan? Obviously, you have to. Obviously, you can’t.
For your organization, and for you as a health care leader, the rapid and, at times, chaotic changes in the payment systems, the purchasers’ strategies, your population base, new technological possibilities, and the competitive landscape mean that you must plan for the future and act vigorously to make that future happen — or you fail. At the same time, those very same factors render traditional planning methods irrelevant, impossible, even deadly.
The movie line that comes to mind is, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” But we can’t just forget it. We must figure this out.
Let’s step through it: the shape of the complexity we are dealing with, how the process must change to deal with it. Then we get to a core issue that often gets overlooked: What kind of mind do we need for this new thinking, and how do we cultivate it?
