Little Bets: Keynote Speaker to Discuss Innovation Through Experimentation

When comedian Chris Rock develops a new routine, he spends months testing jokes on audiences. And not all of them succeed – at least initially.

The animators at Pixar test and critique every scene they shoot to make sure the final product is the absolute best it can be.

When prize-winning architect Frank Gehry starts on a new project, he will spend days cutting up, crumpling and folding pieces of paper until he stumbles upon a design that intrigues him.

Each of these people has something in common: Instead of waiting until they had a plan completely thought out before starting, they were willing to take small, experimental steps until they arrived at a finished product.

It’s this method that author Peter Sims highlights in his book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas emerge from Small Discoveries. Sims, a former venture capitalist, will deliver the keynote address at the ACPE 2012 Annual Meeting and Spring Institute in San Francisco on April 27.

Sims said he first became exposed to this style of thinking while working with the Institute of Design at Stanford University, which emphasizes innovation.

“I had never learned how to do this low-risk, inexpensive prototyping,” Sims said. “I had never been exposed to how to think about problems before solutions and all these different methods that get taught.”

Sims began searching out people who used this method. One of the first he talked to was Ned Barnholt, a former executive at Hewlett Packard. Barnholt said the organization refused to make a move until every possible question had been answered. Each time, it ended in failure.

“Every time they tried to do inventing that way, they’d waste a lot of money,” Sims said.

Barnholt said he came to realize that the smarter strategy is to make a series of little bets instead of sinking everything into one big bet. Good leaders aren’t afraid of failure. They learn from those unsuccessful experiments and build from there.

Another example Sims points to is the story of Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. He modeled his initial concept on the coffeehouses he had visited in Milan. But in the early days, the baristas wore bow ties, which made patrons uncomfortable. The menus were written almost entirely in Italian. And there were no chairs.

Schultz was willing to adapt his initial vision to accommodate the realities of pleasing customers. The result was one of the most successful businesses in the United States, Sims said.

While the world of medicine tends to be very process-oriented, there are still plenty of opportunities to use the Little Bets method, Sims said. For example, how to approach the problem of reducing waiting times at your practice?

“Everybody has to work within constraints,” Sims said. “But if there are ways to be constantly be learning around the edges – that’s what I’m arguing. How do you constantly learn around the edges about something? You don’t wait until the problems are so glaringly obvious that some drastic step has to be taken; you’re always trying to do this discovery as a part of what you do.”

Today, Sims is helping put the Little Bets methodology into action. He’s created the Little Bets labs, which teaches people how to think in innovative ways. Participants at the ACPE 2012 Annual Meeting will get a taste of this during a workshop following Sims’ keynote address. Sims is also launching an effort to apply Little Bets thinking to social problems, such as improving under-performing school districts.

Sims gave this piece of advice for those looking to try out the Little Bets methodology: Create a three-page prototype.

“Anybody can put together a prototype, bounce it off their colleagues or some of their friends and gain insight about whether you’re going down a potentially interesting path,” he said. “This is really just a means of keeping the learning going over time. That’s all it is. Creativity, innovation – it’s just a learning process.”

ACPE Webinar: Putting the Focus on Patients Improves Care for Everyone

Putting the patient first sounds like an easy concept.

Michael Kobernick, MD, MS

But in today's fast-paced, money-driven health care world, this core principle sometimes gets overlooked, said Michael Kobernick, an experienced physician leader from St. John Providence Health Care System in Detroit. Remembering to treat each patient as an individual not only results in better care, it also is economically beneficial to the hospital or health care system, he said. "It's a matter of shifting your focus," he said. "When you do what's best for the patient, the economics will follow. It happens every time." Kobernick will share case studies on how he has created more effective systems of care by putting patients first during a Jan. 26 webinar that is free for all ACPE members. The webinar will be from 3-4 p.m. Eastern. Register by clicking here.

Kobernick, who currently serves as medical director: emergency services, community health services and SmartHealth at St. John, has a long history in patient care. Trained as a family practitioner, he later moved to emergency medicine. He earned a master's in health administration and has served in a variety of leadership positions.

Today he works in the field of community health at St. John and has helped develop free primary care clinics for uninsured patients who have been discharged from the hospital.

"We forget that these people are frightened," he said. "They are sick. They don't have access to care, and those that do have people selling them care that is not in their best interest."

The effort sounds primarily altruistic, but Kobernick said it also makes sense from a financial point of view. First, it keeps them out of the hospital. Next, because staff members work with the patients over an extended period of time, they can help them apply for Medicaid and other government services. So many of the patients end up with insurance.

Kobernick said few people will argue with physicians who strive to treat their patients as individuals. The biggest challenge is giving physicians the time and the motivation to shift their thinking.

"I think that a lot of us lose sight of why we came to medicine in the first place," Kobernick said. "We're all so focused on the economics and on technology."

Register for Dr. Kobernick's webinar by clicking here. ACPE members can view previous Knowledge Worth Sharing presentations by clicking here.

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