Transcription:
Strategy Development and Alignment: Leadership Toolkit

Introduction: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of Dr Podcasting.com

Bill Klaproth: On this edition of the SHSMD Podcast, the gap between strategy and execution must always be bridged to ensure their alignment for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, especially now during COVID-19 and when other crazy market forces erupt. So SHSMD has put together a breakout session for the upcoming SHSMD Bytes Conference, specifically on this topic, which includes a tool kit for you. Come on, everybody loves a tool kit, right? You want a toolkit? I want a tool kit. We all love tool kits. And we're going to talk to Sara Poncelet from the Mayo Clinic about the toolkit and the session hang on, that starts now. This is the SHSMD Podcast, Rapid Insights for healthcare strategy professionals and planning, business development, marketing communications, and public relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. And in this episode, we talk with Sara Poncelet. Sarah is the Director of the Business Strategy and Planning Team supporting enterprise strategic priorities for the Mayo Clinic. And we're going to talk with her about her session at SSHMD Bytes day one, breakout two, it's called strategy development and alignment leadership toolkit. Sara, welcome to the SHSMD Podcast. As you know, we start every episode of the SHSMD Podcast with rapid insights. One quick tip, someone can use to make their marketing communications better today. Sara, give us your rapid insight.

Sara Poncelet: I work in corporate strategy and oftentimes people forget the definition of strategy. The definition is that we make an integrated set of choices in order to position ourselves for sustainable advantage and to exceed the needs of those we serve. So it's really about making strategic choices of things we will and will not do in order to actually have a sound strategy.

Host: That is your rapid insight. That's how it's done. Thank you, Sara. That was really great. And I love how you're talking about strategy and integrating that. So Sara, you are hosting a breakout session day one, breakout two. This is really going to be cool. It's called strategy development and alignment, and the leadership toolkit. This is really cool. So you're going to focus on the leadership toolkit to help leaders align all strategies. So why is something like this important?

Sara Poncelet: It's really important because the point of having a corporate strategy is to have a true North for the institution. And that's only as good as the ability for a hundred percent of the organization to align. And from the high level strategy down to actually execution, oftentimes probably the most important element of the strategy and the being, what are the actions that we should have our operational teams be making that look different tomorrow than they did yesterday, so that we actually start making steps toward the future versus continuing to maintain the status quo.

Host: I love how you say that. Moving from strategy to execution, and a lot of people have that problem. So this toolkit is going to be great. It sounds like this toolkit will even help you when market forces change. Like we're going through COVID who saw this a year ago, it'll help leaders to know what action to take and to thrive in a different future. So tell us more about this toolkit. I know there's guide notes and handouts and videos and slide decks and all that kind of stuff. Tell us more what's in this toolkit.

Sara Poncelet: So, we ended up developing a toolkit in the same steps that we worked through strategy development for our corporate strategy. And there are four different steps, most are about an hour, but there is one that's 90 minutes. So it's broken down in a way that you could do it into kind of a full day session, or you could break into multiple sessions that you could fit into a standing meeting with a team. And the point of the toolkit was to help always have an agile dynamic plan, especially with market forces. Just a bit of background is that we developed our strategy in 2019. And for a while, we were calling our strategy a 2030 strategy and COVID. It actually caused us to rename it because we couldn't necessarily put a date on where we were going. During COVID, we actually had to run back through the toolkit and double check that our true North was really where we wanted to be.

So, the first step is about stepping into the future and utilizing futuristic trends that we believe to come true and imagining ourselves in that new future. The interesting thing about COVID is what we thought was going to happen over the course of 10 years, accelerated and happened in about the course of nine months for us. Running through the four different steps actually helped us create something that was agile, not only for our corporate strategy, but also something that all of the departments, divisions, and major areas that Mayo could run through all of their steps and double check their true North as well. But also stay in alignment to where the institution is still headed for our strategy.

Host: So, you said step one was stepping into the future? Yes. Okay, great. So can you tell us the other three steps too? That'd be great.

Sara Poncelet: Absolutely. The first step is 90 minutes. It is about really looking into our forecast, the forecast of the future. And so I have places where groups can look at the forecast that are relevant to their institution. The second is charting your course, and this is helping align any area at Mayo Clinic to the framework, to the areas of focus that we have for our future. So it's about developing a framework and mapping into what's your role for the institution in that framework? The third is pressure testing. So stress testing, that's bringing back some of those future trends, but about how they work together. And challenging in a more challenging environment, what sort of actions would you take and what sort of elements would you grow into if we experienced different trends?

So COVID was a real-life stress test, really forcing us to challenge what would we do with areas of growth, what were true priorities and what were things we actually had to stop. And then finally the last is called back casting to get from there to here. And back casting is actually been around for a while. And most people have heard of forecasting. Forecasting is looking at where you're at right now, looking at the last few years, and in a linear fashion mapping out where you want to go. And back casting is the opposite. Back casting is starting from where you want to be. And then stepping backward into the key actions, decisions, and things that must be true in order for you to achieve your future state vision. We have an exercise around that and that's specifically around how do I move from where I'm at today to the future I want to be in? And what's the first step?

Host: I love that back casting. How do we get from there to here? That is really cool. So the fourth step stepping into the future, number two, charting your course, number three, pressure testing or stress testing, and then number four back casting. How do we get from there to here? I love that, this is really cool, Sara. So can you give us an example of how this toolkit has been effective in your use at the Mayo Clinic?

Sara Poncelet: Yes. As mentioned, we worked through this for a corporate strategy, so this was the process we went through to get to our corporate strategy, but the point of having the facilitator guides and we have facilitated this. So a major initiative at Mayo Clinic is education. So, that's one of our three shields and we had an education session after the corporate strategy was approved last Fall, we worked through all four exercises. What we did create for the toolkit at Mayo is kind of, I'll say more generic forecasts of what are the different scenarios that we think will play out in healthcare. What we had to do for education was we actually created forecast for education because what looked different for what we've experienced within COVID is the significant increase in virtual care delivery. We had to talk about how there was actually going to be a significant increase in virtual education delivery.

So, we had to modify our forecast to that shield, to the major initiative at Mayo and talked about based on that forecast. So we had five forecasts, but based on that forecast, what does that mean for what we should be achieving in our future? Then as we start imagining that new future, we're actually recreating what that end state looks like. And as we move into the second step of turning our course, we then had to align to the true North areas of Mayo Clinic. So one of those is our people and focusing on our people, we were focusing on our own current talent, but also future talent pipeline. And so they had the outline, how were they advancing specifically? The people initiative, the people area of our strategy from an educational perspective. Then as we moved into our stress testing, we started challenging the different elements of the forecast. And one example is related to a recession. So in a recession period of time, when financials are constraints, it actually accelerates the rate in which we would want to push on that virtual mode because we'd be able to reach more people through a scalable solution.

So that actually helped us to realize that that was a higher priority for us of an area to invest our time, our energy, our people, our resources into. And then finally we have a really solid idea of that future state. We know where we're going and then we have to back cast. So then we have to talk about in that future state, what are the key investments, initiatives, projects that we need to do in order to start moving from a very much in-person setting to a more virtual setting for training and education. And then the example, when we have a plan and it's very focused on the virtual education, then we also had the immediate acceleration of that strategy during COVID. So in a COVID setting, especially in a healthcare setting, we sent so many people home. A majority of that was so that we could all stay safe and healthy, but it forced almost nearly overnight, but in the course of a couple of weeks for us to completely move a majority of our content from what would have happened on in person setting into an online delivery setting. And so we saw our strategy accelerate, and that is how we used it with the education field and how it also was pressure tested under the COVID setting.

Host: Yeah. That's a really great example of how to use the toolkit. So basically this toolkit helps someone to stay on course, no matter what the market forces may be. Is that right?

Sara Poncelet: Yeah. That's the goal. And part of the toolkit and keeping up with kind of an agile strategy is that we have to ensure that we're keeping up on those trends, ensuring that what we've set as our true North stays that way as market forces change, and we start accelerating faster toward our future. So each year we are updating those forecasts and each year we are validating with our board that the true North core framework of our strategy is still what we aspire to be. So rather than doing this in a cyclical fashion, like every five or 10 years, we're reviewing this on a quarterly basis with our board, but then ensuring that our forecasts are staying up to date, as things are changing in a rapid fashion, especially around technology advancement.

Host: I like how you do this quarterly too. It really helps you stay on task because if you do it yearly, a lot of things can happen to move you off course, but quarterly really helps you stay on task. So in your session, will you go over each of these four exercises, if you will, in the toolkit and how to use them?

Sara Poncelet: Yes. I modified the toolkit to be more applicable to many audiences. So having forecasts that span a variety of healthcare institutions outside of ones that are like Mayo, they're academic medical centers, but also the ones that are very much clinical and hospital settings. So modified some of the tools so that members would be able to grab the tools and modify for themselves, but it doesn't have to be directly relevant to Mayo Clinics true North. So weaving more of framework so that groups can input their own corporate strategies. And then the facilitator guides are wonderful for just setting up someone so that they would have slide decks, and they would have basically a facilitator's guide. So they would have all these notes around how do they prepare and how would they have these sessions? The other elements of the toolkit we had to modify was that we did a lot of this in person and we've moved so much of it to zoom setting. So online virtual setting, online boards versus what used to be in person, handing out worksheets, etcetera.

Host: Right. So this is really nice. So anyone can customize this to fit their current situation. So Sara, what do you hope attendees will learn or walk away with at the end of the session?

Sara Poncelet: What I'm hoping people learn is that an agile strategy is a really good approach in order to ensure that you're not having to recreate your true Norris every single time, a major market force changes and that you have sound strategy, tools and development in order to move from the high-level strategy down into the execution. So I'm hoping that people can start to see and set their mind space around that. The other elements is that I hope they are able to walk away with tools so that they can implement and execute this same sort of framework within their own institution.

Host: That is really good. I think this is going to be a really popular session. It is day one. It is breakout two, and it's called strategy development and alignment and the leadership tool kit. Sara, thank you so much for your time. It's going to be a great session. We really appreciate it.

Sara Poncelet: Thank you so much.

Host: That's Sara Poncelet, and to learn more, visit smd.org/education/shsmd-connections-bytes/breakouts. Go ahead and stop the podcast, rewind it. And you can get that URL again, to learn more about that session. And if you found this podcast helpful and please again, how could you not, please share it because Sara is just terrific. That's going to be an awesome session. Please share it on all of your social channels and hit the subscribe button to get every episode. This has been a production of Dr. Podcasting I'm Bill Klaproth.