Innovation Hypertension
A few years ago I worked on an assignment for people with high blood pressure (hypertension) in Sweden. It’s estimated that between 25–35% of the population has high blood pressure but only 50% of them have actually received a diagnosis. So half of the people with hypertension don’t even know they have it. It causes about 18% of all deaths per year.
The (perhaps) more interesting thing that I discovered was that among the 50% of those diagnosed with hypertension, the vast majority wasn’t really interested in getting better beyond (sometimes) taking their blood pressure medicine. Even though they knew it wasn’t enough, or that they weren’t getting that much better, or that their parents or grandparents died early due to heart trouble, extremely few people were willing to engage in lifestyle changes that would help them live longer. Even when they were offered a modest plan of change, they really didn’t want to create new routines or give up something they knew was bad.
I’ve realized that this feels a lot like a large number of organizations that I’ve known over the years! About half of them refuse to recognize that they probably need to change, more worried about hearing bad news about their operations and processes than they are about fixing them (which scares them). The others know that they need to change and recognize that their current systems aren’t really optimized for excellence, innovation and transformation, but don’t really want to invest in new routines because they don’t really want to give up their comfortable ways of working.
Typically, in people with high blood pressure, a major coronary event will spur some short term change, much like a crisis in business, but it turns out that they often go back to previous patterns once the extreme danger has passed.
It turned out, in the assignment I worked on, that there was a group of people with hypertension who did invest in lifestyle change. Typically they lived in big cities, like Stockholm, had university or advanced degrees, successful careers, and were already invested in health and fitness. They obviously wanted to invest in living as long as possible.
And you can see this same pattern in innovation and change — there are a few public and private organizations doing what they need to do to take care of themselves and make the sometimes painful investment in change to make sure that they are building a sustainable future for their organization, their employees, and their customers. But the majority are taking a small dose of medicine every night and hoping for the best.
Innovation and change medicine could be compared to the sprints, the “inspirational workshops”, and innovation theater that feel like something significant is changing without actually changing.
I think I’m going to try and use that high blood pressure metaphor next time I meet with an organization. My guess is that they will hate it as much as the high blood pressure patients hate facing the need to change their lives.
