A Secret to Building an Amazing Practice
What if you focussed on the main activity in your practice that:
You enjoy,
Achieves the best health outcomes for your patients, and/or
Is the most profitable?
What if you focussed on what you do best and continually refining this to create a virtuous circle?
How successful would you and your practice be?
How much more would you enjoy life?
This is what great companies like Amazon and foundations like the Cleveland Clinic have done.
So how do you do this?
Jim Collins, the renowned author of Good to Great and Built to Last, defined this creation of your own virtuous circle as the “flywheel effect“:
In creating a good-to-great transformation, there’s no single defining action, no grand program, no single killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment; rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough and beyond. Once you fully grasp how to create flywheel momentum in your particular circumstance, and apply that understanding with creative intensity and relentless discipline, you get the power of strategic compounding. Never underestimate the power of momentum, especially when it compounds over a very long time. Once you get your flywheel right, you want to stay with it for years to decades—decision upon decision, action upon action, turn by turn—each loop adding to the cumulative effect.
But to best accomplish this, you need to understand how your specific flywheel turns. The six-step process Jim identified for achieving this is:
Create a list of replicable successes your practice has achieved.
Compile a list of failures and disappointments. This should include new initiatives and offerings by your practice that failed outright or fell far below expectations.
Compare the successes to the failures and ask, “What do these successes and failures tell us about the possible components of our flywheel, and what isn’t in our flywheel?”
Using the components you’ve identified, sketch the flywheel. Where does the flywheel start—what’s the top of the loop? What follows next? And next after that? Each component of the flywheel should feed into the next stage of the flywheel. Outline the path back to the top of the loop and be able to explain why this loop cycles back upon itself to accelerate momentum in your particular context.
Diagram the entire loop using four to six components. If you have more than six components, you’re making it too complicated; consolidate and simplify the model to capture the essence of your flywheel.
Test the flywheel against your list of successes and failures. Does your empirical experience validate it? Tweak the diagram until you can explain your biggest replicable successes as outcomes arising directly from the flywheel and your biggest disappointments as failures to execute or adhere to the flywheel.
So why not start thinking about this concept and putting into practice for yourself!
More details of this concept can be found here: https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/flywheel.html#articletop