A few years ago, I worked with the Women's Health service line of a hospital system to define their strategic direction–a strategy statement, Vision, and set of guiding principles in line with their long-standing Mission as part of a large, regional integrated health system. Women's Health is a key service for many reasons, and the group had achieved success as a provider of healthcare services for women as they progressed along the continuum of care - for women that’s typically measured by phase of life (age). This particular hospital system had excellent statewide and regional performance and outcomes for Maternity care, including pre- and postpartum. The clinicians and leaders were proud of this and were looking for the next set of strategies to set their sights and goals. A clear direction would help grow their services, unite the employees and physicians and signal their commitment to continued excellence in a market that was becoming increasingly competitive in this specialty.
I designed both a set of visioning exercises as well as prioritization exercises for identifying which key strategies would most impact the vision and direction. Pre-work consisted of empathy interviews aimed at uncovering core issues and common themes, which would form the foundation for the two-day offsite strategy session. Around 50 clinicians and business leaders came together to level-set on their current state while using a structured, collaborative thought process to uncover and align around a future vision.
The work done during this project became a vision statement and set of ten strategic priorities, many of which years later still inform the strategic plan and related priorities. My role was as a designer and facilitator of retreat sessions, materials, takeaways and directing the next stage of strategy work. This type of collaborative process was new for the organization, and could have easily been replaced with a series of smaller, business-focused meetings, but bringing a mix of clinical and administrative leadership together, without distractions, was invaluable and helped develop the working relationships needed to continue pushing these efforts forward.
As a designer and strategist, this hit all the sweet spots–seeing groups come together to collaborate and ideate, deep-diving into particular topics, designing a thoughtful way to walk groups through complex ideas, and storytelling to advance the ideas into actionable insights and takeaways.