People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them

I was speaking with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn today about some work she is doing for the California Healthcare Foundation and she asked me the question, “Do you think physicians would pay for their own continuing medical education (rather than being funded through industry support)?”

I immediately thought of this manifesto that I just read, whose conclusions I couldn’t agree more with, when I said, “yes we would.”

ChangeThis :: People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them

If you believe that people hate change and that it is your job to change them, they will hate it. If you believe that people thrive on change and that your job is to unleash it, you will tap into a limited source of ingenuity, energy and drive that will allow you to consistently take your ideas into big results.

This is exactly the theme we uncovered the Patient Centered Health Information Technology initiative, and what I have described many times on this blog and on the DailyKaizen blog (see: Let it Burn; a Wildfire of Respect), when I said, “in every part of every company there’s a monstrous capacity for creativity waiting to be unleashed.”

I sometimes hear about people in healthcare being “change averse.” I don’t think they are at all.

As we move toward Health 2.0, we have plenty of capacity to do things differently; nothing is static if it means doing things better for our patients. It’s what I see, again and again.

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Ted Eytan, MD