Agility and Ambition: Putting our Whole Organisation at the Service of our Customers and Patients

We have always been ambitious in our science and what it can achieve for patients and society.?We have been driven to treat conditions that were once considered untreatable, find cures for previously incurable diseases, and enhance the quality of life for patients and their loved ones.

One of my key intentions when we started our transformation five years ago was to bring this type of bold ambition into all aspects of Pharma International. I wanted to enable us to be more ambitious about the impact our organisation could have for our customers and patients.?

Weren’t we ambitious already? Yes, we were. We set goals and targets and pursued them with commitment and passion. However, as we embarked on the challenging journey of turning our organisation inside out with the aim of helping more patients achieve better outcomes, faster, we found ourselves increasingly questioning whether our ambitions and goals were the right ones. Were we truly having the greatest impact possible for our customers, for patients and for health systems? Moreover, were we doing everything we could to enable everyone within our organisation to make a real difference for our customers and patients?

The answer to both questions was ‘not always.’ Although uncomfortable, this truth held immense significance. It was one of the key insights that started us on our journey towards becoming the agile, responsive and outcomes-driven organisation our customers wanted and needed us to be.?

Adopting agile ways of working is one of the most profound changes we have made in our transformation so far. To become a more agile organisation that is better at sensing and responding to our customers’ needs, we have focused on three key areas: shifting away from operating as a hierarchy to operating as a network, leaving behind rigid long-term planning to embrace working in rapid cycles, and focusing on collaborating with customers to identify problems and create value. This wasn’t easy, and it took experimentation and trial and error to get it right. It has been absolutely essential for enabling us to be better at responding to our customers’ needs in a rapidly evolving landscape – and for helping us put all of our organisation’s skills, talents and expertise at the service of our customers and patients.?

But how would we know if we were succeeding? Our pre-transformation metrics, such as share of voice, market share, and the number of milestone completions, were familiar and aligned with our previous ways of working and our old hierarchical structure. However, these measures failed to provide us with the essential insights we needed: how effectively we were delivering value to patients and health systems, the impact we were having, and how we could enhance our performance further. They had worked well for us for many years, but the increasing complexity of both the healthcare environment and of the products in our pipeline meant we could not rely on them to work for us in the future.??

We needed a better approach to help us to focus our resources and the energies of our talented people to where they could have the most impact for our customers and patients. It was in outcomes-based planning that we found that approach.

In the past, much like other companies, we embraced a 'reasoning forward' approach to planning. Our strategic planning process would kick off earlier in the year and we would spend months with meticulous analysis of all our data and insights to develop a ‘perfect’ plan for the year ahead. We then dedicated significant time and effort to deliver these plans.?

While plans seem perfect in the planning process, what usually happened was that things changed over time. The environment was evolving at a pace that often left us struggling to keep up. As we diligently pursued our grand plans, we occasionally overlooked whether they truly delivered the value we aimed for or adequately addressed our customers' ever-changing requirements. To add to our challenges, our former ways of working made it harder to reallocate resources, be it personnel or project budgets, ultimately slowing our adaptability. We knew we had to plan for the fast-paced environment we were in, to be able to adapt and change gears when needed.

Through outcomes-based planning, we have changed that focus so we start by determining what matters for our customers and patients: what are the problems they face, what are their unmet needs and what would make their lives easier? Then we ask ourselves what we need to do to address what matters most – and how we can work with our customers to do it.???

This shift in perspective has enabled us to be more ambitious and has encouraged us to think ‘what if…?’ and ‘what would need to be true to make this happen’? By working with our customers and patients and learning about their needs, we can focus on our part of what can be done to have the maximum impact for patients.? For example, one of our Haemophilia teams set themselves the goal of creating ‘a world with no more bleeds’, and then worked backwards to identify the potential short- and mid-term outcomes necessary to achieve their ultimate objective. This is exactly the type of bold, patient-focused ambition I had been hoping for.?

Outcomes define the value we want to create and the change we want to see for patients and Roche. Outcomes-based planning is a tool we use to help us focus on delivering meaningful impact rather than on output that keeps us focused on our mission. It is also one of the factors that has enabled us to become more agile and to achieve our aim of making sure our whole organisation is working in the service of our customers and patients. By regularly reviewing our progress towards our outcomes in 90-day cycles, we can swiftly apply learnings and share best practices across our network, and we can call on colleagues from other geographies to contribute their expertise. The autonomy that our shift towards creative leadership approaches has given our people and teams means they are able to take action to design and co-create solutions that respond to customers’ needs and bring us closer to our desired outcomes without waiting for direction.? I think it is important to emphasise that if we had simply adopted outcomes-based planning without doing the work that enabled us to change our leadership mindset and move towards more agile and networked ways of working, it wouldn’t have had even a fraction of the impact it has had for us.?

Our transformation is an ongoing journey towards helping more patients to achieve better outcomes, faster so they can live longer healthier lives. This is the outcome that truly matters to patients, to our customers and to us – and I know it is an ambition that my colleagues across the industry share. It is what has driven how we have changed our organisation over the past five years, and it will continue to shape us as we evolve with the needs of our customers in the years to come.