Ahoy Mate... Maybe?

I have been giving a lot of thought to the cost of living lately. Kids' sports, activities, car payments, travel plans, new clothes for little boys that grow like weeds- it all adds up. Some cost is inevitable, essentially the cost of doing the business of life. But in other ways, I'm sure we all try to think about where we can extend our dollar or not even have to spend to get the most from our money. It is eye-opening to realize how this concept even stretches beyond a domestic setting. For instance, I heard a few weeks ago that Maroon 5's new album graphics were created solely with not an expensive design process, but rather, SnapChat. SnapChat, a free, playful app that allows you to put filters on pictures and grow ears or appear like a pirate for that moment in time. How relevant, I thought, when I heard this. The whole world is using SnapChat and these Grammy-winning stars are too. And it didn't cost a thing.

A physician colleague of mine often talks about the "Blue Ocean Strategy" - creating a better market and improvements in our outcomes through value innovation and "low resource, high impact" thinking (Kim and Mauborgne, 2015). I doubt the Maroon 5 band members were thinking of that. However, their catchy album cover made me think about this more deeply. Why does an improvement, a new market offering, or a resource have to be the most costly investment we make? If we look around us and try to focus on having no spend for a much needed improvement, what could we do that wouldn't cost a thing, or at least, would only cost a small fraction of the larger-scale improvements that we thought we needed?

In health care and patient experience, we are faced with rapid technological innovations to improve care design, systems, patient interactions, and outcomes, yet we are challenged to cut costs, increase margins, and minimize waste. A conversation a few nights ago with colleagues in the eLearning industry, Sarah Mercier and Sean Putman of Learning Ninjas, indicated that this thinking is touching all industries as companies attempt to do more with less in light of rising overhead costs. In designing training and helping clients explore learning, they think about how to partner with organizations to grow their own learning, to explore cost-effective options for training, and ultimately, to help their own bottom lines themselves through needing less and developing their people in some way. Yes, their people. Not their eLearning strategy and computer based training, which helps, but more so, their people. Exploring what could be thought of as this "minimalist" approach to improvement and cost reduction is liberating, actually, and in a big way it actually draws us back to our roots, regardless of your industry. For as outstanding as some of the new technology is that can improve systems and organizations, the most outstanding resource we have is not one that is digital, but rather, human.

Our human investment might be the only thing that saves us from insolvency as markets crash and costs rise. I am not suggesting we all start asking our teams to SnapChat to solve the world's problems- but I am suggesting that we stop looking to external sources of solutions and start investing in low resource partnerships, both with the humans within our four walls or with external sources of support that want to grow human potential, not solutions. Growing your human resources, to allow them to innovate differently and to allow them to team and optimize what ever deliverable you are trying to create has proven time and time again to be a blue ocean strategy to gain a foothold in your market and with your margins. And if they want to put on a pirate face or bunny ears in the meantime, let them go for it.

Kim, W.C. & Mauborgne, R. (2015). Blue Ocean Strategy. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.