Helping the blind see

This year has been remarkable for new technologies that help the blind see. In addition, The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a gene therapy treatment for patients with a rare inherited eye disease. Voretigene neparvovec, which will be sold as Luxturna, is made by Philadelphia-based Spark Therapeutics Inc.

The one-time treatment is approved for children and adults with retinal dystrophy due to a mutation of the RPE65 gene, which causes severe visual impairment beginning in infancy. As it progresses, patients experience gradual loss of peripheral and central vision, which can eventually lead to blindness.

Unfortunately, not as much progress has been made in helping biomedical entrepreneurs see their own personal and organizational blind spots or medical educators see how medical education must change to win the 4th industrial revolution.

Organizational blind spots come from not staying in touch with customers and industry trends or discovering too late that the locks have been changed when it comes to finding the key to product-market fit. The customer discovery process takes planning, proper execution and analysis and is fraught with pitfalls. Here is a series of Steve Blank videos that help you avoid them. Here are the headlines:

1. Avoid yes-or-no questions. Closed-end questions (yes-no) are efficient, but don’t surface data that may be critical to a leader’s understanding. Questions are called open-ended when they allow for a variety of responses and provoke a richer discussion. These allow a leader to know what he doesn’t know, and ultimately make a better decision.
2. Don’t lead the witness. Hard-charging leaders often push to confirm their own assumptions about what is occurring in a given situation and what is needed moving forward. This can result in questions that are really disguised statements, like “doesn’t this mean that we really don’t have a quality problem?” These usually prevent contrary points of view and further data from surfacing.
3. Beware of evasive answers. All too often, people will avoid giving direct answers to direct questions. They may not know the answers or not want to provide the answers, to appear smart, or not want to offer incriminating data. Leaders need to keep coming back with directed questions until they get a straightforward answer or “We don’t know.”
4. Ask for supporting data or examples. Leaders need to ask questions that surface points of view and, at the appropriate time, also clarify which answers are based on fact and which are based on speculation. They should encourage people to say what they know from data and what they think they know, and make sure they clarify the difference.
5. Paraphrase to surface next-level details. One technique to push people to provide more information is to paraphrase what you are hearing. While this may result in a yes or no response, proceeding to next-level questions opens up the dialogue. Smart leaders sometimes mis-paraphrase what they are hearing in order to provoke a richer dialogue.
6. Ask for alternatives. Another approach to surfacing non-confirming data is to overtly ask for an opposing point of view. A related line of questioning is to ask the respondent to alter his or her fundamental position, like “You are asking for $10 million to grow this brand. What more could you do if we gave you $25 million?”
7. Give an opening for additional input. Leaders also need to provide an opportunity for others to offer additional input and, in particular, dissenting views. Often, the final moments of discussions are the richest, as people will wait until that time to surface what is really important to them. Ask if there is anything left unsaid that should be heard.

Do you know your leadership blind spots and how to fix them? What about your innovation and investment blind spots?

When it comes to shining light on personal blind spots, there is a difference between personal and professional success. Understanding and removing personal blind spots can be a painful and difficult experience, since they are based on deep seated emotional and psychological beliefs that are built to protect you, despite the unintended, harmful consequences. Here are some ways to identify and remove your personal blind spots.

Finally, doctors trying to fix sick care from inside are the blind leading the blind. The problems are so complex and wicked, the solutions so demanding and the technologies so convergent, that only interdisciplinary and cross industry collaboration, facilitated by open innovation and driven by those willing to succeed at innovation politics ,will yield results.

My guess is a lot of New Year's resolution lists will include removing personal, organizational, leadership or systems blind spots. The problem is that accomplishing most resolutions fail. So, bookmark this post and reread it next year (a simpler resolution) and then rinse and repeat. Maybe by that time some bioentrepreneur will create more pushy AI and deep learning bots to the blindness market and you won't have to struggle so much.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs