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BLOG: Planning and planting your practice garden, part 1
Virtually all human achievements are exquisitely planned in advance on paper or the latest computerized equivalent. Ships, planes, skyscrapers, city parks, Danish furniture and machinery of every stripe are created on blueprints before they are ever created in reality. Circuit boards are diagrammed before they are welded, and potential new autos are modeled in clay. Diplomacy and wars are waged from written, branched contingency plans. And even the most artistic chefs do their best when working from a written recipe.
Symphonic music, another wonderful human construction, is played from written sheets of music. Movies are scripted. Novels are outlined. Professional athletes adhere to a formal, written training program. Even some paintings, and certainly most sculptures, are thumbnailed on paper before they ever become real.
But what about your surgical practice, or for that matter your life as a surgeon? It seems that practice development and management is about as unstructured as fishing or writing poetry: there is not much advance planning and certainly little thought given to how you are going to wind up when the day is done.
It got me to thinking...why aren’t we commonly blueprinting and then going out and constructing practices? Well, of course we can, and a few obsessives actually do. Sometime to extremes—this is ophthalmology, after all. But seriously, why don’t we plan and build our practices like we plan and build our homes? Why do fewer than 1% of the practices I consult with have a business development plan in place before I arrive on the scene?
Perhaps it is because doctors and their managers feel they cannot control the outcomes...and sometimes you cannot even measure them. You know by sight if a wall has been built with crooked lumber. It can be a little harder to know if your eye care business has been framed up correctly. It is so much less concrete and linear. Maybe a certain fuzziness about the outcomes is what keeps most eye surgeons from formal business planning. Or perhaps it’s ego—if you declare the outcome it can be humbling to fall short.
We’ll pick up this topic in more detail with my next blog.