Posted on December 13, 2017

2018 will represent the beginning of my thirty-fourth year of practice, and it represents a lot of time and experiences as well. Over this time, I have had opportunities to both be student and teacher. And it all began with being brought up within a certain system – a dental school learning system which had a certain philosophy and approach toward the transfer of knowledge and testing of competency. My initial experiences occurred at the University of Michigan just like my father and my uncle – his brother – before him.

Each dental school comes up with its own system of education – but to a large degree most are quite similar. So as a community, most of us have had similar experiences with slightly different highs and lows. Our similar educational experiences has much to do with the creation and maintenance of our professional culture – a shared set of thinking patterns as well as assumptions, and feelings about the work that we do and the way things are trending for us on a personal level.

These experiences and feelings are sometimes paradoxical, as some learnings are still valid while others have become counterproductive or significantly outdated. So the challenge soon becomes continuously trying to figure out the current best way to do things – and the best way to think about things. Because if we fail to do this -and often- we can easily become a slave to our old beliefs without even realizing it.

So how do we best approach this challenge? Adopting a concept from Zen Buddhism known as ‘shoshin’, which means “beginners mind” is helpful. Shoshin refers to letting go of our preconceptions and focusing on the creation of an attitude of openness when studying a subject.

Shoshin is helpful because there is a danger which can acccompany expertise, as becoming an expert in a given area can easily lead us to mental laziness and cognitive bias; it can block us from considering information which disagrees with what has worked well for us in the past… it can rather insidiously undermine our ability to grow and adapt to the rapidly changing knowledge, technology, and marketplace which surrounds us.

The concept of shoshin is best when used with our entire Care Team through the creation of a learning organization – represented by a practice culture which encourages innovative thinking, respecting and supporting one another and strategically collaborating to create new outcomes, test out application of new knowledge, and forge new directions.

Three leadeship strategies which will support shoshin in your practice are:

1. Let go of your need to be the primary source of knowledge about everything in the practice. Micromanagment kills creative innovation. Instead, encourage each team member to become a recognized entrepreneurial expert in the areas of their strongest knowledge and interest. Find ways to funnel resources to them in a timely fashion to suppprt their learning and growth. And find ways to empower them, encourage them, and to get out of their way.

2. Let go of your need to come out on top of every discussion (this applies to working with patients as well). If you are having a conversation and someone makes a statement that you disagree with, try releasing the urge to correct them. Instead approach the topic from a place of curiosity, “Isn’t that intesting – can you share more with me about why you feel this way?” Such an approach opens up the opportunity for us to learn something new, and it may even cause them to learn something new as they explain an issue that they may have previously approached too dogmatically in the past.

3. Assume you are an ignorant person  – because you truly are about many things- and particularly about how others feel, about how others come to make certain priorities in their lives, and about what motivates them. The key here is to recognize this truth, remain humble, and therefore discipline ourselves to listen carefully for meaning when others are speaking.

If you approach running your practice with a beginner’s mind, you will not only learn more quickly, but you will make fewer inaccurate assumptions, and therefore make fewer mistakes. And you will also find that your relationships with others will deepen and become more and more effective over time.

Shoshin is a great great leadership mindset, as Bob Dylan tried to teach us as well, “ah – but I was so much older than, I’m younger than that now”.

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments LLC, ©2017

Read more at www.codiscovery.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on February 6, 2017

We all want to get along and be liked. We also want to make good decisions, so when we make decisions regarding issues that we know little about, we often use a cognitive-social approach:

We ask our friends for advice.

We observe other people’s behavior.

We seek-out and read testimonials.

This cognitive-social approach, is known as “social proof” or “informational social influence”.

Psychologists tell us that we make assumptions about most things via a rather incomplete fact-gathering process often tainted with bias. And sometimes this process may even be completely devoid of facts.

We see this phenomenon frequently in dentistry, as patients enter our practices with all kinds of preconceived notions picked up from their social environment, or through experience. And how much of it is true is unique to the individual.

Some patients are functioning off of ‘survivorship bias’, which is based on our tendency to assume marketplace “winners” are those who are most visible. In other words, in the popularity contest of life, less visible and better options are often not even considered.

As a marketing executive friend of mine once told me, “If you are not in the top three of top-of-mind, you may as well not exist.”

This opens the door to all kinds of moral arguments about marketing that our profession has struggled with since the 1970’s. I will leave probing that issue for another day, but suffice it to say, it is an issue full of moral fog.

Our patients also have a tendency for what psychologists call “loss aversion”, which refers to our tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains. In other words, we have a psychological tendency to seek out bargains instead of quality, unless a strongly assertive argument and expectation is established for the later. The “race to the bottom” is real, and rooted in loss aversion. Establishing a brand expectation for quality is challenging but essential for health-centered / relationship-based dentistry.

Patients are also influenced by what is known as the ‘availability heuristic’, which is a little mental glitch in our heads which causes us to assume that the first things which come to mind are the most relevant. For instance, when people think of Delta Dental they think of saving money, not that the policy is limited to $1000.00 a year, highly restricted, and that the company has no particular interest in their health.

And finally, patients often come to us with a ‘confirmation bias’, which refers to their tendency to search for -and favor- information that confirms their beliefs, while simultaneously ignoring or devaluing information that contradicts their beliefs. An example of this when a patient believes that all dentists will hurt them, or that any dentist who is not on their insurance plan is shady and likely to take advantage of them financially.

You can easily see from this brief discussion, that the psycho-social nature of our relationships with patients before, during, and after treatment is complex and potentially full of cognitive distortions which can lead to undesirable behavior and poor decision-making. Consequently, successful helping relationships emerge only when we are aware of where potential distortions may lie and tactfully manage our patients expectations toward more successful treatment outcomes.

L.D. Pankey put it another way, Know your patient.”

Paul A Henny, DDS

Thought Experiments, LLC © 2017