Inspiring Creativity

Can you give an example of perhaps where there was a problem, and that was the approach, “Let’s not fall in love with a solution, but be as creative as we can about solving this problem.”

Yes, one that comes to mind is part of our focus on being health focused, and it’s actually what we would call an essential, to be health focused. We were looking within optometrist offices, being able to help identify patients with diabetes, because there’s so many people who don’t realize they have pre-diabetes or diabetes.
So, a program we put in place as a pilot in offices, was to have the optometrist actually do a prick test, a blood prick test, to be able to test a patient to see if the patient had pre-diabetes or diabetes. So we thought it was brilliant, would be a great program that would support our members and our clients and it would really reinforce the role of optometry in health care. And it’s something that we think makes an impact on just helping people see well and stay healthy.
The challenge, especially with what is happening from a pandemic standpoint and a shortage of staffing, is that we didn’t have as many doctors being able to participate as we would like. And so that’s where our problem was that we were trying to solve. It wasn’t doing blood prick tests within a doctor’s office. The problem we were trying to solve is how do we help identify patients with diabetes or prediabetes? So, I think by staying in love with that, where we’ve ended up is we’ve pivoted and now we’re looking at are there ways to have the patient do that, him or herself? Can they do a prick test? Can the doctor give them something so then they can go home and do it and send it to a lab and get that information? So more of a direct-to-consumer type of approach in partnership with their optometrist.

That’s a terrific example of the need to pivot sometimes. Thank you.

And that may not work. We will have to pivot again.

But it’s okay because you’re falling in love with the problem, not a particular solution.

Exactly.