Douglas Flora: What I Wish I’d Known 20 Years Ago
Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Oncology Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The Courage to Act: What I Wish I’d Known 20 Years Ago.
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.” – Charles Bukowski.
Extraordinary outcomes don’t arrive by invitation. They happen when someone (maybe you?) decides to act.
Years ago, I stumbled upon an article about Bernie Roth‘s work at Stanford’s design school. It was about a fundamental principle that challenged how I’d been leading: the bias toward action. The difference between dreamers and doers wasn’t intelligence or resources. It was their relationship with action itself.
Roth articulated something I’ve seen play out repeatedly in healthcare organizations. There’s a world of difference between trying and doing:
This isn’t semantics. It’s the difference between:
- “We’re trying to reduce wait times” vs. “We’re reducing wait times”
- “We’re trying to improve care coordination” vs. “We’re improving care coordination”
- “We’re trying to address clinician burnout” vs. “We’re addressing clinician burnout”
The language we use reflects our commitment level. And our teams hear the difference.
The power of design thinking comes from three principles that healthcare desperately needs:
1. Fearlessness about failure: In healthcare, our commitment to safety can paradoxically lead to harmful inaction when systems clearly need change. Design thinking teaches us to distinguish between clinical caution (essential) and organizational paralysis (deadly).
2. Bias toward action: This is where I’ve grown most. Design thinking flips our default setting from “analyze, plan, analyze more, plan more, then maybe act” to “understand enough, then build something small to learn from.”
We prototype before we have perfect answers. We create minimally viable solutions to test assumptions. We generate knowledge through action rather than paralysis through analysis.
3. Empathy for users: We maintain focus on the humans our systems serve—patients, families, clinicians—guiding our actions with deep understanding of their experiences.
If I could go back and whisper in my younger leader’s ear, I’d say:
“The perfect analysis won’t save a single patient. The perfect strategic plan won’t improve a single clinical outcome. But the imperfect action—taken with courage, adjusted with humility, and sustained with commitment—can transform healthcare.”
So I’ll leave you with the question I now ask myself daily: Where in your organization have you been merely trying when what’s needed is fully committed doing?
What might happen if you embraced design thinking’s bias toward action in that area today?
P.S. Andrea Flora, CPA is going to kill me for using this photo lol. She absolutely has a bias for action!
More posts featuring Douglas Flora.
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Challenging the Status Quo in Colorectal Cancer 2024
December 6-8, 2024
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ESMO 2024 Congress
September 13-17, 2024
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ASCO Annual Meeting
May 30 - June 4, 2024
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Yvonne Award 2024
May 31, 2024
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OncoThon 2024, Online
Feb. 15, 2024
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Global Summit on War & Cancer 2023, Online
Dec. 14-16, 2023