Innovation Unfolds in Small Steps

Written by on October 7, 2019

Small Steps to Innovation

The Incrementalist Graphic Marla Hetzel

This week I am talking to Marla Hetzel (@hetzelmj), Director of Innovation and User Experience at Change Healthcare. I met Marla when she presented at the HealthTechNet group on innovation where she talked about the ways she and her team and helping bring innovation back into businesses and healthcare.

We discuss the importance of focus and referencing innovation back to the ultimate judge the user and the struggle of combatting our inane mindset that is working against us that likes predictability. Marla explains the importance of empathy in innovation and the difference to Sympathy which when included tends to introduce our bias into any discussion. He team teaches some of the hard skills associated with Empathy like active listening that helps to enable design thinking and helps as the Incremental approach unfolds:

Innovation unfolds with small steps

We discuss the ever present issue of failure and the importance of seeing it as a Spectrum not a binary position where the majority is “Praiseworthy not Blameworthy” (as detailed in “Strategies for Learning from Failure”) and some of the ideas from the book: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.

Marla’s incremental learning steps to approaching failure:

  • Talk about Failure Openly
  • Share Your Failure with Others
  • Invite Others in to Learn and Understand from your Failures

Listen in to learn how you can determine if you are being empathetic and hear how Chris Rock’s methods for developing comedy can inform your innovation process


Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.


Listen along on HealthcareNowRadio or on SoundCloud


Tagged as , , , , , ,





Search
%d bloggers like this: