At a healthcare conference today, someone deemed it a good idea to put this slide up on the screen:
What I like about it is, someone is at least thinking about asking for a patient’s opinion.
What I really don’t like about it is the naivety of the question. First up, ‘what matters to you?’ is precisely the sort of question that guarantees a meaningless answer. It’s supposed to try and tap into people’s emotions, but, as the FMCG industry has known for the last decade, ends up doing the exact opposite. It’s precisely the sort of question that has people lift their eyes to the ceiling trying to work out how to fob you off with the quickest answer that will get rid of you. A lot like what we all do when a waiter comes up to us in a restaurant and asks us whether we’re enjoying our meal. Few if any of us tell the truth.
Second, and much more important, the main reason there’s no point in asking the question is that we already know the answer. When we try and tap into what drives people’s behaviour we know that there are essentially just four drivers:
And, frankly speaking, the healthcare system universally makes all four of them worse:
Autonomy: the moment a patient steps inside a hospital they just handed over control to someone else
Belonging: the fact that the patient is ill means they no longer feel part of ‘the tribe’
Competence: the healthcare system has unwittingly created a population of learned-helpless people that have no idea what is going on when it comes to the working of the healthcare system
Meaning: an awful lot of the form-filling and other bureaucracy activity the patient sees is utterly meaningless to them.
When people like Steve Jobs stood up and said, ‘I don’t need to go ask the customer what they want’, it wasn’t arrogance it was an innate understanding of these four drivers and the need for Apple’s products and services to make all four of them ‘get better’. It’s exactly the same in healthcare: what matters to patients is giving them more Autonomy, a greater sense of Belonging, a feeling that they are Competent, and that anything that happens will be Meaningful. It’s not rocket science.