Heather Driscoll: Good afternoon, everybody! And, welcome to this week’s edition of the Strategic Thinker. I am here with one of my favorite people in the entire world, Melissa Thomas. How are you doing? 

Melissa Thomas: Hey Heather! Who can beat that kind of greeting, right? 

Heather Driscoll: (laughs) Right, it’s true too. So, we come together each week, as you know, Melissa, to really talk through Spark and the Dental Enterprise Value Matrix. It’s really just our way of focusing on the things that matter most in group dental practices, the things that ultimately drive value. So, we do this by focusing on these 4 quadrants: Cultural, Financial, Personnel, and Process. And, it’s always our team’s objective to really try to find ways to help group practices narrow in on the things that might be challenging for them right now or the things that might make their lives just a little bit easier. And so, I think this week’s topic is very timely because as we’re hearing people discuss their ongoing stories of being short-staffed and the increased patient flow but decreased team members, and all of those types of struggles, kind of timely to be focused on the topic we have at hand today. So, Melissa, let’s talk about consistency. I know you love quotes, so I’ll let you take the lead on this one. 

Melissa Thomas: “Hello, my name is Consistency. I make it happen day in and day out. You might know my good friend Success, we’re always hanging out.” Oh look, it even rhymes! We really nailed it there.

Heather Driscoll: We did! We nailed it. So, a quote and a rhyming quote. But, isn’t it true that the people that have the highest level of consistency tend to also have the highest level of predictable, scalable success. And really, that’s what we find to be a bit of a challenge in group practices. How do you scale and grow, or even just manage the current demands of your practices, without having these big ups and downs, these big swings? So, we’re going to talk about consistency. And, Melissa, I love Melissa’s brain, because she has spent a good amount of time on the analytical side of dentistry and also the people side of dentistry, which I think is an interesting marriage. So, Melissa, we’re going to talk about consistency, but we know consistency is hard work, and we kind of tend to start blaming our team members when we find that we’re not being as consistent as we should be, when we find that people are cutting corners or we’re not getting the results that we need. So, talk to us a little bit about the cognitive load and some of the things we need to do to make it easy for people to just truly have a better chance at being consistent. 

Melissa Thomas: Well, I love that you said you have to make it easy, right? When I think about being consistent, I think that it depends on how hard the task is, if you can be consistent. I noticed that even on my to-do list, I jump to the easiest things and cross those off first. Like exercising, I failed to do that thing on my to-do list today because it’s hard work. And so, you think about the things that you really want to do, if they’re not easy, they’re easily pushed aside and easier things come first. I think that when you talk about the cognitive load, I think a little bit about everything, but just making it easier on someone to… you know, I immediately jump to processes in the dental practice. If it’s not easy to grab the new patient paperwork, if you have to go all the way in the back room, or wherever it is, than you’re just making it more difficult and you’re putting up barriers to the consistency. So, I think about ways to even reduce the number of steps that it takes. If it’s entering it here, entering it here, doing it here, and here, can you minimize it from 4 steps down to 2? That really helps limit your cognitive load. Can you do anything to save time and make it more intuitive on the individual? I think that really helps them do it successfully each and every time. 

Heather Driscoll: Absolutely. And, I love the fact that you brought up processes because I do think our natural tendency when things are a bit inconsistent, and outcomes and performance are a bit inconsistent, I think our tendency is to start figuring out which person isn’t doing the things they’re supposed to do, right? And, sometimes it’s true, sometimes it comes back to someone who maybe hasn’t been trained the way they should, or they just really don’t understand the “why” behind what we’re asking, but oftentimes it’s that our process hasn’t evolved with the growth of our practice or the decrease in team members or the increase in patient flow. And so, process really is key to consistency. So, I have a little test for Melissa and I, we’re going to do a little experiment. Melissa’s going to be Group A and I’m going to be Group B, and this is really just an example of some of the things we kind of put out there as really a representation of what we’re expecting from our team members on any given day. So Melissa, you’re Group A and I’m Group B and our task is to count the number of dots, alright? So, you’re the accounting major, right? You got the harder group, but it’s a really perfect representation of what happens in a dental practice, right? We know what we want the end result to be. In this scenario, we want to know how many dots are on each side of the slide, but certainly a whole lot easier for me to come up with my conclusion than it is for you. But, if we’re not careful, we might just say, “Well jeez, Melissa took 5 times longer than Heather to figure out how many dots.” Or, “she wasn’t able to get the same answer twice.” Or, whatever it might be, and again not really recognizing how hard we’re making it for you to get the result we’re looking for. 

Melissa Thomas: I’m going to identify a character flaw because I immediately just wanted to cheat and go to your side and count it up, right? But, I think that’s a good example because if you know there’s another option to get to the same end result, like I know that I can just look at yours and know there must be 100 dots without even counting them, I think that’s what happens in our practices, too. The team members figure out a shortcut, they figure out maybe an easier way to get to the same answer, but we might be frustrated that they’re not being consistent and following a process. And, it may be the process that needs to be reevaluated. I think I often made that flaw when I was working for a larger group and looking at all the processes in our practice, because it’s easier to sit back here and think about what could be done in 100+ practices, but then when you go into the practice and you see it happen, and you go, “Oh wait, the patient actually has to fill it out, then you have to enter it into the computer, then you have to reprint it, and have them sign it.” I’m like, “Well that seems just silly. I know it was intended to be a consistent process that could be followed, that had steps, and had all those good things, but it doesn’t make any sense.” So, until you really get in the weeds, if you will, and look at it, you might realize you could move to that 20 dots, 20 dots, 20 dots example.

Heather Driscoll: Exactly. And, I love the fact that you brought up that sometimes there are people who are creating the process that aren’t the same people who are having to live it every day, right? So, what we know about managing the cognitive load and making things easy is that oftentimes it can save time and energy and ultimately money. And so, when you’re finding things that aren’t being done as consistently as you’d like them to be, sometimes it’s best to just go straight to the source, the people who are having to manage the process and really figure out what it is that’s standing in their way of being successful. First and foremost, do they understand what we’re trying to accomplish, why we’ve even asked them to do what we’ve asked them to do? But then, when they do understand the “why”, what’s making it so challenging? Is it time? Is it a resource? Is it not having enough of what they need, or having it within arm’s reach, to your point Melissa? Because, oftentimes we’re not necessarily monitoring our processes in a way that ensures that they evolve with the growth of the rest of the dental organization. So, any final words of wisdom for our friends out there Melissa when they’re thinking about consistency and helping to kind of manage that load that they’re putting on the people in the practices all day every day? 

Melissa Thomas: I have a really great example that just made me go, “Oh my gosh.” And, when you talked about resources and the things that people have in the practice, I think sometimes this example will sort of blow your mind and really help you ask the right questions. We were talking about the consistency in taking oral photos, taking pictures and making sure they’re done on every patient every time. And so, when we actually asked the question, “What’s preventing you from doing that?” We had a team member go, “Well I don’t have enough USB ports in my computer, so when I use it have to unplug something else.” And so, that day on the way home, the practice manager said, “Well I’m going to go to Best Buy and buy a USB (I don’t know what you call them, something that has the extra things) for 10-15 bucks.” Problem solved. And, wow that’s all it was. We thought, “Well they don’t want to do it, they don’t have the time to do it, they don’t care, they don’t think that it’s important to patient health.” No, there’s just this little, small thing that you can do to give them the resource to be consistent. And, that one’s just kind of always stuck with me.

Heather Driscoll: That’s a fantastic example. And, it’s so crazy because you think, “Well, why in the world didn’t that team member say something before?” But, the fact of the matter is that some people aren’t as comfortable speaking up, or maybe we’ve just been so busy with the day-to-day patient flow that we haven’t really created a place for them to speak up. And so, when you find those things that kind of tend to be resurfacing, the things that you go, “Jeez, how many times do we have to talk about this? It’s the one piece of the patient experience that’s so essential, but we keep kind of misstepping or cutting corners.” If you take a little bit of time and involve your team to really think about, “Well, what is standing in the way of getting it with every patient, every time, every day, every team member…” Because, consistency is hard work, but the easier we can make it, the more likely we are to achieve it. And then, back to our quote, consistency and success hanging out, so definitely worth your time and energy to figure out what’s standing in the way. Alright, well that is this week’s session of the Strategic Thinker. If you’d like to learn more about Spark, you can visit us at sparkdentalnetwork.com We also have some great resources that you can use with your teams, and we look forward to talking with everybody next week. Thanks for joining me today, Melissa!

Melissa Thomas: Bye, Heather!