How Can Creative Leadership Help Optometrists Solve Problems?

When we talk about product-centered or production-centered leadership we point to leaders who are fully preoccupied with production and the only thing important to them is finding ways and the right tools to get the work done disregarding employees and consumers’ well beings as well as not thinking of them as human beings with needs and emotions. An Optometrist with production-centered leadership is mostly oriented towards achieving sales scores and making sure that employees and staff have enough work done and enough jobs disregarding how they are distributed. Yet as eye care providers we distinguish ourselves as healthcare leaders with a mission to improve patients’ experiences that require us to be human-centered leaders who employ creative leadership based on finding innovative solutions that change current situations into more desirable ones. Patients visit us with vision problems and leave us with perfected vision. We design specific processes to make the job of perfecting patient’s vision more efficient by improving patient’s and employees satisfaction, and avoiding Optometrists and staff burnout.

One way to employ creative problem-solving is through the process of Design Thinking that is widely used among innovative eye care hospitals and providers like Sankara Eye Care Institutes, Aravind eye Care system, and Rotterdam Eye Hospital. For those large facilities that provide eye care, design thinking improves customer’s experience, but also improves efficiency, increases productivity. Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving that doesn’t have to be exclusive to large eye care hospitals and settings. It can benefit small practices who want to understand their patients’ experiences as well as every person who might employ it in his day-to-day problems.

With the rapidly changing world Design thinking with a human-centered core encourages practices to focus on the people they’re creating solutions for. With the use of technology, even creative leaders who are not trained as experience designers can create better products, services, and internal processes that address numerous challenges and solve problems. To do so they should start by focusing on the patient, observing his behavior, listening to his problems, and understanding through empathy and questioning. The second step is try to come up with defitions to problems that hard to define: in other words making complex problems simple. Once the problem defined, they should proceed into coming up with ideas to solve the problem, determine or create tools and instruments to test those ideas. Design Thinking comprises of five stages in total: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Problems identified by focusing on patients help in increasing sales and productivity. Some examples include solving delayed or no-show problems, helping avoid overwearing contact lenses, increasing the sales of blue-light blocking ophthalmic lenses, providing awareness of the importance of UV blocking sunglasses, etc. Employing Design Thinking to solve employee’s problems increases efficiency and job satisfaction reducing time off, multitasking, burnout, and increasing effective communication with the patient and the optometrist.