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Pilot strategies to steer your success

Radiology Administrator's Compliance and Reimbursement Insider, August 1, 2006

Secluded in your office at 8 a.m., you stare at the screen, facing down 100 e-mails while your telephone message light blinks ominously.

As you momentarily pause to decide which task to tackle first, your chief technologist knocks on your door and sits down without waiting for the customary “come in.”

He wants to talk about his busted car battery. Seconds later, the phone rings. It’s the front desk. The Office of Inspector General is here.

This may be a typical morning at your facility, said Jim “Murph” Murphy, CEO of Afterburner, Inc., Seminars in Atlanta. With so much going on at any given moment, it’s no wonder why radiology administrators feel embattled every day.

Imagine being in a fighter jet trying to drop a bomb through a second story window on the right side of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s home while traveling faster than the speed of sound.

Now, that’s a tough day, Murphy told a group of business managers and radiology administrators during the June Radiology Business Management Association’s (RBMA) 2006 Radiology Summit in Miami.

Prior to his service in the Air Force, Murphy had a successful career in imaging equipment sales, during which he helped increase his company’s sales by 500%. However, after graduating from the University of Kentucky, Murphy joined the U.S. Air Force.

As a combat flight leader, he flew missions in Central America, Asia, Central Europe, and the Middle East. After several years in the military, Murphy returned to his love of business.

By applying the simple, five-step process that fighter pilots use to fly flawless missions, imaging administrators can bolster their bottom lines and improve their planning processes, Murphy said.

“Fighter pilots follow a rigorous but simple process of planning, briefing, executing, and debriefing their missions to ensure success every single time,” he said. “The same process that makes a military fighter pilot successful will make a radiology business successful, too.”

The plan

Most companies do not have a strategic plan, said Murphy. Many do not identify their core mission or overarching goal. Without a launching pad, facilities struggle to fly their radiology business toward the future, he said.

“How are you going to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are?” he asked.

Further, what mission—military or professional—could succeed without clear, concise planning?

“I’m not talking about a mission statement hanging on the wall over the receptionist’s desk,” Murphy said. “I’m talking about a photograph here—a picture you and every single one of your employees can take with you on your mission.”

Before radiology administrators enter the planning room, staff need to accept a shift in traditional dogma.

“When you plan, what happens?” Murphy asked rhetorically. “You send the CEO, [chief financial officer], and a bunch of other ‘C’ people into a room and three hours later they come out with the plan and start dropping stacks of paper on everyone’s desk—right? That’s how planning is supposed to work, isn’t it?”

Instead, Murphy advocates 360 degrees of employee influence when developing a business plan.

“You need your field commanders and your fighter pilots, everyone from the senior vice president to the marketing associates,” he said. “Open planning is the key. You know why? If everyone is involved in the planning, then everyone buys into the plan.”

When you first step into the planning room, determine the mission objective. The goals should be specific, clear, and understandable, Murphy said.

The goal must be achievable and you must be able to measure that achievement.

“If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen,” he said.

Further, make sure that your plan supports the overall mission of your radiology facility. If it doesn’t, scrap the plan and start over, Murphy said.

In the second step for proper planning, have your team identify possible threats.

“What stands in the way of your organization achieving its objective?” Murphy asked. He flashed a photograph of Osama bin Laden beside the words “cardiologists” and “orthopedics,” as RBMA summit members chuckled.

In the world of radiology, any number of difficult issues—including vendor demands, payer requirements, and government regulations—pose significant threats to your financial future and business growth.

Make sure that you understand the potential effect of these issues and include it in your mission plan.

For your third planning step, identify available resources, Murphy said, by doing the following:

  • Understand who’s who on your team
  • Know each staff member’s attributes and detriments
  • List possible outside vendors to assist you
  • Make a list of your facility’s physical and financial assets
  • Compile a list of strengths and weaknesses of both your competition and your own business

    Once you understand the internal and external threats, match up your available resources with the potential pitfalls.

    “It’s just like connecting the dots,” Murphy said.

    Next, use the previous business experience of yourself and your team to evaluate lessons learned.

    “I’m being sent to fly a mission in the middle of the night over the desert in the middle of a sandstorm,” said Murphy. “I’ve never flown over this particular area and I’ve certainly never flown through a sandstorm before, but other people have.”

    Pick up the phone or, better yet, ask your staff, he said. Further, he suggested contacting related associations (e.g., the RBMA) for advice.

    “Your associations have a wealth of knowledge to share. That’s what they are there for,” he said.

    With the groundwork laid, you and your planning team can begin to brainstorm tactics and appropriate actions to implement your plan, such as the following:

  • Separate into three groups.
  • Give each group a short window of time to establish a plan.
  • Mandate one group to be the “out-of-the-box” thinkers, the “no-holds barred” thinkers.
  • Have teams bring their ideas and then work through them.
  • Analyze the pros and cons of each and finalize your plan.
  • Bring a fourth group of additional staff into the planning process after you’ve finished poking holes in the plan. “They’ll come in and tear [the plan] to shreds and that’s good,” said Murphy. “They’ll see things you and your team might have overlooked.”
  • Draft the final plan.

    You’re not done with the plan yet, said Murphy. With a draft in hand, it’s time to plan for contingencies.

    “This is the time to decide what you will do if,” he said. “In the middle of a sandstorm flying straight toward the side of a mountain isn’t the time to plan for additional difficulties.”

    No plan is perfect. If you think that you’ve thought of everything, you haven’t. Think about it some more and consider the worst case scenarios—then plan on them happening.

    Finally, establish the W’s. Decide who will do what, when, where, and how, said Murphy.

    Make sure that everyone on the team understands how their assigned tasks fit into the larger picture and make this mission manageable, he said.

    Don’t forget to brief the staff, as well, Murphy said (see “Five steps to staff briefing for clarity” below).

    Execute the plan

    One you set the wheels in motion, make sure that everyone on the team stays focused on the task at hand.

    Despite the hundreds of instruments on the flight panel in front of him, Murphy always paid attention to two things—the enemy and the ground.

    “What do we focus on? There’s a lot going on it your cockpit, but if you don’t focus you’ll lose the fight,” he said.

    The altimeter sits in the center of the instrument panel and is the largest of the plane’s instruments, he said. All pilots follow a specific pattern of rotation when eyeing their instrument panel.

    No matter what instrument they check, pilots always return to the altimeter at the center of the panel.

    “Your company’s overall goal should be at the center of your instrument panel, too,” Murphy said. “No matter what other problems, goals, or departments your instrument panel also contains, always keep your eye on the center goal.”

    Debrief staff to learn from your mistakes

    The debrief stage of Murphy’s flawless execution model also requires a culture shift.

    In the Air Force, once a mission ends, the entire team enters the debriefing room, he said. As they enter the confines of that enclosure, everyone from flight sergeants to the commanding officer removes their rank—both mentally and physically.

    “It must be nameless and rankless,” said Murphy. “Once you walk into that room everyone must be open to criticism, from the head of the company to the secretary.”

    At the debriefing, staff must be able to respectfully share information so the next task, objective, and mission can be accomplished, he said.

    “Your team must be able to say, without fear of retribution, ‘I’ve made this mistake and I’m going to fix it.’ It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right,” Murphy said.

    “That way everyone knows what went wrong and what went right, and everyone can work together to figure out a plan to overcome these difficulties next time,” Murphy added.

    A cycle of success

    The goal is accomplished and the team is debriefed. It’s time to get back out there, right?

    No, said Murphy. “Go back and incorporate those lessons that you learned from your debriefing back into the plan.”

    “You can change the culture of your organization,” Murphy concluded. “You can break the error chain. That’s how you can grow your business.”

    Insider source:

    Jim “Murph” Murphy, CEO of Afterburner, Inc., Seminars, 1503 B Northside Dr., Atlanta, GA 30318, 800/261-2912; murph@afterburnerseminars.com.

    Fly clear of task saturation

    So you’ve got a million things going on at once. That’s why you make the big bucks, right? That’s what Afterburner, Inc., Seminars CEO Jim “Murph” Murphy called “task saturation.”

    “It’s a silent killer,” he said.

    Murphy and fellow pilot and lecturer Yarmema “Yarko” Sos should know. They lost two friends, “two good fighter pilots who flew their planes into the ground,” Murphy said. “They weren’t bad pilots. They were good pilots who took their eyes off the ball and died.”

    “I’m sure you all know of one or two businesses out there [that] were doing really well until some task-saturated manager flew it into the ground,” he said.

    Generally speaking, people deal with task saturation in any number of ways. Some quit. Others compartmentalize. Some prioritize.

    “You can quit,” said Murphy. “You can give up and go home or start over somewhere else. The other way we cope is by channelizing our attention. [For example], we focus on that one fish that’s close to the boat and ignore that school of fish swimming a few feet away.”

    To illustrate their point, Sos and Murphy showed a simulated crash of a passenger jet in the Florida Everglades. During routine desent preparations, the crew discovered a broken landing light. Within minutes, everyone in the cockpit became focused—not on landing the plane—but on the landing gear light.

    The captain told the copilot to put the plane on autopilot and help with the problem at hand. By focusing on the light—not on landing the plane—the crew became channelized, said Sos.

    Although flying on autopilot at 2,000 ft. may be common practice for passenger jets, this plane’s autopilot mechanism automatically disengaged with any application of manual pressure. As the copilot leaned forward to work on the light, he inadvertently sent the plane on a slow and steady decline to its doom.

    Avoid crashing your radiology business by maintaining focus on the central mission and continuously planning, briefing, executing, debriefing, and planning, said Murphy.

    Insider sources:

    Jim “Murph” Murphy, CEO of Afterburner, Inc., Seminars, 1503 B Northside Dr., Atlanta, GA 30318, 800/261-2912; murph@afterburnerseminars.com.

    Yarmema “Yarko” Sos, Afterburner, Inc., Seminars, 1503 B Northside Dr., Atlanta, GA 30318, 800/261-2912; yarko@afterburnerseminars.com.

    Five steps to staff briefing for clarity

    With a business plan in hand, managers and staff may tend to move straight to implementation, but Jim “Murph” Murphy, CEO of Afterburner, Inc., Seminars in Atlanta, warned against this measure during the June Radiology Business Management Association’s 2006 Radiology Summit in Miami. Make sure that you review the plan and brief the staff, he said. Murphy used the letters in the word “brief” for a five-step process for this procedure.

    Brief the scenario. What’s the big picture? Why are we here?

    Restate the mission objective. Is it clear, measurable, and achievable, and does it support the overall organizational picture? “If not, go back to the drawing board,” said Murphy.

    Identify threats and resources. Understand the obstacles that stand between your facility and your business’ success. Know what tools the organization possesses to battle these threats.

    Execute appropriate tactics. Make sure that everyone involved knows who will accomplish what task by when and how.

    Be Flexible and plan for contingencies. Flexibility is the key to success, and preparation is the key to flexibility, Murphy said.

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