Matching Expectations

A Match is a Match

So much of new business design and existing business consulting wraps itself around the phrase: “matching expectations”.  To engage in business is to produce some thing or service that someone else wants – to match their expectations well enough that they pay you for it.

I read a great post by a business consultant, Anthony Cirillo, who works in the healthcare industry and was advocating for a new C-level hospital position, the Chief Experience Officer.  He presented a brief speech at the Cleveland Clinic on this topic and his description was the best I’ve seen for this new job.  To illustrate the scope of responsibilities he described 3 functions:  Chief Promise Keeper, Chief Healing Officer, and Chief Context Setter.

I didn’t understand the Healing Officer role, and from the feedback of other readers this may have been confusing, but with  a provided link, Cirillo laid out a reasonable argument comparing hospital staff and care-givers to fire fighters: both face life and death in their daily work, but fire fighters give themselves more leeway to openly talk about and through the harsh realities they see; they engage in black humor and other forms of fire house camaraderie that allows open expression. By contrast his point was that hospital staff don’t easily find this available to them.

The 2 other roles were on target:  His Chief Promise Keeper had the responsibility for fulfillment, and fulfillment of most of the Chief Marketing Officer’s promises of service delivery, too.  Wow.  Imagine that, one officer responsible for the outcomes of another – there’s some cooperative work.  There is some precedent in manufacturing whenever Engineering confronts Marketing.

The last role, the Chief Context Setter, also involves collaboration, but primarily resolves as an internal story-teller.  Proper story-telling begins and ends with how care-giving professionals see themselves in the execution of champion service.  This Context officer sets them at the center of the service proposition, where all skill, education and professionalism can bear full weight against disease.  And this is where the Healing Officer aspect comes in.  How can champion service occur without providers feeling like champions?

Everyone who comes to a hospital has expectations of healthy outcomes, and the American system has done its darnedest to maintain this optimism in the reality of a prohibitive cost tsunami.  Regardless of outcome, the patient must come away with a deep and abiding feeling that all was done for them in a thinking, caring and supportive environment, from the first encounter with the parking garage to the opening of their statement.  Or, as Cirillo illustrates, they will leave the hospital with a bullhorn, erasing all the good work and goodwill the organization has toiled for.