This year, we gather again to celebrate and showcase the 2023 FORUM Innovation Award winners who continue to push the boundaries of technology to improve health outcomes for so many populations in our nation. These teams embody how thought leadership can be amplified and realized through collaborative innovation.
We often imagine thought leadership as an executive providing a vision, a subject matter expert recommending a solution, or an architect designing a technical platform. Each of these thought leaders have one goal in common—to share learned lessons and help the audience overcome, approach, or navigate challenges. However, this new information must be spread across the organizational layers to reach the teams that enable these broad goals to become reality. Strategic visions are built and enacted by the organization’s teams. Thus, each group has an opportunity to exemplify thought leadership by understanding the business needs for all stakeholders, their team’s strengths, and how to align those components to meet their objectives within compressed time schedules.
The agile and human-centered design approaches of today’s product development landscape can serve as a mechanism to empower leadership and promote innovation within teams. The best practices are often found within the retrospective stages of scrum and Kanban teams. By encouraging and incorporating insights into the development process, teams can break free from conventional thinking and explore more efficient, innovative solutions. This collaboration fuels creativity and fosters a culture of continual learning and improvement. Agile methodologies inherently embrace change and promote agility within teams by promoting a culture where emerging technologies, industry trends, and collective expertise are funneled into the best practices.
Agile methodologies emphasize cross-functional teams, close collaboration, and open communication. Empowered teams nurture these values by providing clear vision, strategic guidance, and promoting knowledge sharing along various sprints throughout the development process. This helps teams build confidence, foster a culture of accountability, and become self-organizing units. Open dialogue is essential to the agile and human-centered design approach; it creates an environment where team members can exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and ensure a better understanding of customer needs to incorporate into the overall process. Frequent customer feedback loops or check-ins ensures the project remains focused on delivering the maximum value to end users.
Many of this year’s winners are being recognized for technology modernization. Their efforts brought their innovations to fruition by modernizing, but also by creating a comprehensive coalition. By bringing multiple teams together, these winners working to identify the needs of the business, the stakeholders who would be impacted by the changes, and how to address the problem while improving outcomes for the organization. In many cases, these leaders worked with multiple stakeholders, and in a true testament to their leadership, their holistic approach brought innovation and modernization to their organizations. They did no harm and improved business outcomes across all stakeholder groups.
As organizational teams look to their leaders for strategic goals, these leaders must empower their teams to help the organization achieve those goals and benefit from the collective knowledge base. By providing professional development, mentorship, and encouraging a growth mindset across the organization, we can recognize and develop the next line of leaders and bring future innovations to reality.
Omer Khan
Vice President of Benefits, Claims, and Integrity Solutions at Peraton
