By Steve Harden

A statement of fact is insufficient and often not even necessary to persuade someone to do something.

No matter what type of safety or quality initiative you are implementing, your success rests with convincing people - physicians, nurses, staff, and administrators alike - to do something a certain way. All successful initiatives have as their foundation doing specific tasks or steps in a logical, evidence-based, standard, and approved sequence.

• Prevent blood stream infections? "Insert a central line using these 10 steps in this sequence."
• Prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia? "Do these five steps in this pattern."
• Prevent hospital-acquired infections? "Do these 2000 steps in this order." (Well it seems like 2000 steps.)

When trying to convince clinicians to follow the standardized sequence of steps and change their practice patterns, most safety and quality leaders resort to reciting the facts from the evidence base. We might say something like this, "Following this methodology, ICUs in this state were able to save 1500 lives in 18 months and save $75 million. When comparing blood stream infection rates, the average ICU in this state is better than 90% of ICUs in the rest of the country."

It's a very compelling statement, but it is just a recitation of facts.

In the end, if you are responsible for a safety or quality initiative in your facility, like it or not, you are an amateur marketer. Most of the leaders and administrators I work with in healthcare believe that all they need to do to win the day is to recite a fact, or series of facts from a peer-reviewed journal. This is a mistake all amateur marketers make.

Think about this for a moment. If you're playing Monopoly and you say to another player, "I'll trade you Illinois for Connecticut." But the other person refuses, which is absurd. Illinois costs WAY more than Connecticut. It's a fact. There's no room for discussion here and they should take the action you want just based on that fact alone. You are right and they are wrong.

But they still have the property you want, and you didn't get the action you needed to be successful. Because all you had was a fact.

On the other hand, add a story to the facts you have, and you win the day every time. In another game of monopoly, when the youngest son, losing the game, offers to trade his mom Baltic (almost worthless) for Boardwalk (one of the most valuable properties on the game board), she says yes in a heartbeat. Because it feels right, not necessarily because it is right. She has an emotional investment in the outcome.

She is just like all human beings, she makes an emotional decision and then looks for facts to justify the decision already made in her heart. Yes, this even applies to physicians. (I've made hundreds of presentations to physicians to gain their support for participating in teamwork training with their nurses and to agree to use checklists - I know this is true.) We are more rationalizing creatures than rational beings.

There are 13.4 cases of Parkinson's Disease for every 100,000 people in the U.S. That is a fact. 

Actor Michael J. Fox's struggle with Parkinson's Disease is a story that drives medical research, agitates for political change, and has people reaching into wallets and purses to finance the search for a cure.

If you want to motivate your staff to change and follow a
specific methodology to insert central lines to prevent blood stream infections, you must tell them a story about a specific patient in your facility and what happened to that human being and their family, when he or she acquired a blood stream infection while under your care. Use first names. Be graphic. Make it personal. Then tell the facts from the evidence base.

The position of your physicians and staff on just about everything, including, yes, your new safety or quality of care initiative, your policy and procedures, your institution's core values in providing care and their compliance with all of those are almost certainly based on the stories they tell themselves, not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

As the leader of the initiative, you are the one who should be providing the stories they will begin to tell themselves. When you tell them well, your staff will insert themselves into the story. They will connect. Stories have been scientifically proven to connect with people - move and motivate them.

If you want to "sell" your teams on doing things a certain way for the benefit of the patient, appeal to their logic with the facts, and never forget to leverage the power of the emotions with a great story. The success of your initiative depends on it.

Bonus

I am offering free assistance in December for any of my readers who want help with crafting a story to tell along with their "facts" to get a new initiative off the ground (or to reinvigorate an existing safety initiative.) Just send me an email and I'll set up an appointment with you to help craft your message.