I spend time working with leaders and investors in other industries: medicine, IT, insurance, manufacturing. These engagements allow me to look in from the outside at the dental industry — particularly dental practice and the group-practice space. What I immediately notice is there is an absence of “backcasting.” Backcasting is different from forecasting. In forecasting you look from the present into the future. In backcasting, you look from the future backward.
What is Backcasting?
Wikipedia defines the differences between forecasting and backcasting in this way: “Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backward to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current-trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction. Backcasting is “a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned, and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future.”
When I speak to dentists, dental groups of any size, investors in the dental space, and even IT executives in dentistry, they are not looking from the future backward. When it comes to AI, they are looking from the present to the future, not the future backward. My assertion is that this will be a costly mistake. Those few leaders who can see the future and develop strategies, hires, tactics, and milestones from the future backward will be the winners.
Artificial Intelligence
An example: You’re hiring your C-Suite executives. Some things are a pain in the ass, and you’d like them offloaded to someone who is very good at it, and even likes it. Is an HR executive the answer, or is a CFO the answer? That is the present aimed at the future. But if AI is going to be the future, is an AI expert hire early on the right move?
If you can’t envision a future where a dental practice has no waiting room, where 50 percent of current staff positions are replaced with voice-autonomous computers and robots, you might be too far behind to catch up. If you don’t consider what AI will do for dentistry, what impact it will have on access, revenues, costs, business processes, clinical and business facilities, my belief is your success will be curtailed. If you don’t see that AI will dramatically increase the forces pushing dentistry’s integration into primary care, you won’t see how to construct a dental practice that is interconnected to the medical system.
I suggest you read the below HBR article on AI.
— Marc
The Business of Artificial Intelligence: Harvard Business Review
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