Escaping the Trap of Incremental Thinking

Try to tell a dentist that he or she can grow their practice while actually improving the delivery of patient care and working fewer hours. In many cases they will look at you like you are promoting a miracle weight loss system on a late night infomercial. It sounds too good to be true.

And yet it happens all the time. Dentists all over the country do this all the time. They ramp up production. They build a new and bigger facility. They bring in an associate. They see their revenues spike. They ease back on their hours in the practice and spend more time strategizing on further growth opportunities. They transform the way they practice. I know it’s true because, in all modesty, I have spent a great portion of my life helping many dentists do just that.

So if it’s that simple why don’t more dentists do it?

The first answer is that it isn’t all that simple. While it is true that there are only a few main principles that drive practice growth, and they are fairly straightforward, the fact is it takes a lot of energy and discipline to consistently implement the right systems in the right way. It takes a real commitment to live by those principles. It takes a determination to stick to a vision.

And that leads to my second point, which is that it is simply not possible to achieve this kind of breakthrough by making incremental progress. This is probably the biggest and most common mistake in execution that I see – the idea that you can do just a little bit better this year over last year, and if you keep it up, eventually you will break through to the next level.

That’s completely false. Because if you’re just incrementally tacking onto the systems and strategies you’re using now, the limits to those systems and strategies will halt you before you can reach the breakthrough.

Sometimes we have to break our past to create our future. This goes back to the naive thinking I wrote about earlier, when I said that we need to let go of the kind of thinking that limits us and remember what it was like to dream freely. You need to treat obstacles as things to overcome, not things that prevent you from getting started. You need to have the courage to be bold even when you don’t have all the answers. 

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