A futurist keynote speaker's guide to Forging The Future Of healthcare

Nick Jankel
4 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

One of my specialist topics as a keynote speaker is healthcare innovation, leadership, and futurism. This journey started a while back, when in 1991, I spent a summer volunteering at a major teaching hospital in London. It was the same hospital that saved my life as a premature baby and the same hospital that I went to engage in clinical studies as a med student 5 years later.

It was not glamorous work. I was emptying urine bottles and helping the elderly change. However, it was the beginning of a 30+ year engagement in the world of healthcare that has seen me transition from bedside carer to systemic innovator, working with life sciences, pharmaceutical, and medical organizations as diverse as Genentech, Novartis, and the NHS.

In the intervening years, I ended up leaving the medical path to become a strategist, then an innovation consultant, then a leadership catalyst. Yet across that entire period, I have wrestled with the rapid changes, chaos, and complexity of the healthcare industry as a futurist helping senior leaders and people managers shape a better future of healthcare: one that keeps the care front and center (well, a little offset) of healthcare.

Because no matter how amazing the technology, from CRISPR-inspired therapeutics to AI-driven diagnostics, healthcare must always be about the people: the patients, the nurses, the doctors, and the families of the sick and dying.

The 3D Futures Framework to interrogate the Future of Healthcare

When I first started out as a professional futurist around 2000, which was an integral part of the innovation practice I co-founded and a feature of the keynotes I was being invited to give, I employed the standard strategy and foresight tools to examine drivers of change, trends, and disruption.

After a year or two of using frameworks like STEEP or STEEPLE, I began to realize that the number of categories needed to expand to account for the massively rising complexity, yet the headspace of busy leaders was starting to shrink under the weight of so much data and relentless change.

I played around with different acronyms. I first expanded to meet the requisite complexity of the external and internal environments that organizations must stay adapted to. Then I attempted to simplify to make sense-making and decision-making in complex environments more manageable.

Elegance, what theorists often call parsimony, comes from making things simple but no simpler and never over-simplified. Einstein may have said something similar.

Eventually, I landed on three critical drivers of transformation in the world today that, put together, lead to what I call The Great Reorganization.

Each driver begins with a D. Medics love memorable acronyms to make sense of complex human anatomy and physiology. Inspired by this, I worked hard to make the 3D Futures Framework™ easy to remember and make use of by busy and overwhelmed leaders, not just in big strategic planning cycles but in everyday creativity and decision-making.

Here are the 3 Ds:

D1: DIGITAL REALITIES

Stunning exponential technologies that leverage digital, rather than analog, thinking to scale ideas and innovations without the associated scaling of factories, offices, costs, and headcount. Most of these are digital technologies, but some utilize digital ways of thinking to innovate in warm, wet materials, such as human brains and bodies.

Here are some interesting digital developments that I customized for a recent keynote for a global pharma company:

D2: DISRUPTED REALITIES

Seismic customer shifts in what users, payers, and consumers value and will pay for are disrupting every market and challenging every company to keep up.

Most people assume it is technology that disrupts markets and industries. But it is actually emerging customer needs, often but not always served by new technologies, that disrupt markets and transform them. Netflix disrupted Blockbuster by delighting customers using USPS, not high-tech streaming.

The graveyard of great tech that found no value-creating usage cases makes the same point.

Businesses only exist because they solve problems for people that those people cannot or choose not to solve for themselves. If the needs, desires, pain points, and practicalities of customers are changing rapidly, then businesses need to adapt alongside them to stay relevant and remain in business.

Following MLK's comment about the arc of history bending toward justice, the arc of customer change tends relentlessly toward empowerment, ease, and experience. Those companies that get this tend to win.

Here are some interesting customer/user/patient/HCP trends that I curated for a recent keynote for a biotech company:

D3: damaged REALITIES

Serious existential risks seem to be coming to a head right now as over-stretched systems start to fail, whether seen in the harsh reality of patients spending multiple nights in hallways even in the most advanced healthcare systems to the intense fact that life expectancy, mental health, and healthspan are tending lower for the first time since industralization unlocked the modern world of sterile surgeries, antibiotics, vaccines, and evidence-based public health initiatives.

As there can be no economy without a functioning ecology, whether a planet that supports life or living customers who buy products and services, all organizations need to rise to some of the existential challenges we face as a species.

No company can mitigate them all, and they should not be expected to. But every organization can integrate some of the risks and seek to have a positive impact, not just through ESG-type activities but in their core business, operations, and people models.

Here are some interesting systemic and political challenges that I chose for a recent keynote for Visioncare industry conference:

shaping & Winning the future as a healthcare leader

I am not an ordinary futurist. An innovation and transformation practitioner to the end, smart thinking about the future is only as good as the insights, ideas, and actions it inspires in people.

In my keynotes, I spend (when allowed) as much time talking about the importance of mindset shifts and leadership upgrades as I do sharing trends, drivers, and systemic viewpoints.

I have dubbed this role a "leadership futurist." It means not just helping audiences interrogate various trends to explore what the future, or many futures, may look like, but also to help leaders and managers envision a future that inspires them and understand how they might have to change their thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors to shape the future like this.

Mindsets matter. Leadership is essential. Without provoking and challenging a change in mindset and leadership attitudes, I cannot turn inspiration into action.

As a healthcare keynote speaker, I motivate and inspire healthcare audiences, from research scientists to nurse practitioners, from patients to payers, with:

Actionable insights into how to leverage emerging technologies—from AI to CRISPR to Genomics—in safe, strategic, and systemic ways to drive healthcare transformation.
How to navigate uncertainty and complexity to understand what is probable, problematic, and possible in the future of healthcare, wellbeing, visioncare, and mental health.
How to go "beyond the pill" to leverage creativity and patient/ healthcare practitioner/ payer insights to drive breakthrough innovations outside of R&D.
Ways to unlock powerful collaborations between patients (and their families), healthcare providers, and payers that create life-changing healthcare outcomes.
Cutting-edge leadership insights, ideas, and hacks for leaders in healthcare and pharma to unlock meaningful change, transformation, and innovation in teams, franchises, and business units.
How to work through the challenges of balancing purpose with profit, AI with humanity, and ethics with efficiencies to ensure care is at the front and center of healthcare.