Aged care CEOs should look to military leadership for lessons that might help them in dealing with the significant disruptive change their organisations are increasingly facing, according to a strategy and risk consultant.
The challenges confronting aged care organisations will require “substantial action” and industry leaders must drive that change, Peter Murphy, CEO of Noetic Solutions, told the Leaders Summit in Sydney yesterday.
Speaking to Australian Ageing Agenda ahead of his presentation, Mr Murphy said that aged care leaders could no longer rely on the solutions of the past. “They need to find new ways of doing things and, in military terms, they can’t just ‘dig in’ and hope the problem goes away,” he said.
Aged care leaders needed to be “out there patrolling” and gathering “reconnaissance” to discover the new solutions that will enable them to deal with the disruption they are facing, he said.
Further, CEOs must empower the junior leaders in their organisations so they could contribute to the innovative and novel responses that the sector’s problems demand, Mr Murphy added.
An expert in strategy, program development and risk management, Mr Murphy consults to government, for-profit and not-for-profit (NFP) organisations and is currently advising several disability providers as they respond to the NDIS. He provided oversight of the Federal and NT Government’s response to the Ranger Uranium Mine spill, as well as a government-wide review of juvenile justice in NSW.
Mr Murphy said that while all aged care providers would be challenged by the move to a market-based system, not-for-profit organisations would encounter additional pressures.
Asked about the growing concern that some NFP aged care services would be left as the sole provider in “areas of market failure”, Mr Murphy said NFP providers needed to look fundamentally at what they were in the sector for, what their objectives were and how they could be best met.
NFPs would need to be “agile and adaptable” and therefore had to critically examine their business models and consider their long-term options – such as becoming a specialist provider, forming coalitions or entering mergers, he said.
More broadly, NFPs should encourage a community conversation about “why we allow market failure and whether it is acceptable for us, as a community, to have areas of market failure that have to be filled by philanthropic organisations or NFPs,” he said.
Concerted, collective action needed
Indeed, Mr Murphy said that all aged care providers needed to bring about “concerted, coalition action” to shape the debate on policy and influence both government opinion and public perception, “because I don’t think the aged care sector has been particularly effective at shaping the debate collectively.”
Aged care providers needed to reach out to other parties and groups with an interest in aged care and form alliances to strengthen their case, he said.
Many other sectors such as emergency services and the military had experienced disruptive change, while the disability sector was currently navigating its own sweeping reforms with the NDIS.
“The opportunity for the aged care sector is to look more broadly to see how others have handled this, learn the lessons but apply them quickly,” Mr Murphy said.
Exactly correct the Aged Care sector needs to look at other sectors and learn from their leadership in key areas. The Aged Care Leaders Symposium in July this year brings together political, financial, social, sporting and young emerging leaders to enable our sector to learn important lessons about moving forward