Big Pharma Transformation

Sometime in 2019, I spent several months consulting and coaching one of the largest pharma companies in the world.

Pharma Co. called me to help late-stage drug development divisions get new life-changing molecules, or drug treatments, more effectively to the patients who need them. I worked with a group producing and trialing a potential cure for a deadly form of breast cancer that doesn't respond to any current treatments.

They asked for help becoming more lean and agile. They had lots of historical data to clearly indicate they require 10-years to bring a molecule all the way through late-stage development. After a potentially therapeutic molecule is approved for human trials, they require 10-years until the life-changing treatments are proven effective, approved by health regulatory agencies and in mass production being delivered. (Of course not all molecules are proven effective, nor are they all approved. In those cases failing fast leads to finding different and better results quicker.)

Not everyone believed drug development could be leaner and more agile. But everyone knew if you found an effective way to bring molecules through the third-stage of development faster—if they could safely reduce the time for third-stage development from 10 years to 5 years (or even 2 years)—you would immediately be saving and improving a huge number of lives.

(Remember, this was before the current world-wide pandemic when some companies did demonstrate they can bring a new vaccine to market and get it jabbed into people's arms in record time. This is true as long as conditions and enabling constraints—like prior scientific work, the drive to do it and sometimes Dolly Parton—are all in place.)

I met with the director of one of the molecule divisions on the first day of the consulting job. They called each of these directors the "CEO of a molecule" because they were each responsible for one large working group that would act as a business unit to bring a successful drug molecule through third-stage development to patients. Combined the 60-150 or so people making up the division could do almost everything required to bring a molecule to patients. The people included scientists, trial managers, statisticians, logistics managers, and marketing folk.

But the "CEO" had a problem. He told me his biggest challenge—and the main thing slowing the creation and distribution of life-changing medicines—was their working meetings. These meetings he said were necessary and also time-consuming and largely ineffective.

He told me, in these very words, the 4 main manifestations of this problem that we must solve were:

• They couldn't get the right people to attend important meetings. That is the people who could solve the problems didn't show up.

(I feel sure they were busy solving other problems elsewhere. These were not people to loaf around, but the "CEO" felt they weren't showing up fully for this important work.)

• The wrong people kept showing up. These were people who couldn't solve the problem but felt the need to be at a meeting.
• The meetings never started when they should, and also never ended when they should ... or they simply never ended. Sure they stopped the meeting, but nothing was resolved or actually finished.
• And finally, what happened in these meetings, he told me, was just wrong. Ineffective. Not what they needed.

I could hardly believe my ears.

I confirmed he'd never heard of Open Space Technology, and he was not testing me. That's how he already identified his biggest problems. This was his root cause for cost overruns, and the biggest thing blocking the division from changing and saving lives.

Did you hear the same thing I heard?

I heard him demanding we start holding Open Space events (even if he didn't know what he was demanding).