When organizations want ideas for better practices they often send teams out on a "benchmarking visit" to another organization to see what they can learn and bring back for local adaptation. For example, a hospital's radiology department wants to improve access and flow through radiology, so they go visit other hospital radiology departments.
This is great and can lead to improvement, but it may not lead to a fundamental shift in thinking. You see, other hospitals' radiology departments are probably steeped in the same assumptions, traditions and mental models as we are. Instead of thinking "outside the box," we are just moving around a little bit within the same box.
If we really wanted to think differently about scheduling appointments, completing paperwork, patient access, process flow or the delivery of medications to the correct patient, we might be better off visiting a fast-food restaurant, bank, airline or package-delivery company. They have completely different ways of thinking about and practically approaching similar issues; they just use different language to frame it. For example, while we think of scheduling appointments, an airline thinks about booking flights. While we think of getting the right medication to the correct patient, FedEx thinks about delivering the right package to the right address. But these are conceptually the same issues. What if we could adapt some of their approaches to healthcare?
Fortunately, we don't need to physically visit these other industries. We can do that in our mind. We all have experiences of how other industries do things, and it is not hard to imagine the underlying mental models they are using. We just need to escape the confines of healthcare, pay attention to how others do things, and move in our thinking to imagine how we can adapt what they do to our issues. That is the basic idea behind an ideation tool known as Mental Benchmarking