When starting a new project, I like to use the mental model known as Inversion. This is where you aim for the opposite of what you actually want to achieve, in order to ultimately avoid the mistakes that would entail.

I’ll ask, for example, how can we set things up such that they fail? Rather than how can we set them up for success?

Now, with patient recruitment, it would be quite easy to assume the standard methodology is already based on the Inversion model – as the majority of clinical trials fail to recruit in sufficient numbers.

But what I’m really interested in is defining how things would look if we deliberately designed them so as to not recruit and retain patients. Then take the learnings from this to invert those elements and set ourselves up for success.