What MJ The Musical Taught Me About Running a Dental Practice

Rahul and I saw MJ The Musical at the Prince Edward Theatre in London not long ago. I was not entirely sure what to expect. I know the music, as most people do, but I was not certain a West End show built around a living catalogue could sustain two and a half hours of full attention.

It did, and then some.

What struck me was not the spectacle, though the production is extraordinary. It was the obsession. Every element of the show, the choreography, the sound design, the transitions, the lighting at the precise moment a lyric lands, had clearly been considered and reconsidered until it was exactly right. Not approximately right. Exactly right. You can feel the difference when something has been made to that standard. Audiences sense it without being able to articulate why. They simply know they are in the presence of something that has been genuinely cared about.

I sat there thinking, as I often do when I experience something excellent in another field: this is what a dental practice could feel like to a patient.

The Gap Between Good and Remarkable

Most dental practices are competent. Clinical standards in UK private dentistry are genuinely high. Patients receive good treatment. What is rarer is a practice where the entire experience, from the first phone call to the follow-up message three days after treatment, has been thought through with the same care that Jackson brought to a two-minute bridge in a three-minute song.

The gap between good and remarkable is almost never clinical. The clinician who produces outstanding restorations and the clinician who produces outstanding restorations in a practice that also makes every patient feel genuinely seen, unhurried, and confident in their decision: the clinical work may be identical. Everything around it is different.

Jackson reportedly ran rehearsals until every performer and every technician knew their role not just well enough to execute it, but well enough to execute it under pressure, night after night, at the same standard. That preparation is what allowed the audience experience to feel effortless. The effort was all done beforehand, offstage.

This maps directly onto how the best practices I have worked with approach their patient journey. The consistency that patients experience, the warm greeting, the clear explanation, the absence of uncertainty about what happens next, is not accidental. It is the result of preparation and rehearsal that happens long before the patient walks through the door. The patient never sees that work. They simply feel the difference it makes. Strong patient journey systems help make that consistency repeatable and reliable.

Standards That Do Not Slip

One of the quieter themes running through the musical is the refusal to lower the standard even when the pressure to do so is real. There were easier options at almost every stage of Jackson's career. Simpler productions. Faster timelines. Cheaper solutions. The commitment to a particular level of quality was a choice, made repeatedly, in the face of considerable commercial and logistical pressure.

This resonates directly in dental practice. The periods when standards most often slip are not when things are going well. They are when a key team member has just left, when the diary is overbooked, when margins are tight, or when the owner is exhausted and the path of least resistance is to let something go just this once.

The practices that sustain a remarkable patient experience over years are the ones where the standard has been made explicit enough, and embedded deeply enough in systems and culture, that it does not depend entirely on the owner's energy and attention on any given day. It holds because it has been built to hold. The rehearsal has been done, and done thoroughly, before the pressure arrived. This kind of consistency is often the outcome of applying transformational leadership principles throughout the practice.

The Vision That Precedes the Reality

Watching MJ The Musical, you sense that someone knew exactly what this show was going to feel like before a single piece of set had been built or a single performer cast. The clarity of the original vision is visible in the finished product. It has not been diluted by the complexity of execution.

This is not a small thing. Most practice development initiatives begin with a reasonably clear idea of what they are trying to achieve and progressively lose definition as practical reality intrudes. The vision blurs. Compromises accumulate. The finished result is a diluted version of what was originally intended, and everyone involved senses the gap between what it is and what it was supposed to be.

The discipline of holding the vision clearly, of returning to it deliberately when the day-to-day pulls you toward compromise, is one of the things that separates practices that build something distinctive from practices that gradually become ordinary despite genuinely good intentions. Developing a clear vision for the future is often what keeps practices aligned when challenges arise.

I have asked hundreds of practice owners over the years: if a patient walked into your practice with no prior experience of dentistry, and this visit formed their entire impression of what dental care could feel like, what would you want them to think? The answers, when people give them honestly, are almost always ambitious. The gap between that answer and the current patient experience is precisely the gap worth working on.

A Note on Excellence

Excellence is not perfection. Perfection is a standard that produces paralysis because it is never fully met. Excellence is something more useful: the honest, sustained commitment to doing your work at the highest standard you are currently capable of, with what you have available today.

Jackson did not make the same record twice. Each project began from where the last one ended and tried to go further. That approach, applied to a dental practice, does not mean constant reinvention or a perpetual transformation programme with too many workstreams running at once. It means that each year, each quarter, there is a genuine question being asked: what is the one thing about the experience we offer that we could make meaningfully better? And then doing that thing properly rather than partially.

Not everything at once. One thing, done with genuine care, that raises the standard in a way patients notice and that the team takes real pride in. Building a high-performing dental team often starts with these small but deliberate improvements.

That is how remarkable practices are built. One deliberate improvement at a time, over years, by people who care enough about what they are creating to do the work that most are not willing to sustain.