The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has caused a great deal of uncertainty in many areas of our lives. The change has impacted our work lives, our home lives, and everything in between. Frontline healthcare workers have been working tirelessly to save patients and adjust processes to ensure safety, administrative staff are working from home or furloughed, and businesses everywhere are working to find new ways to meet customer needs so they can stay afloat. No matter what your specific situation is, we all have one thing in common; we are trying to find ways to persevere through the uncertainty and move forward.
Below are strategies from our team that they have found helpful in the midst of challenging ambiguity.
Many of our work habits and processes have been disrupted due to COVID-19. Some important questions come to mind as our organizations think about the future: How will we do our work? What should we return to, what should change, and how will we determine a new norm?
No matter the stage your organization is in during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid changes and new challenges in this crisis can easily derail people. So how do you get your teams back on track?
Recently, Kerri Burchill, PhD, Organization Development Leader from Southern Illinois Health, one of our Catalysis Healthcare Value Network members, shared four strategies to help guide people back on track.
Like many healthcare organizations across the United States, INTEGRIS Health, in Oklahoma, had many questions about how to prepare for COVID-19. How would the spread of the virus look in Oklahoma? Were they prepared for a surge of COVID positive patients? How were they going to manage and handle these patients, as well as other activities within their hospitals?
Paul O’Neill Sr. passed April 18th, 2020. There are a few people in a lifetime that help you define what is important for you. For me that has been my family and a few others. The people I consider the critical few. Paul was one of the critical few.
I realized when I was in graduate school that I needed to understand the concepts I was learning inside and out and be able to practically apply them, because this would be the work I would be doing for my career. I couldn’t simply memorize information to pass my tests, I needed to alter my thinking.
“Moving at the speed of trust” was the phrase a senior physician leader used during my recent Patient-Centered Strategy workshop. His observation was that senior leadership teams struggle because prioritization and deselection require real choice-making among alternatives. It requires a team to say “not now” to a good idea because the capacity does not exist to act on that good idea at the present time; and that can anger an important constituent. Such decisions require the team to put the options on the table and make decisions; but more importantly, to stick to the decisions made. And that requires trust.
Prioritization and deselection are not difficult in a one-time event. After applying criteria to the defined initiatives, people walk away with a list of their top priorities. But a common problem in healthcare organizations is that prioritization decisions don’t seem to stick very long. Deselected projects worm their way back into the work-in-process by returning in a different form, a revised scope, or with new sponsorship. This diminishes focus and breaks down alignment of human and financial resources on the most important breakthrough initiatives. It leads to organizational overburden and gridlock, and the result is susceptibility to fast-moving competitors or new entrants. Continue reading →
It seems that everywhere you look in healthcare today you find someone talking about innovation. In my previous blog post, I talked about the need to focus innovation efforts on care models in order to truly impact the delivery system and provide meaningful outcomes for patients. In an effort to avoid getting lost in the sea of new apps, artificial intelligence, or other technology, we have stopped using the word innovation to describe this work on care models. Is it innovative? Sure, but lumping it into such a broad category creates confusion and misalignment. Instead we are calling it what it is: New Care Model Development. In this post we will introduce the concept.
Recently, as I was driving across town (most likely shuttling my children to one activity or another) my son suddenly proclaimed, “Mom, you are a really good problem solver!” I immediately thought that this was an interesting comment for a first grader to make out of the blue. So, I did what most parents would do; I asked him to explain more.
“Oh yeah, what makes me a good problem solver?” I asked.
“Well, you always fix problems,” he replied.
While that answer is perfectly acceptable to a 7-year-old, it got me thinking. What qualities define a good problem solver? Continue reading →
"There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place." -J.K. Rowling.
In my earlier post, I wrote about some of the ways in which organizations can harness the power of story-telling. But, the question is; How do you craft a compelling story?
It was my first day in the creative writing course that I was taking. As my teacher walked in, here is what she said,
“I am not here to tell you what to write. That is your creativity. Your story matters and is unique. I am here to provide you a structure and tools to apply to your story which will make it more compelling and powerful.”
In many ways writing is about engaging the left brain and the right brain. Creativity and language arts come from the right brain, and structure and patterns come from the left brain. Using both is important to craft compelling stories.
So what are the key ingredients to craft a compelling story? Here is what I learnt from my Creative Writing course. Continue reading →
