Reflections from the 2021 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit

Our mission is to inspire healthcare leaders to accelerate change in their organizations. This year’s Summit focused on how individuals can become the change they wish to see in healthcare. Our presenters shared about focusing on your personal development, building a resilient culture within an organization, and how to take action when learning something new.

Below are some key takeaways from this event from the Catalysis team.

Cultivating Your Personal Development

To support a culture of continuous improvement, it is essential for leaders to take time to focus on their personal development and leadership behaviors. Some points brought up around this were:

• Didier Rabino’s statement, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. I reflect and I learn. Just doing the exercise of reflection, helps me to learn.”
• John Toussaint emphasizing the value of understanding your purpose and encouraging attendees to write it down!
• During Jenn Christison’s session, about the idea of creating your vision using the SWOT approach. In the end, she said, “if you aren’t sure what your vision is, steal someone else’s vision to get you started.”
• Heather Marstiller detailing her PDSA approach to her personal standard work process.

Creating your personal vision and purpose and taking time to reflect on how you are measuring up or progressing toward these is valuable in cultivating your own personal development.

Fostering a Resilient Culture

There were many great examples of resiliency and the necessity of this for all of us over the last 15 months. Some other concepts that stood out to our team around fostering a resilient culture were:

• Matt Pollard’s point that people can’t project their way to success in this work. We need to embrace the principles and behaviors.
• The concept of psychological safety and creating an environment that encourages this to help navigate the difficulty of behavioral change (both for the coach and coachee).
• Trust is the foundation for both personal and organizational growth and innovation – and it’s our personal responsibility to decide how we want to show up, in order to create the safe environment to do so.

It is important to ground your work in the principles of organizational excellence to help nurture and strengthen an organization’s culture.

Turning Learning into Action

In the pursuit of organizational excellence, it is imperative that we are continuous learners. However, it’s not enough to just learn, we have to turn our learning into action. That includes what we learn about ourselves, our people, our processes, and our patients.

Here are some highlights about taking action based on learning:

• Patrice Daquin’s session walked us through the evolution of our relationship with patients over time, ending that in today’s economy it is a partnership where patients are powerful consumers. She shared how they engage patients in the MSK Patient and Family Advisory Council for Quality with the purpose of “identifying the common pain which can be collaboratively solved in this partnership to increase value.” 
• The Lean Leader PI Panels provided helpful perspectives and thinking. They all had meaningful and different perspectives on similar topics which reinforced the idea that if you have seen one lean transformation, you have seen one lean transformation.
• Failure can be (re)framed as: What did we learn?
• Anita Iyengar shared her realization through feedback from operations’ people on their feeling of “Innovation” and how they just saw it as extra work.  This influenced how they defined and encouraged innovation at Legacy Health to make it clear that innovation is simply something new and focusing on identifying and implementing solutions.  This helped with the paradigm shift.

Hearing from healthcare leaders is always inspiring. Many organizations are doing such great work to make things better for patients, staff, and communities.

If you were able to attend the Summit this year please share something that stood out to you in the comments below.

Related Items

Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit

Becoming the Change, by John Toussaint, MD, and Kim Barnas

Catalysis Healthcare Value Network

Organizational Subscription to Catalysis Academy