Leading for Health
In any crisis, we are quick to recognize the power and importance of leadership in rethinking our future and developing solutions, as well as the significant impact when leadership is lacking. In health, that leadership has traditionally come from institutions providing acute care – from major medical centers to community hospitals. Yet this is beginning to change. Increasingly, legislative programs, foundation initiatives, and communities themselves are turning to regional cross-sector collaborations as the focal point for innovation and sustainable change. With this, the demand for new forms of collaborative or system leadership are emerging, even as the roles of leaders inside established organizations shift.
Building on her 30-year association with Peter Senge, PhD, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and a major force in modern management, C. Sherry Immediato, MPP, MBA, is engaging innovators and leaders in developing the tools and skills they need to learn, reflect and lead us toward a sustainable health system through Leading for Health.
Clearly America faces a multitude of challenges that cannot be addressed by any one organization alone – including health and health care. In 2008, Dr. Senge, along with several colleagues described The Necessary Revolution, a growing reality where individuals and organizations work together to address system issues beyond the purview or control of any one organization. This book describes key concepts and a number of examples where diverse groups of institutional stakeholders have developed alliances to serve the interests of the participants, as well as exercise stewardship on behalf of the whole.
The Necessary Revolution develops and documents the applicability of the concepts originally presented in The Fifth Discipline. Dr. Senge’s description of the “learning organization” emphasizes the power of “organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.” What was true within organizational boundaries also applies across organizational boundaries. Summarized metaphorically as a three-legged stool, the interdependent core learning capabilities of creating desired futures, seeing systems and collaborating across boundaries are all required for system health and sustainability – the system will not thrive if any of its “legs” are missing.
Recognizing the power of these capabilities for health leadership and successful collaboration, Leading for Health, a project of ReThink Health, applies these insights to rethinking how we can improve the health of our population while providing sustainable, high quality, accessible and affordable care. Through experiential coaching, workshops, a leadership development curriculum, a community of practice for system innovators, and on-line resources and methodologies, Leading for Health experts provide an emerging network of health and health care innovators with the tools they need to envision the future, navigate system complexity and engage a diverse groups of stakeholder in action and reflection toward a sustainable health system.
In coordination with the range of ReThink Health projects, Leading for Health is creating and actively supporting activities that significantly increase competence, applications, and resources in a few critical areas:
- Understanding the dynamics of the health system and the necessary balance between health and illness and prevention and care
- Appreciating system complexity to help create strategies for short-term momentum and long-term sustainability that actively consider the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions
- Building effective team and stakeholder coordination and collaboration
- Advancing experimenting and prototyping as a means for “learning while doing” with the expectation that health is a complex adaptive system
- Enhancing the capacity for the scaling and spread of successful innovations
- Developing and supporting systems for collective learning, reflection, change and growth