Helene Finidori

Movement for engagement

The British NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement is bringing social movement thinking to healthcare improvement.

NHS’ movement view of improvement focuses on unleashing and sustaining energy through imagination, participation, mobilization and momentum. This perspective operates on previously unseen levels of depth and scale and outperform the traditional “rational view” which concentrates on effectiveness and efficiency through control and standardization of work.

The decision was made after realizing that only 20% of NHS 1.3 million staff were engaged in quality improvement work to try and meet the goals as set out in the NHS Plan, while achievement of these goals required 80 or 100% of staff engagement.

To achieve this, rather than multiplying the number of change programs, NHS transformed concepts and ideas from social movement thinking into principles for radical change aimed at engaging with the individuals’ core values and mobilizing their own internal energies and drivers for change.

For the whole story, read the two articles by Helen Bevan, Director of Service Transformation at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.

• Social movement thinking: a set of ideas whose time has come?
• What NHS leaders can learn from social movements

Change or Die

Why is it that even under a death threat, humans can't resolve themselves to change their behaviors? In Fast Company's May issue, Alan Deutschman draws a parallel between health and corporate performance: whatever the perspective or the danger, the core of the solution is seldom to perform an operation -i.e. change the structure, culture or strategy- or to prescribe a medecine -new systems and technology-. Changing behaviors mostly happens by speaking to people's feeling and emotions, not just thoughts, and helping them adopt different frames of thinking. Change agents themselves need to learn how to change their style if necessary to get to the core. On the "change target" side, behavioral change ability, what we commonly call adaptability, is linked to our brain's ability to change, its plasticity. Everything we learn as a child is behavior based and maintains this plasticity. When the leaning stops, the plasticity decreases. This is why, the article says, continuous learning, by constantly rejuvenating the brain's plasticity, is so crucial to adaptability, not only to knowledge -not to mention living older and in a good shape!-.

See full article Change or Die.
Also see a detailed analysis of this article in Creating Passionate Users Blog