Strategy for progress - building a community of practice
27th March
The response to this idea of creating a Centre for Compassion in Healthcare has been remarkable. Many people have already registered on the membership database. Several people have approached us and said they would be willing to devote their life's work to this cause. Extraordinary connections are being made across the oceans and there is a global resonance being heard. some very influential healthcare leaders have promised support.
Ideas are bubbling up:
- the potential for partnership with Maori in strengthening an holistic approach to health and wellbeing ('Whare tapa wha' has the dimensions of body, mind, relationships and spirit);
- a national conference on compassion in healthcare;
- a holistic centre for the healing of victims of medical error - to be attended by the patient and doctor together;
- novel approaches to the problem of patient safety based on building trust rather than technical solutions.
The question is, how to build and sustain this energy for positive change without burdening a few leaders with a huge amount of work?
We need an approach that recognises the creativity and leadership of many people and allows change to spread in an organic fashion across the sector. Anyone who has created a small organisation know the perils of getting bogged down in the detail and losing the big picture.
Margaret Wheatley is a renowed international thought leader on leadership and building capacity within communities to solve their own problems. She discusses the idea of leaders as "hosts" rather than "heroes". Like many others, she believes that current structures and organisations are inadequate to the challenges of the modern world (it's easy to see the truth of that in healthcare).
Her vision of successful change is an organic process of individual pioneers - who's efforts are largely ignored or invisible - connecting together in networks. These networks mature into "communities of practice" in which there is sharing of knowledge, networking and support, and a growing awareness of the potential of new ways of doing things. These communities of practice then coalesce into systems of influence that reach a sudden tipping point. Widespread change occurs quite suddenly. The pioneers are lauded as inspiring innovators - after years of suppression - and the authority figures say it was their idea all along!
Margaret's work draws heavily on the 'new science' of complexity, chaos, quantum physics, biological adaptive systems, and so on. It has an underlying philosophy that the leaders we need are already present. We just need to move away from rigid command and control structures to more organic forms that have natural, self-organising properties and adapt to the changing environment. Margaret freely shares many of her writings. You are encouraged to visit her website here and to freely download many essays and articles.
We intend to build this work using these strategies. When people network together in a common cause, a new future begins to emerge in a process of co-creation.
For these reasons, it's important that people interested in this work register through the on-line membership form (there is no fee). Link to membership here.
We can use the website email server to help support the growing network of leaders and innovators. We also strongly encourage members to participate in the dialogue through the on-line discussion forum on this site. In this way, ideas will begin to be shaped and spread.
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