Permission to Experiment: Muhlenberg story 1

"The big question for leaders in our industry," said John Kopicki, President and CEO of Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center, "is ‘how do we help our organizations adapt?’"

Kopicki is no stranger to such issues of leadership. In fact, he has seen them as the key to management science since he started studying it in the 1960s at George Washington University.

"Complexity science suggests that instead of being in charge, my job is to let go and enable people to create operational changes themselves. For anyone trained in traditional management theory, that's heretical. But my experience has absolutely convinced me that it's the right way to lead in times of revolutionary change."

"Back then, most people thought of leaders as aggressive, dynamic executives who dominated their systems," he explained. Today, Kopicki defines leadership as the ability to help people in an organization understand their shifting environment and, then, to support their participation in the process, to give them permission to find their own ways.

"Complexity science suggests that instead of being in charge, my job is to let go and enable people to create operational changes themselves. For anyone trained in traditional management theory, that’s heretical, and it wasn’t easy to accept. My experiences at Muhlenberg over the last year, however, have absolutely convinced me that it’s the right way to lead in times of revolutionary change."

One effort that demonstrated the power of this approach forcefully, Kopicki said, was a redesign of procedures in the emergency room (ER). "The biggest community relations problem we have is in the ER, where people across the country are unhappy at how they get treated," he explained. "After hearing us talk about what we were learning, sensing our enthusiasm and seeing projects approached from a complexity angle, the ER manager got a group of doctors and nurses together, told them we had to improve our customer satisfaction level, and asked them what we could do."

"The idea that they could determine for themselves what they’d do generated a burst of enthusiasm," Kopicki continued. "They tried a variety of innovations, kept what worked, and threw out what didn’t. Within six months they’d improved their customer satisfaction scores by 67 percent. That’s unheard of! No one ever created that level of improvement in only six months."

What happened, Kopicki believes, is that participants had permission to do what they wanted. As their experiments showed they could change things, they repeated their successes, and success led to success. "With this kind of success under our belts, I’ve been leading the hospital toward a culture where this kind of self-organization is the way we do things," he added. "We see more examples that it’s working all the time. Because I stood back and let people make their own changes, something fundamental could start to shift in the culture."

Kopicki emphasized that letting go of the idea of managerial control wasn’t easy. "At first, learning about complexity science and what it suggested about leadership was confusing, even stressful," he explained. "Once I began to learn it, to understand it, and to discuss it with other professionals, it began to make sense. I went from saying, I really believe in this to saying, ‘You’re darn right I believe in it!’ I had gone through a personal conversion."