Justifying A Revolution

A Story from Several Leaders of Memorial Hospital of South Bend

Told by: Ken Baskin

• attractors
• emergence
• shadow system
• complexity lens
• metaphor
• min specs
• Stacey matrix
• good enough vision
  
  

Something exciting is going on when six senior managers at any organization start calling themselves "The Shadow 6." After all, the shadow system is the group, operating outside formal channels, that prepares creative alternatives so the organization can evolve with its markets. When senior managers consciously take on this responsibility, they are, in effect, announcing that the revolution has arrived.

That’s exactly what’s happened at Memorial Hospital of South Bend, where two senior vice presidents, George Soper, Ph.D., and Jim Hoffman, M.D., two vice presidents, Mark Chambers and Connie McCahill, R.N., a director of organizational development, Andrea Ferrett, and an organizational development specialist, Barbara Walsh, formed the Shadow 6 after returning from VHA’s "Leading from the Edge of Chaos" conference in December, 1997.

Soper had been part of VHA’s Leadership Learning Network since its first meeting at the Santa Fe Institute in June 1997. But when he brought the other five along in December, something remarkable began happening. "They were so excited about what they were hearing," Soper explained, "that they could hardly contain themselves."

"Most of us went in with an appreciation for complexity science," Ferrett added. "But all of a sudden, I realized how it could be applied to organizations. Our hospital is extremely chaotic. It had been undergoing rapid change for so long, and I’d felt that, as the person in charge of organizational development, I was responsible for bringing order to the chaos. Now I became aware that this chaos was normal and that order eventually would rise out of it. That relieved a lot of stress."

"The conference validated why I’m involved at Memorial," Walsh continued. "As a result, I have more energy to be here long hours and weekends. I’m not de-energized because I was able to realize that the organization is becoming less mechanical and more organic. I don’t feel trapped anymore."

What all the members of the Shadow 6 realized was that they’d been part of a culture shift which complexity science enabled them to understand.

"The organization is becoming more than the sum of its parts," as Soper puts it. The surprising thing is that Memorial Hospital can now measure this sense of organic wholeness.

Aides
Min specs

"Last year, we challenged ourselves to look at how every unit could become more cost-efficient," Walsh explained. "Each department was told to look at ways to contribute to cost savings, but not where to find them. That was practicing min specs before we knew what they were.

"The amazing thing is that we were given a two-year time frame to make those cost cuts," she added, "yet, we met the challenge in one year."

"But that’s not all," Soper pointed out. "Groups were falling short of their targets. However, as a whole, we were exceeding those targets. The whole was functioning better than the sum of the parts. So it became clear that while we were very good at measuring individual productivity, we had no idea how to measure interactions. The conference in December helped us realized why this organic interaction of the parts made our performance possible."

"The greater interaction grew from the chief operating officer’s restructuring," Ferrett explained. "We’d been organized into a series of service areas with a Leadership Group that discussed their problems regularly. They were able to break down the barriers between them because their group was small enough to talk, face-to-face, about issues across the organization."

"For example," Soper noted, "the director of the surgical care unit had some staffing challenges recently. In the past, she would have tried to solve them herself. But the Leadership Group enabled her to discuss them with people throughout the hospital. She didn’t have to feel alone."

With this cultural revolution going on around them, the Shadow 6 felt energized by what they learned at the December conference. Complexity science validated the approaches they had taken and explained why it worked. So they were excited at the prospect of communicating their understanding to the rest of the organization.

"When we brought back some of this information to our chief operating officer, he became intrigued with the idea of using complexity science for the strategic planning exercise that was coming up," Soper said. "So he asked us to present some of these ideas in a half-day workshop leading into our exercise in strategic planning."

Aides
Metaphor

"We decided to demonstrate the concepts in the design of the workshop, in addition to presenting it as part of the content," Ferrett noted. "We wanted participants to understand that this was a departure from traditional workshops. So, for example, we presented the agenda as the diagram of a tree, with our min specs as the roots, agenda items as the trunk, presentations as branches, and small break-out groups as stems.

"We even arranged the room to help participants break out of linear thinking," she added. "We arranged chairs as a flock of geese and eliminated tables. Getting rid of those tables was a mistake. Participants later told us that it violated one of our min specs, comfort. But that was the only min spec we ended up violating."

The workshop opened with a discussion of the min specs ("fun, authentic presence, dialogue, comfort, and adaptability"). That was followed with Margaret Wheatley’s video on Leadership and the New Science, and self-organizing discussions on several issues from the video. After that, members of the Shadow 6 led discussion on complexity science and the nature of complex adaptive systems. (See attached agenda.)

"We were trying to lead the group into action," Soper explained. "In the afternoon we wanted to explore strategic planning and how we could use our mission/vision/values as strange attractors. I think that one reason we were successful is that we tied complexity science into things we’d already done.

"For example," he continued, "we’d worked with Covey’s seven habits and the idea of principle-centered organizations. So we made an effort to show how complexity science reflected that work. That helped participants recognize that this wasn’t something new we had to learn. Rather, it helped explain what we were already doing."

Some of the discussion during the workshop deepened participants’ understanding of the ongoing culture shift. For instance, Stacey’s agreement/certainty matrix provoked a discussion of how people at the hospital had a tendency to push issues into the lower left quadrant (high agreement/high certainty) when those issues were really more complex.

"Now people feel less pressured to put things into traditional linear processes," Ferrett pointed out. "We have more dialogue on where we really are so that we can pay more attention to emerging processes."

Other discussions led to action. For example, one group discussed linear processes in the hospital that didn’t work well. They pointed to the program for entering quality improvement ideas into the computer system, a program so linear that some good ideas were omitted because they couldn’t fit into the format.

"As a result, we’ve abandoned computer input of quality improvement ideas," Ferrett explained. "We’re moving toward displaying our projects on story boards. Our entire quality improvement process is changing because of that discussion."

Finally, in the afternoon session, it became clear that the current mission, vision, and values weren’t working.

"The current mission and values didn’t excite people," Soper noted. "And we didn’t have a vision. So we decided to develop a vision and values that would act as an attractor. We conducted focus groups of employees, board members, and physicians to gather their ideas on a mission, vision and values that would carry Memorial into the twenty-first century."

"As an organization," Ferrett added, "we tend toward excess verbiage. Much of what we do tends to be unnecessarily long-winded. But the mission squad took our 15-year-old mission statement and reduced it from three paragraphs to one 15-word sentence: ‘Memorial is committed to improving the Quality of Life of the people in our community.’ It’s not our custom to be that concise, but I hope the board will approve the recommendations."

There’s also been discussion about reducing the hospital’s three values to a single one.

Largely as a result of the complexity workshop, the new strategic planning process is "different from past ones," as Ferrett noted. "We’re not as tightly tied to a rigid process."

"The process isn’t as linear a process as previous ones," Soper added. "That’s created some frustration from people who are being asked for more inclusion and dialogue with staff, which takes more time."

"Even the formula is different, more than words," Walsh explained. "We’re using a pictograph where words are arranged much like a diagram. It was so different that I was surprised that our CEO was willing to take it to the board. What will emerge as people use this new format is anyone’s guess."

Soper wonders how all this will play to the board of directors. "There are a number of difficult ideas for traditional managers," he said. "The idea of natural time—that things happen according to their own rhythm—is difficult for many people. And letting go of control can be very difficult."

"The board hasn’t been through complexity training," Walsh noted. "It will be interesting to see how they react."

Whatever that reaction, Soper insisted that the new ways Memorial is developing are the way of the future. "We could see that something different was going on," he said. "Now we have the vocabulary to describe it and explain why it works.

"Management can’t solve all our problems alone," he continued. "The only way to get the best solutions is to involve everyone. Otherwise, managers will refuse to let go and staff will refuse responsibility. Organic wholeness is the only way we’ll meet the important challenges we face."

Attachment: Southbend’s Meeting Agenda

Copyright © 2001, Plexus Institute
Permission to copy for educational purposes only.
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