Leaders of health systems around the world seek large scale, disruptive change. Yet most of our innovation and improvement methods are designed for developmental rather than disruptive innovation – making small scale improvements to the system as we know it.
This leaves a gap in terms of how we enable a different, more radical kind of change; one that ruptures our picture of the healthcare world as we know it. There is a problem with calling it “big” change or “large scale” change because the difference is not about scale. This kind of change is qualitative and not quantitative in nature – it is not about a different size of change but a different kind of change. It needs different thinking and different methods. Developing a new kind of change is one of the biggest challenges for leaders of health and care in our era.
In my session, I will talk about the practicalities of creating this new kind of disruptive change. I will illustrate it with two methods with real life examples: the Ian Harcuss approach to double loop learning and The Water of Systems Change by Peter Senge and colleagues.