Tag Archives: pioneers

Hosting Lessons from the Field – Inviting Innovators and Pioneers in Health Care

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It is just the beginning of 2012 and already the year has been rich in hosting lessons from the field, diving deep into new levels of awareness around hosting subtleties. It began in Utah early in the month, hosting Healthier Health Care Systems Now with Tenneson Woolf, Steve Ryman and Marc Parnes.

Marc Parnes

Marc, who is a physician, gynaecologist and host from Columbus Ohio, started us off on day 2 with a story intended to set the tone and challenge of the day.  He told of what was to be a routine surgery he was doing on a woman.  When he opened her up and looked inside, what he saw not only surprised him, it alarmed him.  Things that were not supposed to be stuck together were.  He could not see the path for the surgery.  He was not able to see his way.  He did not know how to proceed with the surgery as he stared at this jumble of internal organs.

All eyes were on him as he then he stood up in our circle.  We could feel the anxiety of that moment.  Standing there, Marc planted his feet shoulder width apart, just like he did on the day of the surgery, to ground himself.    As he closed his eyes, he described doing exactly this as he stood beside the woman on his operating table.  Then, with his eyes closed, he reached into the woman and began to feel his way around, searching with his hands for the openings he could not see with his eyes.

When he finished, he knew what to do.  He opened his eyes.  He could now calmly begin the surgery, having expanded his vision of what was possible by “seeing” with other senses.  The surgery was successful.

There was a collective sigh of relief in our circle.

We began to reflect on what Marc’s story had to do with innovation in health care, what it had to do with hosting.

After coming through the first day, we checked in as a host team and invited the voices of others who showed up to participate in the design process.  We tracked our day around purpose and intention.  We felt good about the design and flow of the day and we felt we had challenged people beautifully in our opening circle on day 1 by asking them to speak to the pioneer and innovator inside of them that had responded to the invitation, but not to speak too deeply to their work, promising that would come later.  We sensed that though the day had been good, something was missing.  With reflection, we realized we were still on the ground of old territory and familiar conversation, not the new conversations we had invited people into.

The invitation was to be in a different conversation about health care.  The challenge for this group was to move into what would be a new conversation for each of them. This amazing group of individuals carry in them irrepressible dreams for healthcare systems that thrive; for simplicity that doesn’t deny the complexity, yet responds well to it.  They continue to have high hopes for healthier healthcare despite having been in many, many conversations about shifting the systems within which they work and play.  Those who responded to the HHS call were already innovators and pioneers in health care.   Maybe the new conversation was not a collective conversation about a new global vision about health care but was about individual systems of influence and what was at the edges of their own learning that might be new territory.

Our challenge, as a hosting team, we realized, was in making sure we really did travel to new territory – not an easy challenge given the experience of the people who came.

We continually scanned what we knew that could invite people into new territory. We brought play into our process – a beautifully renewed learning edge.  Collaborative play, allowing us to see and experience our learning beyond the cognitive or intellect.  Then, through reflection, seeing our patterns in work and relationship in whole new ways.  Allowing inspiration to enter in.

At the end of day two, despite traveling much ground in the day, there was still a sense of restlessness in our hosting team that took awhile to fully sense into. Something edgy.  Something still not quite arrived at.

Checking in as a host team and, like the day before, with others interested in our design process, we recognized that we were happy with our design and the flow of the two days. We briefly wondered if we should be satisfied with where we were and consider how to enter and close our last day well. Yet there was something we still had not quite arrived at.  Something about the new conversation we hadn’t quite dug into.

We reflected on what we knew from our Art of Hosting experiences that would push the edges of where we were.  If we were looking for a groan zone or acupuncture point in our process, normally we would look to a point in day two.  But this timing did not show up in day two.  Were we willing to push our own learning and hosting to bring in something even  more edgy in the morning of day three?

We knew we would not get to where we wanted to go through another conversational or intellectual process.  We decided to invite this group of physicians, health care administrators and others into a guided visualization process, to invite them to explore their own future journey in healthier health care now. Following the visualization, we invited them into drawing or illustrating some representation of their experience in the visualization process, followed by a conversation with a partner to really dive into this experience in depth.

The experience was intense and provocative. It shifted the shape of some individuals.  It shifted the shape of our gathering.  It broke the pattern of the old and invited a new pattern. The World Cafe that followed was amazing.  It was sparky. Ideas flowed quickly.  There was a new quality that had entered into our space.

Once we saw it, experienced it, we could name it.  We had shifted from conversations that came from the head to conversations that now came from a deeper place.  The conversations were now embodied. People began to look at their own path and their own systems of influence rather than at points of the system too far beyond their own systems of influence to have any real impact.  We were in new territory.   We observed that embodiment shifted the conversation to deeper and more meaningful places.

As a hosting team we agreed to continue to push the edges of this group, knowing we still had a whole day ahead of us, even though if we had planned a visualization process, we would likely have planned it for the end of day two.  But sensing where we were, knowing what we were aiming for, keeping our essential calling questions close, we pursued our purpose and intention.  We continued to host potential right up to the moment of preparing to close our circle.

It isn’t over until it’s over.  We know that.  I have often heard it said in a hosting team.  And this time we lived it fully with a trust in each other, in what we were sensing and our willingness to flow with what was there.  Even as I write this, it is hard to describe the exact edge we were on or the truth of our experience.  But I’ve been reflecting on it a lot.  These reflections flowed into the last couple of weeks in Brazil, during Warrior of the Heart and a local Art of Hosting stewarding gathering, where we danced with flow to the most amazing degree – letting go of design to sense into what was alive and needed in any given moment.  More reflections on that later.

For now, the richness of the host team learning in Utah stays with me, embodied in my own experience in the best of ways.  I feel myself growing my capacity in hosting in the most delightful of ways, brought out by those I have the privilege to host with.  This year has started off so rich in learning, it makes me deeply curious for what the rest of 2012 will bring.

Innovators and Pioneers in Systems Change

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In Utah for Healthier Health Care Systems Now (January 11-13, 2012), we used the 2 Loops Model of Systems Change as one of the framing references for why we were gathered. It is a tool and a framing to understand the work we are individually and collectively in that shifts the shape of health care.  The two loops model looks like this:

 

The first loop represents the old system, the one we often name as the dying system.  The second loop represents the new system, the one we keep claiming we want, the one we think cannot emerge by fiddling with the old, the one we believe is needed to bring our current systems out of crisis.

The problem is, when we begin to think about the complexity of something like health care, where there are so many jurisdictions, so many players, so many interlocking systems,  trying to imagine what this new system or systems could be becomes paralyzing.  The conversation often becomes philosophical and theoretical.  It largely comes from an intellectual and cognitive place focused on all the things that need to shift that are outside our circle of influence.

Some of the frustration in being innovators inside of systems is that the systems begin to push back on the work in small and large ways, leading to the exhaustion, frustration and disillusionment so many leaders in health care experience.  This is all part of the old narrative.  Of course this showed up in our conversations in Utah to greater and lesser degrees depending on the questions, depending on who was in the conversation at any given time.  Any time we were in that conversation, thinking about the new system, it didn’t feel like a new conversation.

So, how could we be in conversation about Healthier Health Care Systems Now without  focusing on the second loop or the new system?  Well, by remembering who we are – pioneers and innovators in health systems – working under the first loop – in the in-between spaces – championing the new or being championed.  We began to focus in on and explore new questions: Where are the edges of my work?  What is the new territory I could begin to walk when I go home?  How can I draw on the resources in the room to expand my thinking, even turn it upside down and on its head – like the person who relies on gift economy in her practice, for her livelihood?  What more becomes possible in generative spaces with other innovators?  This was a different conversation, in tone, texture and energy.  This one did not come from the head. It was embodied in a whole new way – the beginnings of a new narrative of health.

The awareness of the old narrative and of the stuck places infiltrated us in the best of ways at the end of the first day of our three day gathering.   Someone suggested what we needed to do was create a vision of the new.  Ordinarily I might agree.  In this case though, that didn’t feel right.  It felt like it would take us further off track given that our roomful of people were geographically stretched from coast to coast across two countries with countless “systems”?

So, without taking our eye off the intention of shifting the narrative of health, we refocused on innovating and pioneering and guerrilla tactics of  hosting, collaborating and co-creating, engaging those around us in this journey that is health.  We didn’t leave with a specified vision of the new system.  We left heartened in our respective journeys, knowing the way to the future is through new processes, deeper conversations and finding our way with as many of our friends and colleagues as we can attract, engage and embolden along the way.

As we continue to shine the light on the experiments already underway, the successes, the challenges and the “failures”, and tap into the individual and collective resilience that is fighting to emerge, we can remember it is a journey that will shift and change as we go.  We remember life actually wants to help and it wants to heal. If we focus on how to expand our individual systems of influence and share those stories with our friends, our collective system of influence automatically begins to expand.  What seems like isolated work informs pockets of work elsewhere and we grow an energetic field that is part of the new, part of the second loop and is fueled by everyone stepping into innovative, courageous and pioneering ideas and projects.

I still can’t see what that second loop is for health care – other than it is about health and it is healthier.  I’m not sure anyone who showed up for this conversation can see the second loop either.  But I am absolutely sure that the innovators and pioneers are already prototyping what’s possible, what’s new, and in this work more and more of the new and the new narrative will show up.  I am reinvigorated by what’s possible, by the people who continue to explore these questions, who challenge the status quo, despite possible personal risks in doing so and know that there are better and more healthy ways to engage health care.

I and my hosting mates are committed to convening more of these conversations with people compelled to be in them to grow the field.  We envision large gatherings of people convening in new ways, continuing to innovate our way into the new system(s) so that maybe one day we will wake up and see in front of our eyes what we once thought impossible – a new generative system of health resilient enough and healthy enough to be sustainable in unexpected and beautiful ways.   If we take our eyes off the urgent need for something that feels impossible and put it in the places where possibility thrives… well, what more is there to imagine or say?

Steve Ryman, Tenneson Woolf, Kathy Jourdain, Marc Parnes

 

 

2 loops of systems change