Welcome & Introduction

In which Curt Lindberg responded to the pressing question: why are we here?
Curt Lindberg, Sr. Consultant, Complexity Management – VHA, Inc.

• “About two or three years ago, the pace of change in health care picked up. We were all trying to do new things – reengineering our organizations, for example. Some leaders or organizations in VHA of New Jersey realized that no one was paying attention to leadership. They began asking questions such as:
  
  
  • How can we approach things differently?
    
    
  • How can we plan for a future that is unknowable?
    
    
  • How can we create systems that are more than the sum of their parts?
    
    
  • How can we work with communities in new ways?
    
    
  • Why weren’t our major change efforts working as planned?
    
    
    
• While exploring literature outside of management for new ways to be more creative and adaptive, some interesting concepts kept popping up – even across fields as diverse as Computer Science, Economics and Biology.
  
  
• They discovered that scientists were talking to others in very different fields with a new vernacular – about concepts like chaotic interaction, unpredictable movement, and non-linearity – and creating a new field called complexity science.
  
  
• Further evidence of the emerging field: journalist Tom Petzinger had been tracking these trends in his Front Line column for The Wall Street Journal.
  
  
• Lindberg noted: “Some of us started to use these new ideas in our everyday work and got great results. We wanted to share these ideas with other interested pioneers in health care. That’s why we’re here.”

Regarding the conference’s structure

• Day one is going back to school, getting acquainted with chaos and complexity theory.
  
  
• Day two is examining how those theories can be practically helpful in your health care organizations.
  
  
• Important to be “active players.”
  
  
• Discomfort in learning new ideas is good, even natural.
  
  
• For example, in NJ Pine Barrens, the seeds in one type of pine cone are released by a fire of moderate intensity. Fire also eliminates the underbrush so the seeds can take root in fertile soil.
  
  
• “We can think of ourselves as pine cones in a health care forest,” Lindberg noted. “We’ll face some heat in this conference as we encounter ideas that seem challenging.”
  
  
• The value of this tension or discomfort is recognized in complexity science. Welcome this discomfort, “because it helps the seeds take root.”

• Lindberg concluded by asking participants to group into clusters, and share why they were attending. Answers included:
  
  
  • “to get renewed on the perspective that chaos serves a purpose...”
    
    
  • “to develop a transforming perspective, particularly to bring new people into a health care setting where they can participate quickly and buy in to new ideas”
    
    
  • “to become refreshed in the work of applying Complexity Science to building a learning organization...”