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Marc pointed out at the team retreat Friday. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. On the surface, our team looks pretty homogeneous. But, scratch below and it gets more interesting. As the pressures mount, which they inevitably do in work of this scope, our diversity becomes more apparent. Our informal roles are showing up. In other words, we’ve built enough familiarity and trust to reveal more of our personal presences.
Some of us on the “P2 team” like to get in and find the problem and fix it and are impatient with processing issues and concepts. Others thrive in bringing up issues and concepts to process. We are dreamers, and we are realists… concrete thinkers and visionaries. AND WE NEED ALL OF US. We are a dynamic and creative team. We continue to grow much larger than the sum of our parts.
Stress in a system brings out both strengths and weaknesses. Stress anywhere in a system affects the whole system; however powerfully or subtly. As an example, our two (outstanding) nurses are working long hours and managing complicated patient and family situations. They work in an already overloaded system medical system, which looks to them for relief. We recently had a patient that was hospitalized as the result of a whole system being overstressed. It would be a great oversimplification to point at any one source for this hospitalization. We are a complex system, not an assembly of independent parts. Wobbles in one area affect the whole area and true “healing” – which is what health care is supposed to be about, is the responsibility of the whole system. How can we best work together to make an even greater whole? We will continue to find out as we face challenges together.
Our team is diverse, creative, dedicated and under a lot of pressure to perform optimally. We are all feeling the pressure and I frequently hear people expressing concern for each other (I have been the recipient as well). At our staff retreat Friday, it become even more apparent to many of us that we want to design an outlet for creativity, innovation, and dealing with challenges. Thanks to Carolyn Turkovich’s skilled, intuitive facilitation, we came up with a plan to hold weekly agenda-less meeting. This will be a time to think generatively together. Attendance is optional. We quickly developed a rough draft of agreements to provide the structure:
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Identify and question judgments and assumptions
Stay curious regarding new ideas
Document our ideas
Check out our own reactions
Creativity regarding problem solving
Voice what’s important
Speak in the here and now – specific and personal
Use questions to create focus.
Speaking our truth without blame or judgment.
Listen deeply
In my mind, we are embodying the concept of complex adaptive systems. We are adaptable, we employ simple rules, and demonstrate continual creativity. Our behavior is creative and emergent and we can only know what we’ll do next by observing what happens. I’m excited! The sky is the limit!
8:48:15 AM
