I’ve been consumed of late with words that begin with ‘A’. I feel particularly reflective on these words right now as I consider Annie Gort’s post today. I’m especially struck by her willingness to demonstrate personal capacity to make these words real on this journey of Pursuing Perfection.
These are the words: accountability; awareness; advocacy; authenticity; alignment; and action. I see these words as points on a star. Right now the star has six points, one for each word. I’m certain that there are others and that the star will continue to expand in points and in dimension and depth to become a star that we are all willing to hitch our wagons to.
We all must be accountable. We must take the responsibility to deal with those things that keep us from moving forward, even when that may be uncomfortable for ourselves and for others. And I do believe, that part of this accountability includes our responsibility to suspend our judgments and confront our own assumptions so that we hear the real message(s).
Awareness or self-awareness, so well demonstrated by Annie, is critical. We first must confront ourselves and reflect on those things that happen in our daily work that may cause us discomfort and build on what causes us joy. This is the first step; to step back and really discover where we are, what our passions are, what we feel, sense, think, want, and are willing to do.
Advocacy is essential too. To me, this means not only partnering with others to work together and collaborate, but also to hold forth our expectations and the expectations of others in support of creating even more meaningful partnerships and encouraging team growth toward the same perfection that we want for our health care delivery system.
Authenticity has to become an expectation. To expect it of self is minimal. To expect it of others is ideal. What a wonderful opportunity we have to practice this as we Pursue Perfection. Annie has taken us to the edge of authenticity by becoming self-aware, advocating for a better team, being genuine and real, with good intent, and with willingness to take action.
Alignment can be the result of Annie’s effort. I’m thinking that alignment is my personal hot button right now. If we fail at alignment, we fail to reach our dream. Alignment comes out of all these other ‘A’ words (accountability, awareness, advocacy, authenticity, and action). We create balance in people, in systems and processes, in structure, culture, and information and by building on our strengths. We avoid the potholes that slow us down and cause ruts in the road that ultimately cause us to get stuck.
And finally, Action gets us to our end. We create intent to do, to make things better, to learn from our assumptions, to accept the real meaning of accountability, awareness, advocacy, authenticity, and alignment and to create the new paradigm for our new future in health care.
These words may get us started. We’ll discover more as we proceed. We may even create new words. But we will be even more successful if we add the seventh word ALL meaning it takes everyone to make it happen!
