First thank you to The Doctors Company Foundation and MedStar Health for your investment in patient safety and quality. The students and faculty and staff are amazing.
This is the third Telluride experience as a facilitator and I am so glad that this important work has come to my home state of California. The students and faculty are the best that health care has to offer and I have no doubt that the learning that emerges from their conversations can lead to the transformation that needs to happen. At the same time I am troubled by conversations I have heard in the past few days about how how national and local leaders are turning their eyes away from patient safety, and that “safety” is not a popular word in health care board rooms. Leaders of the collective wisdom have taught me that there are practices to address this leadership indifference.
Students have been asking some important and challenging questions and faculty members have done the same. How do we keep our minds open to the possibilities as we move through these tough discussions? I have remind myself to return to the “six stances” of collective wisdom, which have helped me learn to quit “jumping to judgment” in my career as a nurse as I have had the tough discussions. The answers to how to make health care safer are in the room. Here are the six stances of collective wisdom. Jan Boller
- Deep Listening
- Suspension of Certainty
- Seeing Whole Systems/Seeking Diverse Perspectives
- Respect for Others/Group Discernment
- Welcoming All That is Arising
- Trust in the Transcendent
- Briskin, A., Erickson, S., Ott, J., Callanan, T. (2009) The power of collective wisdom and the trap of collective folly. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.