 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Sponsored by
KU HealthPartners, Inc. and University of Kansas School of Nursing
Co-sponsored by
the Kansas Public Health Leadership Institute (KPHLI) and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Back by popular demand, Jerry Sternin and the Plexus Institute will conduct their two-day seminar in Wichita, co-sponsored by the Kansas Public Health Leadership Institute (KPHLI) and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. This session will provide a thorough explanation of positive deviance as a change process used to address complex, intractable social problems where resources are limited. Jerry and his wife, Monique, have developed this model based on their international work. Learn through Jerry’s determination, story-telling, and pragmatic teaching style.
Have you been frustrated with the "best practice" or "expert-driven" approaches to change? Are you committed to doing something about problems faced by your organization or community that have resisted previous improvement efforts? Have you noticed that many of these problems do not affect 100% of the community or group? If you answered "yes" to these questions, then this workshop is for you and your colleagues. In a recent article from FastCompany.com, Jerry Sternin says that maybe the problem isn't with the outside experts or with the company. "The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn't work," he says. "It never has. You can't bring permanent solutions in from outside." Maybe the problem is with the entire model for how to create sustainable change. Maybe the problem is that you can't import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but "deviant" practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization--and change comes when you find it.
The University of Kansas School of Nursing, through KU HealthPartners, Inc., with our co-sponsors Kansas Public Health Leadership Institute; KUSM-W, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health; and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, invite you to explore Positive Deviance with Jerry Sternin, the leading Positive Deviance (PD) authority and pioneer. Join with colleagues who are searching for solutions to some of the critical social and organizational challenges facing us today.
Positive Deviance, an approach developed over the past 14 years, demonstrates that by tapping isolated examples of success, an entire community or organization can benefit. Accomplishing this requires a radical departure from "benchmarking" and "best-practice" strategies of change. Positive deviance (PD) is an approach to uncover and amplify the practices of "positive deviants" in a community or organization, who, despite having access to no special resources, achieve much better results than their peers. Intractable problems are solvable, and this two-day conference with Jerry Sternin, known internationally for his work on the development of the Positive Deviance process, will demonstrate a compelling approach that could change the lives of those we serve.
PD is unlike traditional expert-driven models for social and organizational change. Like the human immune system, individuals and institutions reject anything perceived as "foreign matter." This "not invented here" reaction is most common when experts outside an organization provide strategies for organizational change. Positive Deviance provides an antidote to this immune system defense mechanism by creating change from within the organization or culture. Those in a community or organization are helped to discover the positive deviants in their midst, understand the strategies they employ and then create among themselves a process for enrolling the larger community in the desired change. Change occurs from inside out.
Harvard Business Review (2005, May) featured PD in an article co-authored by Jerry Sternin entitled, "Your Company’s Secret Change Agents." The authors share stories about how the PD approach has begun to penetrate the social service, government, health service delivery, and management consciousness in North America. PD success stories include tackling gnarly technical challenges at Hewlett Packard, complexity quality challenges in hospitals, and challenges faced by schools dedicated to improving education.
Complexity science is a discipline that is providing important new insights into how living systems self-organize, evolve, and adapt as emergent and nonlinear interactive processes. Participants will gain new insights into social change triggered by advances in complexity science and get a taste of the theoretical basis upon which the Positive Deviance approach rests.
This workshop will provide an overview of how and where PD has been successful addressing problems requiring social or behavioral change. All participants will gain an appreciation for the four steps of the PD process.
Participants will begin by developing an understanding of how PD works: conceptual framework, underlying behavioral change theory, and the PD four-step design process. The relationship of PD to key complexity science concepts will be explored.
Stories from the field and participant issues will be shared to facilitate understanding how PD has been used to address HIV/AIDS risk reduction, educational performance, childhood malnutrition, female genital mutilation, and hospital and healthcare quality improvement. The participant’s challenges will then be used to practice the four PD design steps to solving problems requiring social/behavioral change.
Participants will then create PD workgroups and networks, design ways to introduce PD to colleagues back home, explore how to get a PD initiative underway, and discuss how they might collaborate on common issues.
To learn more about Positive Deviance, visit the Positive Deviance Initiative, read the HBR article mentioned above, or the new book from VitalSmarts, "Influencer, The Power to Change Anything."
This program will be beneficial for nurses, physicians and other healthcare professionals and administrative leaders who want to learn to be effective in solving intractable problems.
At the completion of this conference, participants should be able to:
Last modified February 03 2008 3:27 pm Valid XHTML
Email Page
Print Page