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J Flower

Publications and source records attributed to J Flower.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
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Spinning the future.

You may not be able to predict the future, but you can create scenarios to help you think about the future proactively. Instead of attempting to tell the future, tell stories about it. Here are eight steps to help you zero in on the future--they are designed to take you through the process of spinning scenarios in order to make decision-making, long-term planning, and thinking about the future more fruitful. Spinning scenarios is a highly sophisticated, singularly useful, and imminently practical way to think about the future. Yet, it is simple enough that you can do it yourself.

Cost Control↗
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Coming out.

Self-knowledge is the beginning of integrity, of coming out of the closet, and is a prerequisite for dealing well with change. Integrity is not just about not lying. Integrity means as on the inside, so on the outside. The Latin roots of integrity refer to touch. To have integrity is to be untouched, undivided, whole, integrated, integral. There is a tight relationship between integrity and the ability to change, because integrity is about knowing yourself, about being transparent. Integrity allows you to move with tremendous speed when the time comes to move. An organization that wants to learn to dance with change must come to know itself and its environment thoroughly. To do this, it must make use of all the knowledge of every member--and all of their learning capability. It must be built into the culture that new information and different points of view are powerful, are welcomed.

Decision Making, Organizational↗
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Breaking the trance.

The father of hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson, insisted that trance was a fairly common state for individuals, one that we drop into many times a day without any help at all--not at all the sensational image we think of with the magician hypnotizing the audience volunteer, or the psychiatrist the patient. Trances have a number of things in common--they: (1) are an altered state of consciousness; (2) feel autonomous; (3) come packaged with any of a number of "Deep Trance Phenomena"; (4) tend to repeat; (5) are universal. Organizations have trances, too. They have autonomous states of mind, ways of thinking that seem to come from nowhere, that seem impossible to change. They have automatic behaviors--ways of meeting, building of bureaucratic structures, interactions between departments. If organizations had knees, we might call them "knee-jerk reactions." Or communal habits. Or organizational trances. If the trance is a harmful one, how can you loosen its grip? By building up parallel realities.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
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Finding a new path.

When a clinician becomes a physician-executive, the shift is abrupt, confusing, and marked by few signposts. To be an organizational leader-especially in the 1990s, in health care more than in any other industry-is to be a master of teamwork, a maven of process, at home with ambiguity, comfortable with change, a nurturer of consensus, yet decisive, ready to move in the face of all the ambiguity. The hyphenated physician-executive lives in a state of culture shock. The first major step to overcoming this unfamiliar terrain is to recognize that the traits of the true organizational leader are, in fact, skills. The second step is to learn these skills, to set out deliberately, this far along in life, on a new kind of training, a new path.

Career Mobility↗
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Why it matters.

Physicians everywhere are facing changes in the ways they are paid, and in their relationships with their patients. In the United States, an increasing number of physicians are being confronted with the choice to join their practice to a physician service organization (PSO) or some other capitated financial structure in which they collectively put themselves at financial risk for the health of their patients. In all these decisions, the biggest handicap is fear. Some physicians let fear keep them from changing. Others let fear drive them too quickly into change that turns out to be unwise. The fear of change-the fear of the unknown, of things that, deep down, under the professional veneer, we wonder whether we can handle-is quite real. It is immediate and nearly constant. How can you drive out the fear? There is no simple answer. The complex answer starts with daily practice, with taking the practice deeper, taking it wall-to-wall. Here are some ideas for dealing with the fear of change, from owning up to your true feelings, to acknowledging failure, to breaking the change down into its smallest components.

Community Networks↗
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Finding the essential difference.

The idea of what is essential and what is peripheral is basic to all intelligent management of change. At the core of all our resistance to change is the fear that we will lose something of ourselves, something unrecoverable. "Touching ground"--gaining clarity on what we are truly about, and shaping our strategies around that core--is a key skill of the change master. What is the most important element in helping people deal with change? According to Roger Fritz, President of Leadership by Design, Inc., a St. Louis consulting firm, "Helping them recognize what's essential. There are two kinds of change: Technical change and profound change. A technical change asks you to learn something different. A profound change ask you to be someone different." Too often, we confuse the two and are met with resistance.

Benchmarking↗
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Doing or being?

The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, would occasionally distill the essence of the art into three simple shapes--a circle, a square, and a triangle. These are three basic ways of dealing with what's coming at you. The square is the simplest. It is about, essentially, doing nothing. The saying here is from the old spiritual: "I shall not be moved." You meet the challenge head on. The triangle is about forward motion--attack, cutting right to the heart of what is coming at you, or cutting right past it to the space beyond. The circle is often the most interesting space. The circle is not about standing ground or cutting through. The circle is about dancing with whatever is headed your way. The real danger lies in being stuck in any one mode--perpetually intransigent, always flailing away in attack mode, or forever slip-sliding through one dance step after another. It is only when our response is embodied in who we are that we will have the power truly to lead other people.

Conflict, Psychological↗
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Is it change? Or is it noise?

How can you tell the difference between mere noise, and a profound change headed your way? Your gut instincts may not always be a reliable gauge. It takes a long time for most people to become an executive leader. If you are typical, you were raised and trained in a different era, with different expectations. You see things with different lenses. So what can you trust? You can trust first principles. Ask yourself what you know about the reasons that changes are happening in this environment. Then ask yourself about what is being proposed--how does it fit with the roots of the changes in health care and your organization? The three change filters presented here can help you to figure out if it's change or just noise. Ask yourself: (1) what are the changes occurring in the health care industry; (2) is your organization ready for change; and (3) how likely is it that your organization will easily adopt this particular change? These three filters together will help you decide what is a truly important change, how ready your organization is for change, and whether it will adapt to this change with ease or difficulty.

Decision Making, Organizational↗