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Maintaining focus and motivation within many health and human service-sector roles can be difficult. Clients continue to show up with issues that demand care and attention often without the means for practitioners to follow-up afterwards. It can be demoralizing. It can also be a source of frustration and low performance (as well as a means of encouraging people to leave the field).

In an article on Censemaking, we outlined the progress principle and how monitoring and evaluation data can contribute to staff motivation and performance, particularly in settings like healthcare where many professionals are simply in a ‘reaction and transaction‘ mode of service. They’re just trying to get things done, but often don’t see progress toward a bigger goal, which is what is among the top motivators and sources of job satisfaction for workers of all types.

In this first article, we look at monitoring and evaluation systems as a means of enhancing motivation, strategy and supporting both staff and organizations in making progress on bigger goals. We will elaborate on these in future articles.

Designing Data Systems for Progress

Capturing progress is important for individuals and groups for many reasons. Creating evaluation and monitoring systems that support this comes down to a few short, simple, non-technical things:

1. Identify what moves people
2. Emphasize light touch and nimble over sophisticated and inflexible
3. Create a pathway and process to connect data collection, sensemaking, and use
4. Evaluate (and repeat)

The technical aspects of this—the measurements and tools, data systems, and analytical plans—are secondary considerations (for the purposes here). If you don’t get these first four things right, you’ll just be designing technical monitoring systems. There’s nothing different that will come from it.

A monitoring and evaluation system is an interconnected set of actions, activities, and relationships. In this case, it’s connecting the reasons why people engage in health systems work with a mechanism to learn from the activities in that work. The system is then designed to illuminate pathways and processes to link the work, the activities performed, the outputs and outcomes associated with that, and indicate where the impact is.

The main purpose is to align what you do with where you’re going and what impact you have, using data from your practice.

Innovation and Learning Systems

The last part of this is to evaluate the work that you’re doing. It may take time to determine the specific qualities of the work, the role(s) that people play, and the particular jobs to be done (what people do in service of their roles). The specific aspects of this will be highlighted in the next article in the series.

This is part of an innovation and learning system. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just needs to allow you as a leader to answer the questions: 1) what is going on? 2) what influence are my staff having on health problems and patient/client care? 3) how do I know? and 4) how can I tell this story to others?

Lastly, it’s asking how I can take this and use it to improve, maintain, or transform what we do?

That’s what an innovation and learning system is. If you set this up, you’re set.

(We’ll look at that in the coming articles in this series). In the meantime, reach out if you want to chat about how we can help you build this within your practice.

References (For Further Reading)

• Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press. https://hbr.org/product/the-progress-principle-using-small-wins-to-ignite-joy-engagement-and-creativity-at-work/13361-HBK-ENG
• Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The power of small wins. Harvard Business Review, 89(5), 70-80. https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins
• George, G., & Rhodes, B. (2018). Why do people become health workers? Analysis from life histories in four post-conflict and post-crisis contexts. Global Health, 14, 92. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-018-0414-1​PubMed Central
• Maharaj, S. (2017). What Motivated Students to Choose a Career in Health Sciences? A Mixed Methods Study at the University of the Free State, South Africa. The Open Public Health Journal, 11(1), 44-53. https://doi.org/10.2174/1874944501811010044​The Open Public Health Journal
• Tamayose, T. S., Madjidi, F., Schmieder-Ramirez, J., & Rice, G. T. (2004). Important Factors When Choosing a Career in Public Health. Californian Journal of Health Promotion, 2(1), 65-73.​ResearchGate
• Mittelman, M., & Beckwith, K. (2024). 7 Reasons To Get A Job In Public Health. NurseJournal.org. https://nursejournal.org/healthcare/public-health/reasons-to-get-a-job-in-public-health/​NurseJournal.org
• Gage, A. (2021). Guide to a Career in Public Health Research. Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. https://publichealth.tulane.edu/blog/public-health-research/​School of Public Health
• Al-Harahsheh, S. T., & Al-Sheyab, N. A. (2024). From decision to destination: factors influencing healthcare students in Qatar to pursue healthcare careers. BMC Medical Education, 24, 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-04636-1​

Image Credit: Getty (used under license), Chat GPT

One of the myths of innovation is that something has to be new. It doesn’t. Something only needs to be new in context. This means that an old idea brought forth into a different or refreshed context can be innovative. For example, home visits and care by health practitioners have become innovative ways to address healthcare resource constraints. This approach to medicine and care is a very old way of working that was largely abandoned in the 20th century.

Perspective-taking and making is about seeing our present context through different factors. One method we use in our work is to look at an organization’s history and inventory of skills and knowledge to see what has been learned in the past (and potentially lost, forgotten, or ignored) that can bring fresh insights into the present.

An organization’s most unique value is its experience. No other organization- its people, resources, and accomplishments- has what it has. This can be ignored. To illustrate, a particular organization might operate within a market with many competitors or collaborators, but none will know or experience certain things. These things might be tied to physical location, staffing, timing of production, or something else. These experiences are often taken for granted but can benefit an organization seeking to grow, evolve, or pivot within a specific situation.

Implementation

This exercise can be done with an external consultant or a familiar person/group that knows the organization/team/people of interest but exists outside of it. That external individual or agent should be either at arm’s length, unfamiliar with the situation, or disconnected from the present context. To illustrate, consider a past mentor or teacher, a former collaborator, or a colleague from an outside firm. These are individuals who know enough about what you do but see what you do slightly differently than you do.

Engage them in a discussion about the present situation and approach the conversation as one of seeking perspective. Ask this individual or group:

1. What does this look like to you?
2. What opportunities do you see for me?
3. What can I do to address this situation wisely?
4. What assets or skills am I neglecting to use in approaching this situation?

The external person is more likely to see things that you don’t because they are less invested in the present situation while being invested in you. This gives them a greater or different set of options because their stakes are lower. They are less constrained by fear, bias, excitement, or perceived constraints than you are. This allows them to see some things more clearly while also drawing on their knowledge about you.

If you are engaging a consultant, they should spend time ahead of this exercise familiarizing themselves with the work you do, your history, and even interview or consult with people who are familiar with your work. They will combine their subject matter or process expertise with this information to help provide those different perspectives. This is the value of a different perspective.

This is how we approach our work with clients and it’s how you can be of value to those just outside your own circle.

Try this out, the perspectives you’ll see will help you escape a rut, a see new possibilities.

If you want help with this, let’s talk.

Image Credit: Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

The post Perspective Taking and Making appeared first on Cense Ltd. .

If you are looking to make a change and demonstrate it to others, there’s one thing you must do: capture your baseline.

A baseline is your starting point. It can be done with whatever available data you have – the more specific, detailed and well-fitting, the better. However, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the necessary.

Change is only understood as a from-to relationship. A situation starts as one thing and then changes to another. Too often, we see (and hear) people speaking of change in retrospect. We only understand change retrospectively, but it has to related to some starting point.

If you’re looking to initiate change, document what things are like before you start. This might mean measuring the presence of something (e.g., resources, sales figures, client service visits, etc..) or taking observations. Details help because it helps capture the specific aspects of the thing you want to change.

Our recommendation: take stock of what data you have on what you want to see change. Gather what you have to the best of your ability and consider what can be compared over time. Change is a comparison of like things — numbers to numbers, experiences to experiences, observations to observations etc.. You can always add additional layers of data gathering over time.

We would rather see an organization take action with limited data to start with than wait to have the perfect or ideal dataset in place. Look around, see what you have and use that as your baseline.

When you tell the story of change, that will be what you start with.

Are you unsure of what you have? We’ll bet you have much more data than you realize, and we can help you use that to capture stories of change over time. Let’s talk about how we can help you.

Photo by arvin keynes on Unsplash

The post Capture Your Baseline For Change-Making appeared first on Cense Ltd. .

Strategic planning describes a lot of what we do, yet we don’t use the term strategic planning to describe our approach. Instead, our focus is on strategic thinking. Here’s why you might want to do the same.

Strategic planning is used as a structured way to transform goals into action plans and frame decisions. That’s the shorthand. It’s now so popular that you’ll find strategic planning done within organizations large and small and is often considered a prerequisite for receiving funding or investment.

Yet, strategic planning is often done poorly — not by method but style. It’s not fit for purpose or designed for the conditions it is meant to serve. That has much to do with its history.

Strategic Planning: A Short History

Strategic planning has its roots in military strategy and has evolved as something that’s now a core part of organizational management in corporate, healthcare, non-profits and foundations.

1. Early Military Origins: The origins of strategic planning can be traced back to ancient civilizations. Military leaders, such as Sun Tzu in ancient China and Carl von Clausewitz in 19th-century Prussia, developed principles and techniques for strategic thinking and planning in warfare. Their works emphasized the importance of assessing the environment, understanding the enemy, and aligning resources effectively.
2. Industrial Revolution and Business Strategy: The concept of strategic planning began to find its way into the business world during the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As industrialization increased competition, companies started adopting strategies to gain a competitive edge. Key figures like Alfred Sloan of General Motors and Henry Ford played significant roles in shaping early business strategy.
3. Post-World War II: The aftermath of World War II saw a shift in strategic planning. Military planning techniques, such as scenario planning, were adapted for business use. This expanded over the following decades and saw the introduction of formalized processes like SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and the Boston Consulting Group’s growth-share matrix.
4. Emergence of Strategic Management: In the 1980s and 1990s, strategic planning evolved into strategic management. The focus shifted from a rigid, long-term planning approach to a more flexible, adaptive, and ongoing strategic management process. Scholars like Michael Porter and Gary Hamel significantly contributed to strategic management theories during this period. In the 2000’s Agile and lean methodologies, as well as the concept of disruptive innovation emerged along with an increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and stakeholder engagement in strategic decision-making.

Understanding where strategic planning comes from aids us in framing where we are and what comes next with strategic planning.

Strategic Design for Strategic Planning

Strategy is about going from here to there. It helps you figure out where ‘here’ is and where is ‘there’, explores ways to get from one to the other, and embeds a means to tell the story of your journey and know where you are.

That’s it.

This is a design issue. As designers, we look to shape things and an organizational journey is no different. We design it by asking certain questions about and exploring where an organization is:

1. What do you have (assets, people, resources, etc.)
2. What is your situation? Look at the context, climate, unique and shared challenges of the organization and the opportunities to act. Where are the constraints, pressures, and demands on your energy?
3. What are your needs, challenges, desires, and wants? Looking at these collectively helps align different aspects of an organization’s aspirations and concerns together. The work here is defining what goals you want to pursue and what you value and is valued.
4. What do the present, emerging, and longer-term futures look like? This means conducting environmental scans and foresight analyses to ensure you’re designing for the emerging future rather than planning for a past present. This failure to anticipate appropriately is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make.
5. What are the outputs, outcomes and influence (impact) of importance? This is your evaluation plan and looks at what measures, metrics, tools, and approaches best fit with helping you attend to what you’re doing, assist in decision-making, and demonstrate success.
6. How will you learn and adapt? This frames the data you gather — the things you pay attention to — and the way you connect that to your situations and goals and decide what to do while you’re doing it.
7. How might you connect all of this? Strategic design means fitting the plans to the purpose to achieve certain outcomes.

Putting all of this together is where strategic thinking comes in.

Strategic thinking is the mindset you bring to all of this. It’s about knowing yourself, wayfinding (knowing where you are and want to go), and an openness to learning.

Strategic Planning for Living Systems

The fault in traditional strategic planning is a mindset that assumes were are operating in a controlled system where we can produce, measure, and control things with high reliability over time. This implies systems that are stable, predictable, and without many extraneous factors. Think of an industrial factory. Much strategic planning in human systems has been done with this mindset, and it’s had detrimental effects.

While there is evidence that strategic planning can moderate effects on performance, much of that requires a strict set of parameters. In other words, we need to design-in narrow boundaries and methods. That might work for some organizations and situations with more closely connected ties between activities, outputs, and outcomes — (e.g., surgical delivery, service wait times). It’s far more difficult when those outcomes and outputs are tied to more complex, unpredictable things (e.g., public health practices, applied learning).

But as others have noted, we no longer live in industrial times. Most human service organizations are dealing with complexity. We don’t work the same way, and work conditions and the employment and skills markets are changing dramatically. We have rapidly evolving tools to shape work, and the environmental conditions — from COVID to wildfire smoke or extreme weather — are substantially different from year to year.

None of these factors support traditional 5-year planning cycles using traditional methods.

Planning now involves complexity considerations. Words like resilience, adaptation, learning, innovation, collaboration, co-creation, and flexibility are now part of the conversation around planning. This is a different way of planning, and it can be designed into your organization. It has to be designed in if it’s to work.

This requires the enrolment of your teams, boards, senior leaders, and the entire organization. It involves systems to learn, evaluation plans that respond, and principles to guide the process.

Yet, it is possible. It also makes your organization more resilient and your plans more feasible, realistic and effective in helping you get from here to there.

Developing Strategic Thinking and the Adaptive Mindset

Here are some simple ways to build this mindset. It’s simple, but not always easy without help.

Developing an open, flexible, and adaptive growth mindset involves cultivating certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that support continuous learning, resilience, and personal development. Here are some key elements involved in developing such a mindset:

1. Embrace a Learning Orientation: Adopt a mindset that sees challenges, failures, and setbacks as opportunities for growth and learning. Understand that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and practice.
2. Emphasize the Power of Yet: Use the word “yet” to reframe limitations as temporary and view them as opportunities for improvement. For example, instead of saying “I can’t do this,” say “I can’t do this yet, but I’m working on it.”
3. Develop Self-Awareness: Reflect on your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Recognize your fixed mindset triggers (e.g., fear of failure, seeking validation) and consciously shift your thinking towards a growth mindset.
4. Embrace Challenges: Welcome challenges that push you out of your comfort zone. Embracing challenges helps you develop new skills and fosters a mindset of continuous improvement.
5. Cultivate Resilience: Understand that setbacks and failures are a natural part of the learning process. Focus on bouncing back from setbacks, learning from them, and persevering despite difficulties.
6. Emphasize Effort and Process: Recognize the importance of effort, hard work, and effective strategies in achieving success. Shift the focus from outcomes to the journey, and celebrate progress and effort rather than just the end result.
7. Embrace Feedback: Be open to receiving feedback and view it as an opportunity to learn and grow. Actively seek feedback from others and use it to identify areas for improvement.
8. Foster Curiosity: Ask questions regularly and often. Approaching your situations like a child might can help because we’ll ask questions, rather than presume answers.
9. Develop a Growth-Oriented Network: Surround yourself with individuals who have a growth mindset and who support and encourage your development. Engage in discussions and collaborations that challenge your thinking and inspire growth.
10. Practice Self-Reflection: Regularly reflect on your progress, achievements, and areas where you can further develop a growth mindset. Consider journaling, meditation, or other self-reflective practices to deepen your self-awareness.

Remember that developing a growth mindset is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort and self-reflection. By intentionally cultivating these elements, you can foster an open, flexible, and adaptive mindset that supports your personal and professional growth.

Strategic planning helps direct our focus. A good strategic plan, developed with complexity and living systems in mind, can help us find, clarify, and achieve that focus and connect your here to a better, more sustainable there.

We work with organizations and their leaders to design and implement strategic plans that are fit for purpose. If you want help in designing for the future and success, contact us; we can help.

The post Strategic Thinking for Strategic Planning appeared first on Cense Ltd. .

Seeing into the future is fraught with creative issues. While we might know about a future opportunity or situation, what might it feel like? What would it look like if we could ‘try on’ a decision before we bought it?

We can.

The idea of Identity Dress-Up is a simple visualization exercise that brings together foresight, futures thinking, behavioural science and design. It does this by getting you to ‘try on’ the outcomes of a decision. For example, could you imagine that you achieved a particular goal? Let’s say it was to serve a new clientele for your agency — what would success look like? What would it feel like? What would have had to be in place in your organization for that to have happened?

Take some time to imagine this and challenge yourself (and your team) to add detail to this imagination and explore its assumptions.

We’ve found that sometimes our clients don’t want that future after ‘trying it on.’ It happens all the time: we get the thing we’ve strived for and realize we didn’t really want it after all.

More often, organizations begin to see what it will take to get to this vision. This is where the strategic design process comes in. By setting up your preferred future first, you can then walk back from there to the present to determine what needs to be in place and how it needs to be organized to set yourself up for success.

Identity Design

We act as we see ourselves. This process is so effective because it provides us with a safe way to change how we see ourselves without having to make substantive changes – yet. Trying on ideas helps socialize the idea of change and allows us to see the pros and cons of it and make it feel more familiar. The more familiar it is, the more likely we are able to consider it, adopt it, and design for it.

Just like a kid playing dress up, we can do the same and fit our fantasies and hopes for the future on with what we experience in the present.

This is a simple, fun, and powerful exercise that can be done in a short amount of time. We explain this in short, below.

If you need or would like help doing it, we can help – let’s talk. Good luck!

Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

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