Beyond the ingredients and skills needed for a team to become collectively intelligence is the creation of a supportive environment. Team members must forgo their competitive spirit (at least with one another). A culture of individualism and individual gain must be discouraged. On the positive side is the critical role played by a culture of collaboration.
Members of the team must be willing (even eager) to work with one another. They must find gratification in the relationships established with other team members and enjoy the collegiality that comes with “winning” as a team rather than as an individual. Most importantly, as conveyed in the portrayal of the Empowerment Pyramid, team members must appreciate the strengths shown by one another as well as the moments when they are effective at communicating, managing conflict, solving problems and making decisions. We once again introduce the appreciative motto: “Catch them [us] when they [we] are doing it right!”
Turbulence and Contradiction in Healthcare
What does emergence look like in a healthcare setting? When do several things that seem separate begin to dance to life and create new and surprising outcomes that might baffle and un-nerve traditional healthcare leaders? Covid-19, of course, represents just such a surprise. We see viruses all the time, they are ubiquitous in our lives through colds, the flu, herpes, HIV, etc. We generally see contagious epidemics on the TV, happening in other countries and have world-renowned experts who advise them on how to manage their epidemics.
We might get a little scared when one flies to our country like Ebola, yet most of the suffering and death happens “out there.” We normalize the deaths of our endemic contagions—yep another flu season, yawn. The emergence of Covid-19 is still hotly debated, was it a Chinese Death virus created in a lab and unleashed on the world to cripple the west? Or was it because of climate change and development into previous bat-lands leading to unprecedented mixtures of species and natural mutations that formulated this devastating pandemic.
A pandemic is an emergent phenomenon that likely requires thousands of things to all fall in place in a certain way that, thankfully, doesn’t happen all the time. Like a 100-year storm, some high-turnover, high-mutation-rate, moderate-killer virus is created and suddenly our entire world is shoved into a new and unstable, VUCA-Plus reality for everyone on the planet. Just looking at the DNA sequence of the virus, no one could predict how it would fundamentally alter reality for years, perhaps decades. This microscopic virus emerged and traditional healthcare, traditional public health, traditional life was not ready.
Nor were our leaders, surprised, baffled, we dithered and dithered. Yet we also acted with lightning speed to create the most effective, rapid vaccination development response to a pandemic virus in history. With emergence came polarity—mask vs no mask, social distance vs no social distance, conspiracy theories vs best evidence, truly effective treatments vs quackery. Entire societies dithered and squabbled about the right pathway forward.
