Julianne Morath, Vice President, Quality
Minneapolis, Minnesota
September, 1995

Results - whether customer satisfaction, process outcomes or service excellence - are dependent on an organization's ability to learn, to innovate, and to redesign its work in response or anticipation of what is happening in the environment. The ability of an organization to do this is based on the quality of its decision-making and the ability of its people to work together. We believe that the quality of decision-making stems from The five disciplines of a learning organization, as articulated by Peter Senge. Central to those five disciplines is personal mastery - knowing one's self - and that is the work of HUMAN DYNAMICS.

Our organization at Allina is large and complex. We are an integrated health service network which consists of providers (physicians, nurses, therapists, and alternative therapy providers), delivery systems (clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, and community sites), and products, which are the health plans. We have twenty thousand employees, almost nine thousand physicians, twelve hospitals, six managed hospitals, two nursing homes, fifty-five clinics, and one million people enrolled in our health plan. Our total revenues exceed 1.8 billion. Our ability to deal with diversity and complexity is absolutely essential.

We have merged several times in the last few years. As a result we face a challenge of cultural integration. People are coming together from all parts of the organization, from many different disciplines and positions, to focus on what they have in common. HUMAN DYNAMICS provides us with an integrating force for working with the fundamental essence of being human and how individuals operate. It is through this kind of awareness that we have been able to be more effective in doing boundary work, to more effectively tell the truth, to more effectively confront our differences, and to explore the things we have in common that can help us move the work forward.

Additionally, we are widening our vision of ourselves. We have begun to transform from a health care organization, attending primarily to the treatment of the sick, into a recognized innovator in community health improvement. Without abandoning our obligation to the sick, we need to move upstream - to try to identify ways to prevent illness or any decline in function. This shift has required us to think in new ways and to come together in new ways.

In these unprecedented times we acknowledge that our competitive advantage lies in our human capital - our collective intellect. It is really a two-fold advantage. The first comes in being able to learn what we need to be good at faster than anyone else. The second advantage is a level of service excellence: an ability to relate to people and work with them to understand and manage their experience of care or service. This requires a strong relational base - the ability to know another person - and Human Dynamics is an essential foundational piece for that.