Welcome

Jim Guest

Good morning everyone. David, I thought you were terrific last night: Setting the tone for what we’re doing and why collaboration is so important. I especially loved the story of the Iroquois brave showing how five sticks together are stronger than one as indicative of what we’re doing here.

This is my second summit and what stands out for me is the goodwill I find. We’re coming here putting aside institutional demands and lobbying. It seems that we are all clear that the bottom line is to serve patients.

Thank you also for the poetry. I grew up in Hammermith, MA which some of you might know that is the home of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost wasn’t too far away either. I was inspired by that and will share a poem with you in a minute.

This group here is not a hierarchical structure and we need to put our conventional ways in the background and deal with the scenarios we made for the future. We need to understand that either we’re going to do this work or the regulators are going to do it for us.

When you listed the meta-characteristics of leadership, the first was courage. I see that here, that we have the courage to put aside past perceptions and be open-minded. We have to shift positions as the dialogue goes along. There is no particular organization that is leading this and we’re all here to collaborate.

I want to offer this poem by Emily Dickinson which always gives me a lift.

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses -- past the headlands --
Into deep Eternity --

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

            Emily Dickinson

We have to take risks, both professionally and personally. It may be scary to make this journey out to the deep sea, but it can also be exciting. I can’t be an optimist but I can have hope. I have hope that we will put aside our hats today and have the open dialogue.

I look forward to taking this journey out into the deep sea.

 

Michael Kaufman

Thank you, Jim.  Good morning everybody. I used the metaphor last night that once the event starts it’s like the ship leaving the dock and then I thought that ships need orientation and wanted to do that briefly today.

All of us are being oriented to new surroundings. Let’s orient our place where we come from throughout these summits. First we generated scenarios. We first had 35 scenarios and whittled them down to the ones which were most critical and most unpredictable.  In the second summit, we looked at the assurance of competence given the supposed reality of the scenarios. We had every single person in the room take their own time to imagine these scenarios. We said that maybe those would come true within 20 years. What we discovered last January is that some of those scenarios are already coming to pass. We don’t have as big a time frame as we thought.

The purpose of this whole thing is how we can maintain self-regulation. Right now that’s how we do this, bug if the scenarios prove to be true, we may not have that anymore.

We also decided it would be nice if we had a common language to discuss these things. From that, the idea of a good medical practice document emerged and then the idea of a national alliance. We had some of the groups look at what those things would look like and put some meat on the bones. As soon as those had some life, a third idea popped up which is the trusted agent. In Summit 4, those ideas were worked.

Prior to formalizing these ideas, we had a discovery workshop to have some scientists and other experts around complex adaptive systems and group decision making. There are some implications to the national alliance because of those discussions.

Does anyone want to say anything else towards the context of this?

I mentioned last night that some of the things in this summit will be different, but this first exercise will be similar. I’ll pass out this team list and you have an exercise. This assignment is extremely short. We want you to reconnect with the work from the discovery workshop.

The assignment is if there were to be guiding principles for the alliance as it moves forward, what would you want them to be?

 

 

 

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