The authors offer six leadership tactics for spreading success across an organization based on IHI’s ongoing examination of this challenge:
• Set the expectation that leadership will keep asking about performance improvement and that staff cannot wait out this “flavor of the month.”
• Have a realistic understanding of change fatigue and how much process improvement the organization can do at once.
• Manage improvement for spread rather than catering methods to the best performers.
• Build in necessary redundancies in the system to catch lapses in spread.
• Create a visual display of coverage and completeness to track progress.
• Create half-life-type goals rather than finite targets so the organization does not become complacent once it achieves a target.
More Articles on Organizational Spread:
Spreading Ideas About Healthcare’s Future: Q&A With Dr. Kenneth Davis, President and CEO of The Mount Sinai Medical Center
14 Steps From Pilot to Large-Scale Improvement in Healthcare
5 Challenges to the Spread of ACOs
