Module 1: Sense of Urgency
Action Plan
Background
A great sense of urgency requires three components: a story, data, and vision.
- A powerful story grabs people’s attention and demands they listen.
- The story can be of a patient who had a bad outcome or someone who had a good outcome. It’s often more powerful if it’s a bad outcome but positive ones work as well to build positive energy. Sometimes
you’ll have both. A negative one in the beginning of the presentation and a positive one at the end to show how it could work if we all made the necessary changes.
- It should take less than 30 seconds or so to tell. A 5-minute story loses its impact.
- Stories, unfortunately, have a short half-life.
- People don’t remember them for long, and as such, they are not great long-term motivators of change.
- Also, while it may be attention grabbing it doesn’t speak to the scope of the problem. E.g., if this happened one time, 20 years ago, that is tragic but not enough to compel me to change my behavior.
- Data allows you to share the scope of the problem.
- A vision is your ideal future state. It’s what you aspire to become in the future—as a person, group, or organization.
- Great visions are aspirational (achieving greatness, things currently out of reach) and inspirational (motivate people to do try to attain it).
- Visions are not goals! Goals are achievable, concrete outcomes you strive to achieve IN PURSUIT OF THE VISION.
- Visions are generally not attainable. You will never be the achieve zero preventable harm (that’s a vision, not a goal) but you can certainly set goals that, when achieved, get you closer and closer to that vision.
- Most organizations have vision statements. Few have internalized them. Even fewer lead to them. This is one reason why change so often fails. To succeed you need to lead your change toward a powerful vision.
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