Innovative Decision Making in Healthcare

Book excerpt: Large, successful organizations only transform after failure. If everything is going well, there is a tendency not to challenge methods. It is only once things have gone radically wrong that a successful organization starts to reexamine their methods and culture. This book is about organizational leadership, but provides a unique spin to promoting innovation, inclusion and transparency among employees. It examines co-author Steven Rotkoff’s experiences as a retired US Army Colonel and Red Team strategies used by the military and the corporate world to make better decisions and improve organizational culture and applies them to nursing in both clinical and academic settings. Centering cases derived from US-based academic and clinical settings, the book discusses how and why some strategies do and others don’t work and examines how these military and corporate strategies apply effectively to nursing settings. Turning a lot of the available literature on its head, this book offers new models and methods to foster better conversations, particularly between managers and staff. Nursing has changed in both academic and clinical settings. Just as military and corporate organizations have had to change their organizational behavior and leadership styles and methods to meet the needs of today’s employees and consumers, the nursing profession must change to meet the needs of faculty, an inter-professional health care environment and our increasingly inclusive and diverse environments.