Risk Management is our Ability to Anticipate

Risk assessment is a pillar of the quality system because it gives us the ability to anticipate in a consistent manner. It is built on some fundamental criteria:

Criteria	Asks	Ensure
Expertise	What sort of expertise is relied upon to look into the future	Diversity in expertise. Drive out subjectivity
Frequency	How often are future threats and opportunities assessed?	Living risk assessments, cycles of review.
Communication	How are the expectations of future events communicated or shared within the system?	Risk register. Knowledge management. Continuous improvement. Management review
Strategy	What is the model of the future	Sensemaking
Time horizon	How far ahead does the system look ahead? Is the time horizon different for different organization areas?	System building
Acceptability of Risks	Which risks are considered acceptable and which unacceptable? On which basis?	Controls
Culture	Is risk awareness part of the organizational culture?	Risk-based-thinking. Mindset

Anticipation Criteria to apply to Risk Management

Engaging for Quality

When building a quality organization, we are striving to do three things: get employees (and executives) to feel the need for quality in their bones; get them to understand what quality is and why it is important; and build the process, procedure, and tools to make quality happen. Practitioners in change management often call this heart, head, and hands.

Engage the heart, head and hands to build a quality culture

In our efforts we strive to answer give major themes of questions about why building a culture of quality is critical.

Theme	Questions
Why	Why do we need quality? Why is it important? What are the regulatory expectations? What happens if we do nothing?
What	What results are expected for our patients? Our organization? Our people? What does out destination look and feel like?
How	How will we get there? What’s our plan and process? What new behaviors do we each need to demonstrate?
You	What do you need to fulfill your role in quality? What do we need from you?
Me	What do I commit to as a leader? What will I do to make change a reality? How will I support my team?

Five Themes of Change

The great part of this is that the principles of building a quality culture are the same mindsets we want embedded in our culture. By demonstrating them, we build and strengthen the culture, and will reap the dividends.

Be Preventative: What actions can be taken to prevent undesirable/unintended consequences with employees and other stakeholders. We do this by:

Involving end-users in the design process
Conduct risk assessments and lessons learned to predict possible failures
Ensure the reason for change is holistic and accounts for all internal and external obligations
Determine metrics as soon as possible
Focus on how the organization is responding to ongoing change
Think through how roles need to change and what employees need to be accountable for

Be Proactive: What actions can be taken to successfully meet objectives?

Participate in sensemaking
Establish habits and rituals
Provide role clarity
Provide learning opportunities
Make change social

Be Responsive: What evidence-based techniques can be used to respond to issues, including resistance?

Learn from mistakes and resistance
Apply learning
Rely on partnerships

This is all about leveraging the 8 change accelerators and effectively developing strategies for change.

Understanding the Levers of Change

As part of my presentation “Sustaining Change – Executing a Sustainability Plan” at the ASQ Lean and Six Sigma Conference tomorrow I’ll be talking about levers of change.

Change Management practitioners usually talk about seven levers:

Infrastructure – Investing in the tools, processes, and other resources that employees need to be successful with the change initiative.
Walk the Talk – active leadership is about ownership; it includes making the business case clear, modeling behaviors, clearing obstacles and making course corrections.
Reward and Recognition – acknowledgement and compensation for employees who work to move the initiative forward
Mass Exposure – getting out information about the change through broadcast messages and other communication pathways
Personal Contacts – creating opportunities for advocates to share their experience of the change with peers who feel disengaged
Outside advocates – bringing in resources (internal or external) to gain expertise for the change initiative
Shift Resisters – moving people to areas less affected by the initiative.