“Why focus on moonshot thinking? Isn’t it enough to work harder to collectively solve problems to make the progress we need?  Actually, no, not really. Because we might be solving the wrong problems.”

Astro Teller, CEO of Google X

It’s easier to make something 10% better than it is to make something 10X better. Why? Because tinkering with problems and adding to already existing models for improvement around a definition of a problem that has already been defined might be all about solving the wrong problem. Making something 10X better requires bravery, creativity and effort way beyond our comfortable reach.

This is where moonshot thinking comes in. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at Google [x] thinks that moonshots can be recognised by three components:

1. Choosing a big problem that has existed for a long time;
2. Articulating a radical solution that if it existed would solve the problem – a solution that might seem crazy
3. Finding some evidence that the solution is not quite as crazy as it sounds; something that suggests it deserves at least a close look.

When Freerthinking teamed up with AIPFCC to think about the long standing and deeply tragic problem of workplace bullying and intimidation we proposed a radical solution: kindness and respect articulated across the healthcare culture. We found evidence that suggested that kinder healthcare teams were actually safer. We invited others to work with us to find ways of realising a solution.

The Gathering of Kindness is our moonshot.

Two days, 100 people, talking and listening, developing possible ways forward; mapping out the terrain and all the while re-naming the problem and testing solutions.

Every day as we move closer to the 31st March I have more reasons to trust that this process will be worth every moment of our time.  I applaud those people who have registered to attend this event and who even now are preparing themselves for the work ahead of them.

“So we should make sure those who have been brave enough to enter this kind of race have us there beside them … Celebrating the audacity itself, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed.”

Astro Teller

Putting our hand up to be part of radical change isn’t easy. The easy bit is to scoff, or dismiss. That requires no action and risks nothing. But showing up, saying ‘I’m in’ before there is any hint of success – that’s the team I want to be on.

I love rituals. Every January I take the opportunity to re-focus and to claim the next 12 months, like a potter claims her clay. I look ahead and ask myself what will I make of this year? What shape will I create ? What impact will I make? Where will I devote my energy?

Of course there will be unpredictable, crazy winds of change. There will be births and deaths. There will be re-structures and amalgamations. Things will end and things will appear, as if from nowhere. But in all of this where will my attention be?

I have a ritual every new year where I choose a word. A word that captures a value or characteristic that I most want to grow in the following 12 months. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years now. Let me give you an example. One year I chose the word gratitude. I chose this word because I wanted to explore how gratitude works for me. I wanted to feel a greater sense of appreciation and wonder at the abundance in my life. I started out taking a moment to feel grateful each day.  I started to notice things that I hadn’t seen before and I felt a little bubble of something rise up inside my chest. I realised it was gratitude. As I got the hang of it I started to notice times when I didn’t feel gratitude, I felt the complete opposite. I would quietly move in closer at those times and look more carefully.

To be completely honest I loved exploring gratitude so much I chose it two years in a row. There are no rules. One year I chose a question instead of a word. My question was What would love do? I would ask myself that question many times throughout the week as I made decisions. You’d be surprised how useful and revealing that question is.

Last year I chose the word connection. I asked myself questions about how my connections impacted on me and how I could increase the value for others. I started to explore what it might be like for the people on the other end of the connection. After a while I started to experience a sense of greater belonging, as if I had found my own space in the world fully connected to everything around me.

I discovered that there are more ways of being connected than I realised at first. I found time to let people know they were in my thoughts. I would send a simple sms when I thought about a colleague or a friend. When I look back over the last year I can see all the joint projects that grew for me. I started to think more creatively about partnering with others to make great things happen.

“Words, in my humble opinion, are the most inexhaustible source of magic we have.”

Anon

I’m inviting you to join me in 2016 and choose a word. I’d love to know what your word is and how it’s going for you. To help you get started here are a few things that I found helpful as I got the hang of this ritual.

1. Don’t feel you have to rush into choosing your word. Let it emerge. Think about a characteristic you’d like to grow or explore. It doesn’t have to be something you lack. It could be a value or characteristic that you think you have a handle on but you’d like to become even more friendly with.

2. You don’t have to share your word if you don’t want to. It can be a secret little charm that you keep to yourself or it can be something that you share openly with your friends and family. This can be helpful if you hang with the sort of people who will offer you lots of encouragement. Remember this is your word and you chose it because it was important to you. Treat your word kindly and take care of it so it will last you through the year.

3. Be playful. It’s not all serious work. I’ve had lots of fun with my words. What you’re trying to do here is to learn more about a characteristic or value – you’re not trying to beat yourself up. This isn’t a competition. Think of it more like a lens to help you focus.

4. If you like to write then jot down in your journal some thoughts about what you’re learning. If you think a monthly reminder on your iPhone will help you stay on track then pop the word in your calendar. You will likely discover some new ways of staying on track and I hope you will share them with me.

Enjoy your word and may 2016 be a year of discovery for you.

Mary Freer

Why not follow the path that is beckoning you? Why not acknowledge that you are already on your way home? David Whyte Three Marriages: Re-imagining Work Self and Relationship

Today I found myself out on the ledge. Have you ever felt that rising tide of panic that starts somewhere way down deep inside you with the whisper “this will never work” and before long has you wondering where all your courage has gone? I had one of those moments at work today. It wasn’t beautiful.

I sat for some frozen moments, very still, and watched as my mind reeled out of control. One thought jumped to the next, and they all had failure written all over them. Before long old fears had surfaced, as if called to be witness to the prosecution. Oh yes, they knew of other times when things had gone badly.

I let the mind wander for a while and then decided it was time to reel it in. There was a conversation to be had; with myself. I settled back in my seat and the first thought that came to me was “arms wide open”. When we open our arms wide we can’t hold onto anything, our soft heart is exposed and our head held high. It’s an exultant position, a position more suited to the tightrope than a hiking trail. Nothing protected, ready for whatever happens next.

There is always a soft joy available to me in those moments. A completely vulnerable open moment of letting go and breathing. In this small moment I allowed myself to feel the fear and the vulnerability. This is not uncommon territory for anyone who chooses to do work that is radical. Being willing to work in a way that is open, that doesn’t hold on to ideas, that invites everyone to be part of the change we are creating is not an easy way to work. It is a dance with uncertainty. It requires us to be brave and tenacious while at the same time being humble and intuitive. It is a balancing act.

“A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of  insanity to keep it alive.”

David Whyte

I’m often asked about resilience and the place it plays in my work. I think finding ourselves in the grip of a crisis of confidence and talking ourselves back from the brink is resilience. Not being at all sure of the path but taking the next step is resilience. Reaching out and letting others know that we feel uncertain is resilience.

I’m back on solid ground. I’ve decided to step back on the rope and keep those arms wide open.

*Thank you to my dear friend who got my phone message from the edge saying ‘can we talk for 10 minutes’ and called me back with a cheery voice that was ready to hear anything. I was reminded of Emily Dickinson ” I felt it shelter to speak with you”.

“There’s never been more pressure to kind of parcel yourself… It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places. Even just to feel like you’re showing up as your whole self in different settings is a pretty rebellious act.”

Courtney Martin – Do It Anyway

I’m on the road again. This time beautiful Wellington. Last night I lay in my hotel bed, far from home, listening to the sound of rain falling against a tin roof, drumming me to sleep.

I’ve spent much of my life, like most of us who live in the industrialised world, struggling with  how to work well, live well and love well. I’ve never felt comfortable with the idea that I need to find a balance, to measure each section of my life up and weigh them out with fairness. Giving each equal attention as if they were small children pulling against me for more. Is it too simplistic to expect that our whole round lives can be so easily sliced up and kept in balance? I think so. I find it exhausting to try and hold everything in balance. I find it invites me to resentment and disappointment and has me wanting to give up on one to focus on the other.

I really warm to David Whyte’s sense of Work, Self and Others as being a marriage and a conversation. Each one informing the other and at times stretching and pushing the other to go further and be more.

These past few years I have given so much of myself to my work, at times feeling that my whole self was being consumed by my efforts to create some improvement in healthcare. But when I look more closely I had really given my whole self to life. I had opened my arms wide as I inched out onto this tightrope and let myself be ready for whatever happened next.  I discovered that I belong to myself.

“Work is a constant invisible question, sometimes nagging, sometimes cajoling, sometimes emboldening me; at its best beckoning me to follow a particular star to which I belong.”

David Whyte

The more I understood that I belong to myself and that my whole life and my whole self could not be separated, the more I started to show up in tact. Fully showing up is a radical act that brings about such a fundamental shift in our connection with others. Fully showing up at work and at home and with ourselves in one of the most powerful ways we can enact change. It doesn’t mean showing up as a super-hero – it means showing up in all your vulnerability and following your purpose.

Our work as radicals and social activists is not about producing things, it is about discovering what the world wants from us and what we in turn want from the world.

Three things stand out for me over the past 7 days. I started a new yoga class, I watched Don Berwick deliver an extraordinary paper at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, 2015 and I started reading Atul Gawande’s book On Being Mortal. What all those things have in common is open-heartedness.

As I lay on my yoga mat on the board floor of a local church hall listening to my new yoga teacher’s thick Dublin accent I set my intention: to keep an open and soft heart. The spirit of Yoga rarely comes easily for me. I engage in a constant pull towards perfection and improvement. While a softer voice reminds me about the value and integrity of each pose.

And so, it was with this start to my week that I encountered  Atul Gawande and a day or so later, Don Berwick.

Atul Gawande speaks of the relationship of giving and receiving healthcare as :

A human being coming to another human being with their body or their mind’s troubles and looking for their assistance. And that is the central act of medicine.

According to Gawande we have 30 different organ systems and at latest count we have  60,000 ways they can go awry. It is perhaps the enormity of those numbers that drives us towards the shelter of regulations and policies. But there is no shelter there. We need to embrace fully the at times frightening world of purpose and connection. We must throw ourselves into a way of working and living where we value and revere the commitments that we make to the colleagues we work with and to people we deliver care to. Where we push ourselves to do so much better because there is no other choice.   This way of living and working connects us to the  joy and the open-hearted sense of purpose and  meaning in our work. It sees us celebrating the connections between the people.

Don Berwick so eloquently described the invitation that the harsh world of healthcare is offering to us as leaders:

The world is inviting you to cynicism. The tools that you’ll notice in your hands first in that world are laws and regulations, and compensation systems and budgets, dicta and  fear,  measurement, standards, measurement, measurement, measurement.

They are seductive. They make you think you can mandate improvement, that you can command knowledge growth, that you can require excellence. They are deceiving you. You cannot. Of course laws matter, regulations matter, compensation, budgets, policies, they all  matter.  Standards can help. Measurement can help. Control can help. But only in proper proportion and only if they don’t harm. Only  if they  avoid waste in time and ideas and spirit . Only if they maintain deep respect for how complex the real work is and how good at heart the real people are.

Thirty years in the vineyards of improvement  have taught  me how impoverished, how blunt, how inaccurate, yes abusive, the tools of inspection and incentives are without deep understanding and respectful action regarding the nature and the sources of interdependent human achievement. (Don Berwick)  International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, 2015.

We need to decline, at every offer, the invitation to cynicism and renew our commitment to open-heartedness. I’m going to renew this commitment on the yoga mat again this week.

What’s the one tiny thing you could do right now that would have you dancing with fear ? What’s the thing that would have you feeling a slightly nervous, ‘ gosh I hope this works out’, maybe I need to wait for someone else to do this first, kind of feeling. That’s your ‘edge’. I’ve found my edge this last year and now I want to own it.

But to find my edge I had to ask myself some hard questions.

Q. What am I more afraid of : settling or not giving it my best?

A. Settling definitely.

Q. What is my work ?

A. To have more impact.

Q. Who can I give to, more often, and  how do i figure out how to do the giving I am afraid of more often?

A. I am not my resume,  #WorkIsNotAJob. I am committed to making a beautiful ruckus.

Seth Godin encourages us to

Get better at dancing at fear – then the world gets to see that there is this person that loves dancing with fear and they are good at and people start lining up at the door.

Well, this is a blog that invites you to find your edge and start dancing.

Here are my 7 useful tips for doing that dance:

1. Everyone feels like a fraud sometimes.
2. Dancing requires you to be creative and brave. Sometimes you will stand on someone’s foot.
3. Make a date with 5 or 6 others and agree to meet every fortnight to show each other the thing you have started. Commit to showing up and producing something new.
4. Commit yourself to doing one thing everyday that stretches you – even if it’s brushing your teeth standing on one leg. Just do something.
5. Open your arms and say hello to your fear, don’t hide behind the sofa. Come out and get to know each other.
6. Agree that your purpose is a parachute, follow your purpose and it will carry you.
7. Be unbelievably kind to yourself. Be as kind to yourself as you would be to a dear friend.

Now you are dancing with fear, out on your edge. Own it. It’s yours.

We hear a call for radical action from leaders across the globe. The Chief Executive of the NHS England has called for ‘the unleashing of creative energy and the mobilising of collective action’ for change. David Bennett, the CEO of Monitor has said “if the NHS is to continue to deliver the universal health service to which we are all committed it needs to turbo-charge changes in the way healthcare is delivered to patients.”  //media.nhsiq.nhs.uk/whitepaper/index.html

In many countries around the world, including here in Australia, a catalyst for frontline led change is building with the emergence of Change Day movements. The inspiration for these radical movements has come from the amazing example of the NHS Change Day.

If you’re not familiar with Change Day Australia here is a very short video of our amazing achievements in 2014 (0nly 170 seconds)   //www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgP56-n5ZWQ

I like to say that we created Change Day Australia from  “6 inches of string and some sticky tape”. People always smile at the sheer ingenuity of that achievement. We all love to hear a story about how we can do something great with nothing, especially in Australia where we applaud the ‘the hard working battler’. But I’m starting to realise that the story about the string and the sticky tape doesn’t do justice at all to what it really took to create Change Day here in Australia. Sure we had nothing but it’s no mean feat to make something from nothing.

It’s absolutely true that we have not received any funding from anyone, no sponsorship, no government grant, no philanthropic gifts. We took the nothing that we had and then we emptied our pockets and put everything we had on the table and then some more. Some days I got  flat and really tired and felt like giving it away, but I didn’t. We kept going and we told each other that it would work.

At the same time I was working on Change Day my brother-law became very unwell. We knew he would not have long to live. One time I visited him and the staff had left his half empty jug of water out of his reach and he had no strength to sit up and stretch for it. He had not had a drink of water for a number of hours and it was a very warm Australian summer. His lips were cracked and his bed was soiled. I kept going with Change Day because I know we can do better.  I want all of us to connect with the values that brought us into this work in the first place.

We all held tight to this idea that when people heard about Change Day they would make a pledge. We knew that every pledge would make a difference, and it has.

When Change Day finally came around and the pledges started rolling in, first hundreds and then thousands we knew we had created something worthwhile. We knew we had found our people and we could build a movement.  A movement of people who were as committed to a better outcome for those who use health and community care services.

“When things fall apart, the hopelessly radical becomes common sense.”

Charles Eisentstein

Now we are embarking on Change Day 2015 on 11th March, only this time we have nothing left in our pockets to put on the table and we don’t know how much wider we can open our arms. We know we can’t empty the ocean with a cup.

This is why we have decided to crowdfund. We are asking you, if you have  anything in your pockets that you can put on the table to grow this campaign. We need everyone who believes that a better outcome is possible to come on board and join us. We need you to be creating Change Day in your organisations in March. We need your energy and your enthusiasm. We need your emails and your tweets and your photos and your encouragement. You are not invisible to us, we have read every pledge you made and we are glad you are part of this movement. We hope you are on the Change Day mailing list

If you have any money that you can put on the table now is the time to do it. We only have 14 days left to reach our tipping point of $19,000 – if we don’t reach that figure we don’t get any of the money people have promised so far. It’s 19 or nothing. Tonight we are at $8000 – we have a way to go.

Can we do it ? I don’t know – what do you think? Can we?

Support our crowdfunding campaign here

I have had that experience just recently.  I was so fortunate to spend 3 nights camping in beautiful country Victoria at Paynes Hut with the very first DO Lectures Australia. No mobile phones, no distraction, a composting toilet and a portable shower in the back of a big old truck. Sharing a tent at night with 3 strangers (well they were on Day One) with temperatures hovering around zero one night. Over our roasted yabbies and velvety shiraz we told long, winding stories about how change is possible. The sort of stories you never tell at a conference but go home wishing you had. We spoke about the courage, the loneliness, the exhilaration, the drive and the energy that all come when we make change happen. We came to realise, more then ever before that people can change the world. (Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point said it only takes roughly 15% of a population to flip a system.)

Here’s a question – have you ever done something that re-set your engine?

Beautiful photograph of Do Lectures Aus by Mark Lobo

Seventy participants and twenty speakers building a micro community of possibility under a blanket of stars with the moon swimming around us. I could go on and on about the Do Lectures but I’m going to leave it to you to check out the website and hopefully you can join in next year. This blog is about doing the thing, as an alternative to just talking about the thing. I’ve come away committed to doing a few things diferently. Firstly I’m going to write my blog every week, so you’ll be hearing from me more often. I want to start a conversation about how we can join forces around change to health and social care services in Australia. Secondly, I’ve come home with a fire in my belly about Change Day Australia 2015 – it is going to be so much greater next year, with your help. I’ve quoted Margaret Wheatley lots of times in my blogs, that’s because I think she nails it when it comes to whole system change.  She identifies four steps: 1) Isolated pioneers struggle alone; 2) They begin to connect in networks; 3) Where the ground is fertile, communities of practice begin to emerge; 4) Communities of practice link together to create a force-field that tips the whole system to a new mode of behavior. Let me know if you want to be part of the Change Day 2015 force-field- I’m looking for friends in every state and territory who want to create a better health and social care system. Let’s just DO IT! Join me mf

Just this morning I was thinking about the absence of a quiet hum and predictable routine in the office of freerthinking. This suits me just fine, I know from years of experience that change always looks messy in the middle but gorgeous in the end. I’m brewing a storm of change at the moment and finding so much energy in it.

But oh how we long for predictability and measurement and steps and processes. I get asked all the time to promise organisations that everything will be okay and to provide them with numbers to ward off the risk that boldness brings. It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don’t measure well by conventional means. We will find meaningful ways to reflect and weigh the importance of cultural change, of change that places people at the very centre of health care and that values their experience and contribution. But whatever those measurements are we will need to keep pushing forward and creating a health and social care system that is responsive.

“The weight of a television set has nothing at all to do with the clarity of its picture. Even if you measure to a tenth of a gram, this precise data is useless.”

Seth Godin

I applaud all the people who have so far joined the Change Day campaign and made a pledge to do one thing to improve outcomes for others,  in the absence of  data that proves they will fully realise the difference they want to make. But rather, in the sure and certain belief that we need to be bold and create the irresistible future that we want to see in the world.

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

Nietzsche

I am preparing a series of workshops on Person Centred Thinking to be run in Adelaide in March and then in April in Melbourne. I will be sending out the details for these workshops next week, but the numbers will be limited – so if you are wanting to join with others and learn more about how to develop person centred care and thinking in your organisation please email me mary@freerthinking.com.au

Now, wasn’t it Andre Gide who famously said ” [we] cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Bon voyage !