Robert FrombergEditor-in-Chief, HFMABenjamin Franklin listed 13 virtues necessary to “succeed in life with good character.” The list included virtues such as frugality and moderation. The virtue he had the most trouble achieving was order.
Franklin defined order as “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” He wrote, “I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order,” both in terms of controlling his schedule and “with regard to places for things, papers, etc.”
However, Franklin’s actions belie his assertion that he found order “extreamly difficult to acquire.” Franklin’s many accomplishments—including this list of virtues and the systematic way that he tracked his efforts to improve himself in these areas—demonstrate a more important dimension of order than keeping a neat desk, a dimension that is crucial for leaders: the ability to identify, communicate, and act on a clear organizing principle.
In health care, an example of a powerful organizing principle is structure, process, and outcome, the scheme identified by Avedis Donabedian in his work on improving healthcare quality. The orderly ideas in these simple words have helped frame the thinking of a generation of people devoted to providing excellent health care.
An organizing principle like this has an intellectual component, but is more than an intellectual exercise. It is a clear expression of a person’s nature—a cousin of personality and vision. For example, a pragmatic person would tend to organize thoughts into a process. An analyst would tend to look for classifications, comparisons, or causal relationships. A poet might organize thoughts around analogies. A politician might organize ideas around argumentation or persuasion. A natural learner would process information inductively. A natural teacher might process information deductively. Another way of saying this is that there is no right way to organize ideas, but it is crucial that such an organizational scheme exist.
I thought about the idea of order, organizing principles, and leadership the other day while listening to HFMA’s 2006-2007 Chairman Joe Fifer address a group. Fifer held up Consumerism in Health Care, the most recent PATIENT FRIENDLY BILLING® project report, and told the group that the five guiding principles in the report are an ideal way to organize our thinking and actions related to the many tentacles of consumerism.
I thought about the idea again while reviewing the content of the forthcoming January issue of hfm magazine, which focuses on leadership.
One example is in the cover story by Jeni Williams, which is titled “How Does Your Leadership Rate?” The organizing principle demonstrated by the leaders interviewed for this article might be called inputs and outputs. The article suggests that true leaders have an unquenchable thirst for inputs—information wrung from virtually anything, from a television program to a colleague’s comment to a formal study. And accompanying that thirst is a focus on using those inputs to improve an output.
Another example is "A Heart for Change" by John Britt and Barbara Thomas, in which the authors make order of change management by organizing it according to the attributes of an effective cardiovascular system.
These examples are just brief illustrations of the importance of an organizing principle in conveying ideas and converting ideas into action. By that definition, I’m going to give Benjamin Franklin a break—he did, indeed, master the virtue of order.
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