President's Point

NONPF Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 4, 2001

Peter Drucker, one of the world's foremost management seers, explains in The Economist how the next society will differ from society today and what needs to be done to prepare for it (November 3, 2001). He delved into fascinating facts and figures and included nursing and education examples. Drucker presented several future themes that affect us as APN/NP educator/knowledge workers and as NONPF members: The New Demographics (young and old); The New Workforce (knowledge workers as new capitalists); The Manufacturing Paradox (getting far more out of fewer workers); Will the Corporation Survive? (not as we know it); and The Way Ahead (get ready now).

Drucker's recommendations for change readiness are applicable to our knowledge work. First, we can experiment with new organizational forms and conduct some pilot studies, especially in working with alliances, partners and joint ventures to educate NPs. Second, we can attend to human resource issues creatively, e.g., by re-employing retired NP. Third, because our leaders can no longer know all they must know to be effective, we will need far better information systems to allow us to inform our NP faculty and leaders about the changing internal and external forces. Fourth, to achieve in the next society, organizations must become change agents—abandon unsuccessful ways and institute quality assurance processes for all aspects of the unit. Change must be seen as opportunity, not a threat. Finally, although the information revolution began in 1940s and took hold more than 40 years later with the Internet, by 2030 we can expect radical change throughout our institutions, theories, ideologies, and problems. We can expect innovations which are possible only with societal disequilibrium (e.g., the NP/APN as an innovative disruption)(Christensen & Kenagy, 2000).

The NONPF Board continuously reorganizes the organization to adapt to rapidly changing external forces. At the fall Board meeting, the directors faced financial, membership, organizational, and several other challenging and potentially divisive issues. While we have rarely had dysfunctional dissonance, real differences exist among us--not only in terms of talent but also in personality. These differences have balanced our thinking, kept us on the move while staying out of too much trouble. Nevertheless, perhaps we could enhance board functioning further if we better understood those differences and enlarged our self-awareness as leaders.

The NONPF Board members and other members of the organization have some awareness of how we affect others—at minimum, we all have had repeated student evaluations. At past Board meetings, we identified our conflict resolution styles and gained very interesting insights. Also, most of us have taken the Myers-Briggs Preference Inventory, so we know if we are extraverted or introverted along with three other preferences. But how about our preferences relative to change? Because the Board strives to reflect and guide changes in contemporary NP practice through its products and services, this is an important question. So, before we tackled an agenda filled with potential changes, we embarked on an exercise to understand our preferences toward change and completed a self-administered questionnaire, Change Style Indicator (Musselwhite and Ingram, 2000).

In brief, as a Board, we lean from the middle toward a preference for change. We have five members whose scores suggest that they see the big picture and understand complex problems, serve as catalysts for systemic change, work independently and are change and risk oriented; however, they also may have more problems with being impractical and overlooking details. We have seven members whose scores indicate that they are more practical and realistic about long-term and short term issues, are team builders with a facilitative approach, and are flexible and adaptive; however, they may also be indecisive and undirective (middle of the road) and seek approval from too many people. The Board has no members who are on the far other end of the change spectrum, characterized by organization, detail orientation, preferred adherence to routines and rules, consistency, and reliability, as well as rigidity and risk aversion. With this configuration of the Board, we all must be on the look out for feasibility in our vision as related to implementation. Our middle-of-the-roaders often take on a more cautious role to ensure that NONPF does not go too far overboard as we undertake changes to assure quality of NP education nationally and internationally. We gained many other insights about change as individuals and as a group and began to understand better the perspective of members whose preference for change was different from our own.

Having in mind many of the same concepts that were featured in Drucker’s article, we had a very productive Board meeting—too much change for some, not enough for others, but with solid, forward-thinking decisions.

Ever onward,

Lucy Marion, PhD, APRN, BC, FAAN

References:

Christensen, C.M., Bohmer, R., and Kenagy, J. (2000). Will disruptive innovations cure health care? Harvard Business Review, September-October 2000, 102-112.

Drucker, P. (November 3, 2001). The next society. A survey of the near future. Economist, 361(8246), 3-20.

Musselwhite, W.C. & Ingram, R.P. (2000). Change style indicator. Greensboro, NC: Discovery Learning Press.