Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Journey to Improvement: A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Health Care, and Social Welfare

The challenges we face in education, healthcare and social welfare are multi-faceted, reflecting the complex systems we live in. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities. Journey to Improvement serves as a roadmap for teams ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience leading improvement work in different social sectors, the authors walk teams through the various phases of an improvement journey, from launching the team, to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. The book highlights the personal, relational and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real world examples from across the social sector and around the world.