Social entrepreneurs have been on the job for about two decades. We work inside current organization structures to promote positive system change. Attunement Solutions embraces this business model and applies it to therapy as well as healthcare organization or dynamic human system coaching.
The Seed of Attunement Solutions
From an American marketing perspective, when I put the word attunement in my company’s name in 2018, I was making a mistake. Many people had never heard the word, so I often had to start phone conversations by spelling it out letter by letter. Even at the time, I knew the word was too important to leave out.
Later, I learned that my intuition had served me well. I discovered that a world-renowned research psychologist and marriage counselor had written a paradigm-shifting book on attunement. That book defined attunement as the science of trust.
Dr. John M. Gottman is one of the most influential psychotherapists of the last 40 years. For interested readers, here is a link to learn more about The Gottman Institute (https://www.gottman.com). He specializes in healing some of the most complex relationships we know. Those are the relationships of married couples considering divorce.
The Gottman Institute provides attunement-based family therapy. This treatment uses research-based dynamic systems tools to promote healthy parent-infant bonding. Like healthy marriages, research has proven that attunement makes all human relationships more dynamic.
I agree that attunement is a complex word that can be seen and understood from different perspectives. Time has brought two perspectives together in the form of my therapy practice and my healthcare and dynamic human system coaching. Today, I will talk about both of those perspectives.
Promoting Readiness-to-Change in Individuals
When working with a person in treatment or with any individual, attunement is the way I say without words that I hear and understand what they tell me. Attunement goes even deeper than that. It helps a person know that I feel what they are saying or showing with their emotions.
Big messages can be delivered in few words when we use attunement. With patients who have experienced developmental trauma, therapeutic multisensory environments are useful to further increase a stressed system’s readiness-to-change. This is sometimes called the dynamic systems approach to occupational therapy. A type of occupational therapy that is grounded in new paradigm science.
Promoting Readiness-to-Change in Healthcare Organization Communities
As a healthcare organization and dynamic human system coach, I use attunement for trust-building. This helps communities of people regain trust and develop new hope that their organization can learn to work better together and create a more sustainable future. Attunement helps me feel a community’s pain without getting swept up in it. Again, I don’t use a lot of words, only well-focused strategic and adaptive actions.
The word and concept of a scientific paradigm shift was introduced in a book published over 50 years ago. That book was, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn. He wrote that, “paradigm change becomes necessary when an earlier paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork ‘fixes’ that a complete overhaul is necessary”.
Attunement Solutions has seen and responded to the need for today’s healthcare service organizations to benefit from creative collaborations with social entrepreneurs. Our healthcare system has a long individual hero story that appeared in the form of a Hippocratic Oath between the fifth and third centuries BC. Of course, physicians still take this oath seriously.
All healthcare professions have a version of the Hippocratic Oath. For many professions this is called our Practice Ethics. Living up to practice ethics is a given. Individual hero stories aren’t.
Reframing Old Paradigm Stories
Living out this scientific paradigm shift means it’s time to reframe old paradigm hero stories as sustainable community stories. Now we have a new way to understand healthy relationships and communities that is based on the science of natural dynamic systems. It’s one that is already teaching children the benefits of playing interdependent roles across system differences. Healthy organization and community models are being developed from new paradigm system pattern studies of ant colonies and bee hives.
Elementary kids now learn about the interdependent roles of ants and bees as the pattern for healthy schools, workplaces, and communities. New paradigm science explains what makes communities more sustainable. School children know that it isn’t just the work of the queen.
Ant colonies are sustainable only because they have individuals playing interdependent roles across system differences. System differences make ant colonies more sustainable by increasing a pattern called adaptability. Adaptability is high in dynamic systems and is low in systems-under-stress.
Increased adaptability or readiness-to-change explains why the dynamic systems approach to occupational therapy works so well. It also explains why the work of social entrepreneurs is so important for helping healthcare organizations build new paradigm futures. The U. S. Healthcare system can be thought of as having what new paradigm system pattern studies call a too-stable structure.
Our U. S. Healthcare system is too stable for a reason. Based on old paradigm thinking, that was assumed to make it stronger. That was before we knew that change is “a given” and adaptability or readiness-to-change is an asset.
One tricky reality is that kids are naturally the first ones to make a scientific paradigm shift because they learn it in school. Another is that it can take decades for too-stable system structures to adapt to all the changes that occur during a scientific paradigm shift. This introduces our current need for social entrepreneurs to accept this challenge. Our challenge is to help chronically stressed healthcare organizations that are currently in-need-of-change.
The New Paradigm Need for Social Entrepreneurs
As a social entrepreneur, I use attunement for community-wide trust-building. This helps communities of people regain trust in an organization that still hopes to return to its old paradigm vision of the future. Attunement helps me feel a community’s pain without getting swept up in it. Again, I don’t use a lot of words, only well-focused strategic adaptive actions.
The fabric of today’s healthcare service organizations has changed so quickly, healthcare system heroes typically don’t know what hit them. The Hippocratic Oath stands in stark contrast to the competitive spirit of business organizations. A culture needs both for obvious reasons but, success is usually measured quite differently. The internal operations of today’s healthcare service organizations are usually strained by the tensions between what I call the business vs. healthcare hero interdependent pair.
21st Century healthcare service organizations commonly have internal tensions. The days of a lone physician leading a large healthcare organization are behind us. Now, all medium to large service organizations have a business department that holds decision-making power. This is a true and useful need for organizations to survive in the world today but, it typically causes internal tensions.
Few system leaders with the job of blending business and healthcare hero perspectives would say that this blend is always harmonious. Business operations goals and roles are necessarily different from those of healthcare heroes. Yet, the power of business-minded decision-makers has increased.
Interdependent relationships across different work roles can cause tension-building challenges. Social entrepreneurs still have more to teach healthcare system leaders serving both organizational work roles. We often enlist the help of younger healthcare system workers to teach both leadership groups that our model for healthy communities has now changed.
21st Century healthcare system leaders have often been put on defense. Medium to large healthcare organizations typically started feeling more fragmented to older system leaders when the internet changed workplace dynamics. Organizations often felt more isolated when the need arose for IT Departments to build stronger firewalls. It was a true need and useful defense in a changing world. However, internally fragmented systems that feel isolated from the outside world can cause chronic stress.
An already strong need for healthcare system leaders to stay on defense was intensified by COVID-19. For healthcare organizations serving vulnerable populations, this threat continues. And yet, healthcare organizations and their leaders have been on defense for too long.
The need for collaborations with social entrepreneurs. Defensive mindsets no longer work. New growth opportunities require outside collaborations and internal tensions just cause more stress. Social entrepreneurs using dynamic systems approaches are here to help.
The trust-building process used by social entrepreneurs is sometimes called network weaving (https://nwinstitute.org/). Just like Dr. Gottman’s research-based approach for saving troubled marriages, network weaving is based on new paradigm or dynamic systems science. It is being used all over the world to bring individuals and groups together across previously divisive differences.
Network weaving is a useful strategy for reducing divisive internal tensions in today’s healthcare organizations. Social entrepreneurs are working extra-hard to collaborate with healthcare service organizations for a good reason. Social entrepreneurs and service system leaders need each other so we can help our too-stable U. S. Healthcare System start adapting to a changing world.
Trust-building requires social entrepreneurs and healthcare system leaders to teach and learn from each other. The dynamic systems approach provides the right tools for this job (https://www.attunementsolutions.com). All dynamic systems tools work by promoting system-wide adaptability and readiness-to-change.
When two individuals or teams teach and learn from each other, new paradigm science calls this a praxis partnership (https://www.hsdinstitute.org/what-is-hsd/coherence-group-practice.html). Praxis partners work together as trusting collaborators. This is easy when both agree on the need for collaboration.
Social entrepreneurs know that praxis partnerships can feel hard to come by. We know they can feel challenging to create in today’s defensive healthcare system. Experience teaches us that network weaving promotes system adaptability and gives healthcare organizations a chance for needed change.
It’s Time to Make the Shift
Regardless of individual neurotypes, thinking-styles, service roles, or organization affiliations… when we think alone, we eventually get stuck. Social entrepreneurs with dynamic systems models and methods are here to help. Attunement Solutions would love to talk with you about how the dynamic systems approach can give your healthcare organization-under-stress more adaptability. I look forward to us connecting. All exchanges are welcome by email or in the chat space. Let’s turn your organization’s system tensions into new paradigm possibilities!