The emergence of a value transformation strategic initiative in the healthcare context.

How do strategic initiatives emerge? Despite rich tradition in the emergent strategy literature-focused on significant organizational change-surprisingly little insight exists on the dynamics of a new initiative's emergence. This is particularly relevant in healthcare because of the increasing pressure to implement value transformation models focused on maximizing value at the point of care. The value transformation model prioritizes the decisions of the frontline providers and thus requires their expertise and commitment for the model's implementation and success.

Shared accountability in distributed leadership for improved healthcare access: a study of a US dental institution.

Purpose: Accountability within distributed leadership (DL) is critical for DL to drive positive outcomes in health services organizations. Despite this, how accountability emerges in DL is less clear. This study aims to understand how accountability emerges in DL so that distributed leaders can drive improvements in healthcare access - an increasingly important outcome in today's health services environment.

Complexity Leadership in the Nursing Context.

Consolidation through mergers and acquisitions is occurring across health care as a strategic move to address the disruptive forces of complexity. While consolidation is improving the overall fitness and viability of health care organizations, it is having the opposite effect on the professionals working within them who are reporting increasing rates of burnout from ongoing complexity in the health care environment. This happens in all organizations that try to respond to complexity with traditional bureaucratic leadership approaches.

Embracing uncertainty, managing complexity: applying complexity thinking principles to transformation efforts in healthcare systems.

Background: Complexity thinking is increasingly being embraced in healthcare, which is often described as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Applying CAS to healthcare as an explanatory model for understanding the nature of the system, and to stimulate changes and transformations within the system, is valuable.

Main Text: A seminar series on systems and complexity thinking hosted at the University of Toronto in 2016 offered a number of insights on applications of CAS perspectives to healthcare that we explore here.