Welcome to module four in course five of Leadership in Interprofessional Informatics Specialization. My name is Daniel Pesut, and I'm the instructor for this module. Currently, I'm a professor of nursing and director of the Katharine J Densford International Center for Nursing Leadership at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing. In this module, we build on the knowledge you have gained in previous courses. Now that you have mastered the fundamentals in dynamics associated with teamwork, we turn our attention to a most important concept, collective impact. Collective impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem using a structured form of collaboration. People working in interprofessional informatics also have common agenda for solving specific problems, and can benefit thinking about their collaboration in a structured way to have collective impact. Specifically, the objectives of this course are to explain the collective impact principles of practice in order to create a vision for interprofessional informatics groups and teams. Describe the four phases of collective impact needed to design, implement, and evaluate a collective impact initiative. Explain the mindset needed to enact collective impact thinking in a group or team. Describe how the knowledge of competing values and requisite variety of leadership skills contributes to successful collective impact initiatives. There are a number of learning activities associated with this module. The learning activities enable you to explore the concept of collective impact. Principles and phases of collective impact are described. There are four phases to a collective impact initiative, generate ideas and dialogue, initiate action, organize for impact, sustain action and impact. There are five conditions of collective impact, area common agenda, shared measurement, mutual reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support. Recall the logical levels of alignment model of leadership developed by Robert Dilts and discussed in course three of this specialization. A commitment to collective impact is a commitment to align the meta, macro and micro levels of leadership associated with the Dilts model in order to move from vision to action and action to vision. Collective impact is about the alignment of purpose, practice, and people in service of a greater good. Collective impact is a commitment to collaborative action rooted in shared responsibility and accountability. And the alignment of vision, mission, identity, values, and beliefs, and behaviors in a given environmental context. The challenge of collective impact is to move away from disorder, confusion, and isolation to alignment, random acts of partnership, and synergy of purpose. For some people, collective impact is a new idea and requires the development of a new mindset. Specifically, collective impact requires people to get the right eyes on the problem and realize that the relational is important as the rationale. And both adaptive work and technical solutions are required to realize collective impact success. More specifically, collective impact emphasizes skills over content. A successful collective impact leader must possess existing relationships with or an ability to build relationships with a cross-sector range of system players, who themselves are issue experts. More than having a specific solution in mind for how to address an issue, such a leader must have the ability to thrive in a fluid, unstructured, and often entrepreneurial environment. A good metaphor is a collective impact leader is more like an orchestra conductor. Being an orchestra conductor is not a top-down boss telling people what to do. It's not about the conductor coming in and throwing out all the musicians and starting from scratch. It's about exploring the great talents that can be built upon and identifying some gaps where we need other musicians to fill in. Sufficient authority, the effective impact leader must feel comfortable pushing the thinking of senior-level people at a range of partnering agencies and organizations, and facilitating difficult conversations and communicating with a range of stakeholders more broadly. That can be formalized and institutional in nature, for example, they're a part of a very important organization or agency, or more informal and rooted about the relationships that have been developed, or both. Key principles of collective impact practice include attending to the design and implementation of initiatives with a priority placed on equity, including community members in the collaborative, recruitment and co-creation with cross-sector partners, using data to continuously learn, adapt, and improve, cultivating leaders with unique system leadership skills, and a focus on program and system strategies, creating and building a culture that fosters relationships, trust, and respect across participants, customizing programs and solutions for local contexts. Throughout this specialization, we have challenged you to consider the competing values framework as a way to develop your leadership skill set. Recall the types of cultures that are derived from the competing values framework, the creative, market, hierarchy, and collaborative cultures. By now, you've realized that requisite variety of leadership behaviors is essential to navigate these cultures. Leadership success depends on your knowledge of competing value dynamics and how to best to integrate and manage the polarities associated with those dynamics. Recall from course three, the new leadership behaviors required for this integration include autonomous engagement, practical vision, teachable confidence, and caring confrontation. I invite you to consider and respond to this discussion prompt. How will you use collective impact framework to lead and organize the work of you interprofessional informatics team? If you want to learn more about collective impact, I hope you explore some of the added references and resources and consider how to apply this knowledge with your team or across institutions. Time to take the quiz to test your knowledge before we move on to the next module about the future of interprofessional informatics leadership.
