Future Pull.pdf

CHAPTER 11
FUTURE PULL
Understanding the Culture in Culture Change
The springs don’t push the river toward its goal.
Gravity pulls the river to its future.
– George Land and Beth Jarman, Breakpoint and Beyond (1992, p.173)
At a board retreat the question arose, “Would you want to live in our nursing home?”
“You couldn’t get me to move there,” responded the mission leader, to everyone’s astonishment, including her own.
“It was kind of our ‘aha’ moment,” she says. “When leadership says they don’t want to live here, to share a room or bathroom, to go down the hall to take a shower, we knew it was time for a change.”
The story of this Action Pact client at the beginning of their transformation to households reflects both the negative and hopeful aspects of today’s long-term care institutions. The first is that nobody really wants to live in a nursing home or place their frail loved ones in one. No one wants to let go of their real home, give up their lifelong belongings, and endure the lack of privacy and purpose that plague older adults even in good nurs- ing homes. We cringe at the prospect of being power- less, suddenly dependent and insecure; of feeling dis- connected and stripped of all that has nurtured our sense of personhood; of eventually sitting slumped in a wheelchair, lined up like cattle around a bustling, noisy nurses’ station; of being essentially homeless.
The second, more hopeful aspect of the mission leader’s story is providers see the cultural reality of their institution, they are moved to change it. The question is, how?
Reproduced by permission from Culture Change in Elder Care, Editors: Judah L Ronch, Audrey S Weiner, @2013 Health Pro- fessions Press, Inc. All rights reserved. www.healthpropress.com
by LaVrene Norton
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Helping long-term care providers learn how is our mission at Action Pact. Since 1996 we have coached more than two hundred organizations on changing their culture, and in recent years we have guided more than a hundred others on their way to the Household ModelTM. Working with these organizations has con- vinced us that purpose and vision are the propelling forces of deep culture change in retirement communi- ties and nursing homes.
Land and Jarman define purpose as “how an indi- vidual or organization makes the world a better place.” Vision, they continue, “is a compelling image or (men- tal) picture” of how it will be after the purpose has been achieved (Land & Jarman, 1992, p. 176). When enough people in an organization are prompted by a powerful purpose to commit to a shared vision, they are drawn to it like water to gravity, a phenomenon known as “future pull.” Land and Jarman compare organizations to living organisms supported by individual cells:
A human life begins as a solitary cell. However, that cell has within its nuclear DNA a molecu- lar blueprint not only of itself but of the whole human body. Since every cell can reference its common internal vision of the future whole, it can contribute its part. . . . Because each cell is working from a common blueprint, as the hu-