Systems Thinking

Last week, the BIF team visited Bond Community Health Center in Tallahassee, Florida and Eau Claire Cooperative Health in Columbia, South Carolina to conduct interviews with leaders, staff, and patients as we continue our work with the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC). BIF and NACHC leadership are joining forces to explore the questions:

Carnegie Corporation of New York has partnered with BIF to design and run the Integration Design Consortium (IDC). Rather than funding programmatic proof points, the IDC is giving leaders permission to test various integrative approaches to support students throughout their journey in the education system.

It's safe to say that all of us have left #BIF2018 changed. Inspired. Hopeful. Ready to self-organize and create the conditions necessary for all of us to freely combine and recombine our capabilities to make the world a better place.

Blending intentional design with best practices in equity to address the changing nature of work.

Thinking about innovation through the lens of what innovation needs.

"We can hide behind all kinds of data, numbers, and research. But if you’re making me tell my story you make me open up, and that opening up makes other people share as well. "

Tech guru and futurist, founder of Constellation Research and is one of the most prolific thinkers in the disruptive tech space.

Bestselling author Dan Pink stops by to discuss his newest book "When: The Science of Timing" which takes an in-depth look at how and why we should all be paying closer attention to the ways in which timing can have a deliberate effect on the way we work, think, and live. 

The nature of work itself is fundamentally about the way people organize themselves and how they make decisions in a group. Even though change in the workplace is accelerating, Boyd notes, “most businesses still run on folklore—they’re not founded on principles that are supported by any kind of research.”

If a business model is a network of capabilities woven together into a sustainable financial model, a system is a network of business models that have learned to collaborate. Until organizations learn how to do this, integration in our education system won’t work, and innovations that fundamentally transform outcomes will remain localized and dispersed

Listen in as Rita J. King discusses ways we can all tap into our own innate creativity, what we can do about a shifting technological future, and the power of thinking outside our own traditional silos to better ourselves personally, professionally, and for the organizations, we belong to.

Throughout this project, we saw powerful glimpses of these conditions in action. They enabled us to go beyond surface level solutions to think more holistically about how school and communities could better learn and grow together.

Sometimes leaders are ready to jump into the exploration of transformational next practices and new business models, but more often than not, they need to see the path and understand the investment. At BIF, we created Membership as an easy way to help leaders do this.

Know around the world for her work in strategic design thinking and organic growth, Liedtka has been a leading thinker and pioneer in the field of corporate strategy for the past 30 years and was at the forefront of utilizing the strategies and principals we use today.

It’s the innovator’s day. CEOs everywhere know that keeping their companies relevant in a rapidly changing world is imperative and that innovation is the solution. Corporate leaders also know their legacies depend on their organization’s ability to reinvent itself. It’s not going well.

The most successful businesses today are movements more than companies. Movements don’t market. Movements inspire and engage. They create an emotional connection through storytelling. Not stories to be enjoyed passively but stories we see ourselves in, stories we can actively participate in.

Elizabeth Stefanski is an impatient social innovation junkie with over a decade of experience in building and leading social ventures. She recently joined the Business Innovation Factory as chief market maker, where she is attracting capital and building partnerships to generate new models for transforming complex social systems.

The idea of the MinuteClinic is as much a mindset problem as it is a financial threat. The model runs counter to everything a physician has been trained for. Another problem - most physicians don’t want to be businesspeople and this is a real business conundrum.