Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Change

• Set against the baseline perspective that health care organizations are complex adaptive systems whose future states are unpredictable and unknowable, the purpose of this chapter is to introduce a perspective of health care organizations that borrows from quantum theory and chaos theory to describe innovation and change not as rational, controllable processes, but instead as complex, uncertain, nonlinear sequences of events and activities. This chapter expands upon these perspectives by bridging and integrating them in the notion of the learning organization, where innovation and change are seen as everyday activities and inputs for further learning. The chapter concludes with managerial guidelines for generating learning, stimulating innovation, and implementing change. LECTURE OUTLINE