Healthcare Manager should respond to VUCA with vision, understanding, clarity and agility, Bernard Gloster, HSE CEO said when he gave the opening address to the Conference.
“The conference today is an absolutely striking theme and one to consider. And I know the speakers who talk to you, but more importantly, the engagements you will have with each other will help to explore and unpack some of the aspects around what they call leading and health and social care in the VUCA world,” he said.
“Many of you have studied various programmes, academic programmes, and others, and I’m sure have done reading around the background to VUCA, where it came from, a military context, and how it talks about the world and the world being volatile, being uncertain, being complex and being ambiguous. And how do we take all of that volatility and uncertainty and complexity, and ambiguity? How do we take all of that, and how do we understand it? And how do we understand it, particularly as managers and leaders of healthcare and social care systems in that type of world, because it does seem to be the case that that is the type of world we now live in.
“People look to us as healthcare managers and as leaders, and they look to us to give them certainty about how we are leading them in a response in that type of environment. And again, I’m sure many of you who have studied the literature in this area will understand, of course, the perfect response to VUCA is what’s often referred to as VUCA Prime. And so, you respond to the volatility with vision. And isn’t it just so important that the work of healthcare leaders is about setting vision, is about working with government, working with the minister, with the various government departments involved in health and social care and setting a vision, and that’s so important.
“And in terms of uncertainty, it’s really important that we as leaders, then bring understanding. We have to bring that understanding for the people we lead. We have to show that we have an understanding even of that very uncertainty. And with complexity, what’s the greatest thing you can do as a manager with complexity? It’s to bring clarity, very often, to simplify back down. What is the net issue? What is the net issue that we are dealing with? Is it something just for today? Is it medium-term? Is it long-term? Is it perhaps existential?
“And then, of course, perhaps the part of the VUCA response I’m most engaged in, certainly in recent years in my career, is the response to ambiguity. And that response to ambiguity, of course, is agility. It means so many things. People often think it’s a very ‘business like’ word, and we can’t associate it with the care of people. Yes, we can. We can absolutely do that. And of course, we learned a whole new experiential definition of ambiguity during the life of the pandemic. But we also learned our capability, to be agile and become more agile when it really mattered. But we don’t need a pandemic. We don’t need an emergency to explore more ways of being agile, because the ambiguity of our world continues. And if the world for us is one that has all of that ambiguity, so too it has for the people we serve, for the citizens we serve and the people we support.
“Have a wonderful, wonderful conference today. I wish HMI every success into the future. It is now a long standing organisation, supporting managers, creating that professional identity, creating learning opportunities, creating collaboration.
“All that you will do into the future will be important in supporting the healthcare managers of the future, and certainly for me, as I leave my time in the public service, I can simply say to you, my peers, it has been the most enormous privilege of my time to have worked with you, to have worked with many of you, to have met with many of you. I wish you well. Have a great conference. Thank you.”
Thank you to my peer community
Bernard Gloster opened his Conference presentation by thanking HMI for presenting him a HMI Fellowship, the previous evening.
“Firstly, I want to say thank you to HMI. I had the enormous pleasure of joining the executive of HMI and many of the members and supporters last evening for the pre-conference dinner, and I was particularly humbled this year at the enormous tribute that was paid to me as I approach my last few months working in the Public Health Service,” he said.
“When I leave here on March 5 next, it will be following almost 38 years of service, all of it in Ireland, in the statutory health and social care services. And so, thank you to HMI President, Breda Crehan Roche, to the members of the governing body, and all associated with last evening. It genuinely means an enormous amount to me, and it means an enormous amount to me because it comes from health managers, it comes from my peer community. And so, thank you. Thank you so much again.”
