Terri Lewis, National Teacher's University of Changhua, Taiwan Louis Adams, CANAR, TVR CIRCLE: Tribal Vocational Rehabilitation— Continuous Improvement of Rehabilitation Counselors, Leaders, and Educators Darlene Groomes, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan Thomas Jones, Michigan Department of Human Services—Rehabilitation Services 7 th Summit Conference Louisville, Kentucky September 2014

Learners will understand:  Strategic management within the context of the VR system  The conceptual tools that help us to theorize the act of management  How to design systems for meaningful metrics – indicators, outcomes, impact  How to plan and lead implementation within a systems environment

 87 agencies  87 separate systems  Single set of common measures  87 data collection systems  87 different agency designs  87 separate political designs  Inconsistently applied meanings and indicators across these contexts

Design and Maintenance of Resources to Manage  Vision, Mission, Value for public  Stance  Complex adaptive systems  Quality management practices  Change control and innovation  Intellectual capital, knowledge interpretation & translation

 State Plans are the controlling documents between states and the federal government  They represent program mission, stakeholder needs, and public value  States create their own strategic plans  Introduces variability that significantly impairs meaning

 Stance can be seen as a mental state involving beliefs, knowledge and dispositions to act in certain ways along with a preparedness to react to complexity.

 Most VR managers do not feel that they have time to focus on complex situations…the presence of problems is precluded by the ability to solve them (Ashkenas, 2013)  Leadership is all about mobilizing your organization to achieve better adaptations  When you adapt, you carry forward from the past that which is best, and yet have the openness to learn from engaging with the wider world so that you can continue to thrive and carry forward and sustain that which is precious (Stacey, 1996)

 Quality management is predicated on systems thinking  The failure to grasp systems thinking leads to disregard for the complexity of work, which in turn fosters ineffective and unsuccessful methods  Link vision and mission to outcomes and impact

 Public sector leaders are trained to focus on identifying and correcting errors that occur external to their immediate environment.  Because this is a largely successful strategy, they rarely experience failure that affects them personally, thus limiting their opportunity to learn from internal failures.  When this process results in error, they tend to go on the defensive, placing the blaming on others within and outside of the organization.  This defensive mechanism shuts down the learning process for the leader and the subordinate at precisely the moment is it most required in order to understand one’s personal relationship to results of the error.

 The act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing:  Knowledge  Behaviors  Abilities  Values  Program evaluation and quality improvement (PEQI) staff acquire customer perspectives  Customer satisfaction surveys  Comprehensive needs assessments  Employer needs surveys  Vendor performance ratings

 The organized body of information usually of a factual or procedural nature which, if applied, makes adequate performance on the job possible  Program evaluation and quality improvement (PEQI) staff share learning through quality thinking across the organization  A learning organization (Deming, 1984; Scholtes, 1998)  Results in knowledge about your VR organization

 Implicit and explicit messages of the organization have an impact on the way learning informs knowledge, as well as the way knowledge fuels learning (Antonacopoulou, 1999)  A learning organization embraces systems thinking; therefore need to find a way to acquire and archive knowledge throughout the system © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn The Reading Room at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris

 The acquisition of organizational knowledge is termed “Intellectual Capital”  Differs from tangible capital such as financial or economic reporting mechanisms, which show bottom- line value and worth of an organization (Spender, 2011)  The VR Program’s movement toward management of knowledge resonating from quality measurement speaks to the need for understanding how this intellectual capital is the basis of organizational value (Hendriks & Sousa, 2013)

 Within the culture of VR quality management, PEQI are the knowledge assets who display the value of VR via intellectual capital  Quality Thinking  Planning  Doing  Checking on Results  Acting to control variation or improve processes

 Previously stated that reaction and defense (i.e., personal behaviors) shut down the learning process  Advocate for control of change through learning, acquisition of knowledge, promotion of intellectual capital = organizational value  Own it and drive in the same direction  Checking one’s degree of power differential  Get in middle range to optimize stance and allow adaptability  Once understand our value, then work to translate that knowledge and innovate practices

 In the rehabilitation profession, knowledge translation is the process of synthesis, dissemination, exchange, and application of knowledge to:  improve quality of life for citizens with disabilities  provide more effective rehabilitation services and products  strengthen the VR Program (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 2005)

 The relationship between personal behavior and organizational change must be mastered  Continuous improvement programs focus attention on the mastery of personal behavior to improve organizational activities and associated results  Single loop learning – change occurs external to learner decisions  Double loop learning – change occurs as the result of personal decisions and actions

 Leadership may understand the need for continuous improvement practices, but fail to act in ways that make continuous improvement possible  The job of leadership is to ACT in ways that make continuous improvement and learning possible

 Heuristics are assumptions, biases, and cognitions that we believe are true, even if they are not exactly true  We use heuristics to design processes and measures  Quality metrics are designed to reduce bias, increase veracity

Competencies  Leadership knowledge, skills, & abilities  Management of processes  Core Competencies  Tools  Theoretical approaches  Models  Evaluation & Research  Metrics Scorecard Action Areas  Vision, Mission, Values  Customer  Learning & Growth  Business Practices  Financial Programs

Quality models rely on planning, doing, checking on results, and acting to control variation or improve processes  Leadership knowledge, skills, & abilities  Management of processes  Core Competencies

 ActivitiesIndicators (I)  Grouped ActivitiesI + I + I = Outcomes (O)  Grouped Outcomes O + O + O = Impact (Ip)  Analytics Difference measures  VariationError  ROIImpact – ((O) + Error)

 Step 1: Applying for Services  Step 2: Determining Eligibility  Step 3: Exploring Careers and Developing an IPE  Step 4: Following the IPE  Step 5: Finding a Job  Step 6: Successfully Employed: Closing the Case

 Link vision and mission to impact  Link personal actions to results  Provide at a glance information A Way of Organizing the Mess

 Leadership may understand the need for continuous improvement practices, but fail to act in ways that make continuous improvement possible simply due to the automaticity of prior learned response sets  Quality models rely on planning, doing, checking on results, and acting to control variation or improve processes.

 Vision, Mission, Values  Programs – State Plan Sections  Scorecard areas – Key Results Areas  Activities – Key performance Indicators  Metrics – Summative, Formative  Impact – Community Return on Investment

 Changes to expected impact results from changes to outcomes  Changes to outcomes result from changes to activities & resultant indicators  Change control tracks the record of changes to outcomes at the activity level

 Archive of organization knowledge assets  History of decisions  Traceability of data management  Auditable  Captures change from:change to  Communicates to stakeholders

Do not plant your dreams in the field of indecision, where nothing grows, but in the weeds of what-if. ~Dodinsky

Managing What Matters, Matters!

 Terri Lewis  Darlene Groomes  Lou Adams  Tom Jones