2025 Nashville Cluster

Our complex healthcare system continues to face daunting challenges in the setting of dynamic change and uncertainty. For all the problem-solving approaches we deploy, our ability to engage teams and deliver sustained high-impact outcomes remains elusive. If we are to move in a new direction, we need to look at and understand why our conventional problem-solving methodologies fall short and inquire whether a new paradigm exists.

This seminar explores the nature of conflict and its impact on collaborative problem solving. Over four sessions, we will look at the prevalence of conflict and how it entangles our functional problems, often distorting our interpretations and leading to suboptimal results. Understanding the nature of conflict creates the opportunity for us to effectively manage and eliminate it, sharpening our ability to objectively observe, understand and collaboratively solve our functional problems.

Using a representative healthcare issue, we will learn how our understanding of conflict enables us to apply a simple, user-friendly framework for moving teams from collective conflict to collaborative problem solving with sustained results. This seminar is interactive and is sure to generate lively and thought-provoking dialogue and learning.

Seminar Objectives:

• Describe the nature of conflict and its relevance to problem solving
• Apply elements of conflict mitigation to optimize conditions for problem solving together, while prioritizing improvement targets
• Learn to distinguish and highlight informal workarounds from formal processes in collaborative problem solving
• Identify approaches for how functional solutions are translated into a functional plan for continuous improvement and sustained results in conflict management

Who Should Attend:

Any healthcare leader actively involved in care delivery optimization and complex problem solving

Presented by:

• Frederick (Rick) van Pelt, MD, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer, UAB Hospital