5D Sustainability in Uncertain Times

Fewer financial resources and changing social and political priorities are adding great uncertainty for organizations. Competing demands are reducing organizational time, energy and resources. Leaders are trying to clear away the distractions and focus organizational resources and energy on sustainable initiatives that address what really matters to people receiving services, their families, public agencies, and tax payers.

Organizations need sustainable solutions that bring focus, clarity, and meaning. Rather than adding “more” to an already stretched workforce, organizations need a way to combine their strengths and resources into practical strategies that sustain person-centered excellence and fiscal accountability. These leaders are ready to move organizations forward into the new financial and administrative realities of the future. But how?

Based upon five decades of research and design of practical solutions, CQL | The Council on Quality and Leadership presents a model of five integrated leadership strategies that will guide and sustain health/human service organizations in uncertain times. This model contains 5 Dimensions:

1. Personal Outcomes. Every health and human service organization needs to define the outcomes that it expects from its service. They are defined in person-centered terms. These are not processes or outputs.

2. Evidence-based Practices/Person-centered Excellence Guidelines. These are the organizational practices that result in the personal outcomes. Organizations demonstrate that outcomes are person-centered and system-linked. Resources connect to evidence-based, person-centered practices.

3. Accountability for Health and Welfare. Organizations have a fundamental obligation to provide people’s safety, security and welfare – this requirement is both personal (accountability to the individual) and public (accountability to society). The lack of transparency and accountability will take down any state or private provider when events go south. The dimension occupies the bottom on Maslow’s Hierarchy and every organization needs to look at basic assurances.

4. Measurement. Measurement enables organizations to determine whether outcomes are increasing and that the services and evidence based practices are producing the outcomes. Without measurement, you’re just guessing whether outcomes are increasing or that your practices produce results. Without measurement, organizations can actually invest in services that don’t work. Current financial circumstances suggest that the public and boards of directors won’t tolerate ambiguity on this issue.

5. Sustainability. Organizational improvement is based on learning by doing. Fifty years of organization development, organizational dynamics, and systems change research and practice points to learning by doing. Group learning produces better and longer lasting results than individual learning. Data analysis, reports, policy and procedure alone are not enough to cause change. Real changes in values, behavior, and performance flourish during group learning.

Integrated and connected
This 5D model for sustainability is entirely consistent with CQL’s forty-two year history of leadership in simultaneously defining, measuring, and improving personal quality of life. Not only does CQL define quality of life in terms of personal outcomes, guidelines for person-centered excellence and accountability, but, and at the same time, it develops metrics for the indicators that it defines, and then it proceeds to develop quality improvement models that incorporate both the definitions and the metrics.

CQL is committed to this system of connecting definitions to measurement. We guarantee that we can measure our definitions of quality of life outcomes and excellence in supports; and we’re proud that we can use both the quality of life definitions and metrics in our quality improvement platforms of Person-Centered Accreditation, The Focus Forum, and trainer and interviewer certification programs with the Personal Outcome Measures.

This simultaneous development and management of the 5D model of sustainability is our customer guarantee of accountability and performance excellence.