Seeing Across Boundaries

Organizations are made up of people who become experts in their own domains.

Clinicians speak a clinical language.
IT speaks a technical language.
Finance has its own language.
Administration, research, procurement, operations, all professions have their own ways of understanding the world.

This specialization is necessary, and valuable.

But it can also create invisible boundaries.

People become very good at seeing their part of the system without necessarily being able to see what happens beyond it.

I have always been fascinated by those boundaries.

I notice how quickly people recognize someone who speaks their language—and how difficult it can become to understand what another department is trying to accomplish when they use a completely different one.

Much of the work I have done has involved moving between these worlds.

I don't need to be the clinician, the programmer, the researcher, the administrator or the paramedic to understand that each sees something important that the others may not.

My role is often to help connect those perspectives.

To ask:

What does this look like from the other side?

What are we not seeing because we are standing inside our own domain?

This is where I believe some of the most important opportunities for improvement exist.

The problem isn't always that people aren't communicating.

Sometimes they are communicating perfectly within their own language.

The problem is that nobody is translating the system as a whole.

That is the space I naturally occupy.

Between the domains.

Between the people.

Between the problem and the possible solution.