Dear all--

Thank you all for a heart full Roundtable, where we connected deeply with each other at a difficult time for many of us. I am especially grateful to our core host committee - Amanda Brewster, Steve Shortell, Hector Rodriquez, Salma Bibi and Ishika Sachdeva from UC Berkeley; Elinam Ladzekpo and Akanksha Majumdar from Brandeis University; and Jim Best, a long-time RCC member and consultant in Berkeley - for organizing a magical experience.

This is a recap of some highlights from my perspective and some thoughts about our next steps as a community.

On Day 1 the Hike to Inspiration Point and Kayaking on the Bay allowed us to meet and reconnect with each other in places of tremendous natural beauty. We ended the day with a Welcoming Reception at Jupiter Pub, where the full Host Committee from up and down the West Coast enjoyed meeting each other in person, and meeting you as you arrived from around the US and around the world.

We had a fantastic Day 2 together as we learned from each other, deepened our connections and continued to address next steps in the complex world we live and work in. We started with a warm welcome from UC Berkeley professors Amanda Brewster and Hector Rodriguez. Presenters in the symposia and shift & share formats were inspiring, informative and engaging.  I was incredibly proud of four first year Brandeis Exec MBA physician leaders from health systems around the country who presented their Early RC Interventions - Getting Started, using the Relational Model of Change and building multi-stakeholder change teams to co-lead the work.  Amazing variety of work in this group of four, as we saw throughout the Roundtable.

Our lunchtime keynote speaker JP Stephens provided a visceral understanding of how we see ourselves in relation to others in order to see the whole together - and how leaders can facilitate that process. How does relational coordination and relational leadership work in choirs and orchestras and construction projects?  JP made it obvious - it's about helping people to see AND feel the whole together.

We ended with an outstanding Leadership Panel expertly facilitated by Steve Shortell with one panelist Andre Morgan joining virtually as he continued into the night with mediations in a teacher strike. All four panelists - from a school district, a health system, an international pharma start up, and the US Department of Defense - reflected with wisdom and humility about their responses as relational leaders to crises and opportunities. They revealed how they as leaders are striving to help their colleagues to see the whole together.

Then a VERY lively reception at Triple Rock Brewery!

Day 3 began with a warm welcome from UC Berkeley professors Steve Shortell and Em Chuang sharing the history of Berkeley as an institution and reminding us to bring RC from the person, team and organizational levels to the institutional level in our work for greater impact. We continued with symposia and shift and shares with lots of energy in the room as people shared their work and received caring and meaningful feedback.

Our Saturday lunchtime speaker Brian Park was outstanding as he demonstrated the power of connecting personal narrative with a clear practical message for us - our health system tends to be technically good and relationally bad, resulting in a broken, high cost system with adverse impacts on its participants.  Relational leadership can be learned and is likely to help.  Theory suggests relational leadership facilitates relational coordination among participants thus driving a wide range of positive outcomes (Gittell & Douglass 2012 [drive.google.com]) but this connection has not yet been adequately studied to my knowledge.  Given JP's and Brian’s excellent keynotes referencing the power of relational leadership, I am even more interested in understanding how that connection works.  Research alert!

On our final afternoon we chose from six Hands On Workshops to get practical knowledge for understanding and facilitating the development of relational coordination in our own context.  I loved hearing Erin Blakeney and Brenda Zierler walk us through ten years of building RC in a regional heart center, taking time to answer very specific questions about "how to" from the health leaders in the room.  Then Alexander Mansour and Kyle Turner literally showed us how to have high impact one-on-ones to build relationships and desired outcomes. 

Babs Belk and JP Stephens ended our time together by harvesting our insights through one-on-ones, table conversations and full group sharing. I was incredibly fortunate to have my parents attending for the first time. I want to share the experience from their perspective as high school grads who went from farming into successful business ventures.  “Each person has made us feel more than welcome and it has been a very pleasant adventure for us to spend several days with some of the most down-to-earth, well-educated people we’ve ever met who have made us feel like we have always been a part of the group.”  My dad asked me at dinner - how have you found so many wonderful people?  I said it’s the idea that attracts wonderful people and it’s the best part of the work we do.

So what comes next?

First priority in my view is organizing to protect the most vulnerable:  How will we keep people safe who are attacked?  Maybe with love, building on Brian Park's message.  Think of UK citizens coming out of their homes earlier this Fall to protect their Muslim neighbors from attack. They overpowered the haters with strong and clear messages of love. Our beloved colleague and friend Heba Ali who was terrified to drive her daughters home from school that day wrote that “it was like the sun came out in the middle of a dark night.”  More of that courageous display of love in the face of hate will be needed.  Likewise, how will we organize when resources are stripped from those in need and when critical human rights are denied?  How will we protect the earth from further destruction?

Second priority in my view is strengthening the message:  What can we learn from this election about how to craft a narrative consistent with our values?   How will we build a stronger narrative that stands up to disinformation?  The Harris narrative was designed to be inclusive and relational.  Why did that fail?  Did the voters reject inclusivity and relationality and deliberately choose exclusivity and hate?  Or did too many people not feel included in the Harris message? 

Third priority in my view is policy solutions themselves:  How can we take this time right now to create better policy solutions given the broken systems such as healthcare and immigration and labor markets and housing that were not adequately addressed by either candidate in the 2024 election?  

Let’s get creative and build real solutions that address root causes in addition to offering effective bandaids.  Let's help to expand Sarah Phillips' work in St. Louis and Erik Nicholson's work with farm workers in the Northwest and the work of so many others who presented at the Roundtable - then try to take the lessons we are learning one level deeper.  Let’s use our creative relationship-building methods to get mental health and housing resources to people BEFORE they get arrested and to get migrant workers paid at the level of US citizens so they are not serving as the reserve army of labor that reduces pay levels for other workers.  Let’s use our creative efforts to build solidarity among workers to advocate for a decent living wage and decent benefits for all workers.  Let’s address trauma and mental health crises by discovering the root causes of trauma and by building organizations and institutions that produce less trauma. Lets bring relationality to the institution-building level as Steve  Shortell suggested on Saturday morning!!! 

Then how do we implement solutions when we do not have the policy levers to do so?  Can groups of concerned people propose solutions and carry them out at levels that don’t require federal government power?  Will direct organizing town to town, city to city, state to state and country to country be possible?   For example, our colleagues from Portugal have proposed building a network among organizations around the world that are dedicated to relational solutions, starting with six of us (RCC, RCA, RELATE Lab, Relational Lab and two others in Spain and UK that were not at the Roundtable).  We discussed this Saturday over dinner and the RCC board will discuss at our board meeting this Thursday. 

Addressing all of these questions will require relational coordination and relational leadership. We can do this!  Please respond with your perspectives - including any photos you may have to share!

Love to all!

Jody Hoffer Gittell

Director, Relational Coordination Collaborative.

with many thanks to Core Host Committee

Many thanks to the Core Host Committee!

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