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Organizational Readiness

Posted on December 7, 2010

Pia Escudero (bio) emphasizes the importance of strategic planning.


I think that you can begin to measure the readiness of administrators and then the readiness of clinicians. But to me, I think in my own personal experience of being an administrator in a large school district, which really involves dealing with a whole array of administration issues and school board issues and really multitasking an array of factors that impact your daily practice. I think that it boils down to the willingness to take a risk and ask yourself, can you do what you do a little bit better? And how do we know that what we're doing helps? So when I ask that and I thought, how do we get better and how do we really address issues in a way that we know we're helping, sometimes you have to take a risk.

So I think you're never ready to take on more work because sometimes that's what taking on evidence-based practice means. So learning a new intervention and exploring a new world and getting a lot of clinical training. Many times it involves, as we've talked about, funding that you don't have. Yet if there's a commitment to really improving, of challenging, and yet having also the end result, which is evidence that what you do is improving, whether it's clinical skills, whether it's the population you serve. I think it's a very worthwhile commitment and I think that sometimes we just have to get out of our comfort zone and engage in these conversations that many times as an administrator you don't have because you're pulled with immediate emergencies.

You're constantly burning out fires and so are the clinicians. So you're always in a reactive mode versus a mode that calls for critical thinking. It calls for strategic planning. It calls for investment of time and professional skills but in the end it's a worthwhile process.

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Excerpted from an interview with the contributor in Los Angeles, CA in May, 2010.





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