Sunday, September 21, 2014

Buurtzorg - Community Nursing

Buurtzorg is a community nursing organization in the Netherlands. It started small, focused on the needs of the professional care team and the people they support. It uses a self-organizing model that puts the local team in charge of the care and how they run the team to provide that care.

A trio of remarkable outcomes resulted from this.

  1. Extremely satisfied patients with excellent outcomes and reduced total costs (40% below the expected cost). 
  2. Extremely satisfied workers. Buurtzorg was the Employer of the Year in 2011 and 2012 in the Netherlands.
  3. Explosive growth, from the first team of 4 nurses in 2006 to 8,000 in 2014. Buurtzorg now provides 80% of the community nursing services in the Netherlands. This has occurred with almost no corporate overhead (a central staff of 45 and 15 team coaches).
The shared services include
  • An electronic health record
  • A social network
  • A team dashboard
There are references to some outsourced services, such as payroll and legal. I'd like to know more.

Here are links about Buurtzorg.



The Queen's Nursing Institute (2014 blogs):




I came across Buurtzorg in a book on a new organizational paradigm (Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux). A great book that needs its own entry... something for another day.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Self-Organizing Organizations

A friend is hosting a workshop to focus his small company, Courage Labs. Here's his recommended reading/viewing list and commentary:

Talks about how to build solid organizations that people want to work in/on.  I'll be using "Orange" and "Green" and "Teal" a lot -- you should know what that means in an organizational context.

A Teal organization (see above) doesn't have a master planner -- it has partners who care and work to help the organization evolve.  I have a strong bias toward this particular ruleset.

A 20-minute introductory video about Holacracy (without a lot of detail).

Introduces the Holacracy governance system, its core meetings and constitution.  My intention is to have Courage Labs abide by the Holacracy Constitution.

I want Courage Labs to be a place that is beyond profit.  A purpose-driven organization that is driven as much (if not more) by how much it benefits the world as how it generates profit.  I will be pushing for reorganizing Courage Labs as a Benefit Corporation.

A Holacracy "app" that can define how to "split up" ownership of a Holacractic organization.  I'll be asking everyone at this meeting what tier they belong in.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Ten Minute Meditation Instruction

At a recent company meeting, one of my co-workers asked for some resources for meditation practice. I thought "this is something I could offer." Here is the first of a series of 10-minute talks on meditation practice. Short pieces to be of benefit to new and more experienced meditators.