System Innovation: A Holistic Approach to Disrupting With Love and Human Caring,by Julie Kennedy Oehlert and Kathleen Sitzman

The bright vision presented by this book provides an invigorating push to bring out the inner anarchist hidden in even the most complacent of health professionals. System Innovation: A Holistic Approach to Disrupting with Love and Human Caring, by Julie Kennedy Oehlert and Kathleen Sitzman (Kennedy Oehlert & Sitzman, 2025), renews the ongoing discussion of how theory-driven change can be used to ground and promote the integration of love and human caring into system innovation by providing concrete and realistic application strategies to front-line practice. In this book, theory is presented as a catalyst to review and revitalize system processes in consideration with human caring and a heavy focus on the relationships that make a system work (or not work) by examining how interdisciplinary practice can complicate an organizational focus on caring and set up a culture counter-intuitive to the delivery of holistic care.

Within this book, the authors provide clear and concise actionable items that can be utilized in direct patient care, a step missing from many books on this topic. For example, the clarity with which the first chapter presents Jean Watson's Theory of Caring, which can sometimes be perceived as quite lofty and overarching, is instead artfully presented in tangible, accessible, bit-sized pieces, enabling change to happen in steps rather than requiring an entire coup d’état to implement system innovation. This approach facilitates a shift in perspective on an individual level that can be translated easily to others when opportunities to make change present themselves in practice. Clearly the authors understand the realities of practice and the overwhelming system of checks and balances that slow, delay, and/or stop altogether making meaningful change in practice.

This is not to say that the authors do not appreciate an entire system shift towards a caring focus. The authors do a valuable service in recognizing that for optimal results, this kind of innovation requires a commitment at the interpersonal level – it is in the actions and relationships among individuals, groups, and departments that the system can be transformed. In that effect, this book grounds system change in Riane Eisler's Cultural Transformation Theory, allowing the authors to take a holistic approach to organizational culture that focuses on interaction-based relationships within the system in recognition of structural power. In Chapter 2, there is a well-conceptualized discussion of interdisciplinary silos that exist within health-care systems, such as Human Resources, Marketing, and Finance, that may lack insight into the very system in which they respectively manage, publicize, and control costs. To enhance connectiveness, the authors provide a beautiful tool, the disruption mandala, to name each silo within the system and understand how each is connected to system innovation.

The authors do a seamless job of interweaving the chapters to include both Watson's Caring Theory and Cultural Transformation Theory. The authors openly address the need for well-developed leadership programs that nourish an organization. In Chapter 3, Leadership is Love, the authors specifically address the capacity to lead rather than simply delivering rapid results. The authors advocate for the development of leadership programs that create a culture of growth within an organization as a way to truly cultivate leaders rather than promote individuals and assign them with additional tasks. Growth that can be measured, as discussed in Chapter 4, Measurement: Goal-setting for Love and Human Caring, by connecting data to visual representations in a way that encourages members of the organization to focus on needed change.

As part of creating that change, Chapter 5: Human Resources, delves into attracting the right people to the organization and making orientation a cultural immersion activity instead of a task to complete. From a managerial standpoint, orientation is an opportunity to begin a dialogue on the personal preferences of team members, giving opportunities to provide the right rewards to keep team members feeling valued, appreciated, and considered, as milestones are met throughout their journey within the organization. This chapter also reviews the importance of creating performance evaluations that mark a celebration of service that is customized to each team member's unique growth and development within the organization as well as providing the opportunity for team members to connect with the team leaders on a personal level. The authors advocate for meaningful touchpoints, or individual check-in meetings, on a monthly basis. These touchpoints should review competencies, capacities, and the support that team members need to be successful in the organization.

Chapter 6, Organizational Communication, further explores the importance of the way how team members and team leaders connect and work together to overcome the challenges they face in everyday practice. Using the term multidimensional caring communication, the authors address the need to move beyond communication only from team leaders to team members, team members to team leaders, and team members to each other. Instead, the authors advocate for including community members, patients, families, and affiliated businesses into the organizational communication network. This communication technique helps organizations to create solutions from a place of collective knowledge with as many factors and impacts as possible considered in the process of change. This chapter includes a rich linguistic guide to help leaders rethink the language they use when communicating to others, to clearly express language that is positive and supportive, and that fosters growth within the system.

In the face of challenges, Chapter 7: Human Caring Experience, moves the discussion of system innovation forward by addressing the customer service expectations that influence frontline practice. In a system that is strained for resources, finding the time to invest in creating a customer service-oriented atmosphere can easily fall by the wayside, seen as frivolous or unnecessary to patient outcomes. However, there is an entire discipline focused on improving customer service and, without addressing this element, team members can find themselves in conflict with the system. This book provides a structured way to incorporate hospitality into the patient/customer experience as well as a useful strategy to discuss customer feedback and responses to customers who have less than satisfying experiences.

The final chapter, Healthcare Voices, immerses readers in the power of advocating for change within a system. Expanding on the previous chapters, this chapter brings the book together to harness the totality of system innovation and the power of individual team members to evolve in even the direst of health-care situations. In this chapter, individual team members affirm the need for change and discuss how caring has been used to disrupt patterns of behavior in practice that do not promote a culture of love and caring. As a review of the whole book, this chapter provides a concrete affirmation of the strategies from the previous chapters and demonstrates how those strategies create effective and lasting cultural changes within the system.

In conclusion, System Innovation: A Holistic Approach to Disrupting with Love and Human Caring provides a very practical, hands-on approach to creating system-wide change, beginning with interactions among individuals to facilitate a culture of love and human caring. The most appealing strength of this book is that it is not a lofty overview of theory and research. Instead, this book is practical, easy to read, and, most importantly, presents strategies that are easy to implement. For team leaders, this book provides invaluable tools to build a culture of caring and maintain a team that embodies caring as a result of a leadership and organizational model of caring. For team members, this book is a reminder that a workplace culture with an expectation that is positive, supportive, and fosters growth is not out of reach; it simply has yet to be implemented within their system.