Journey to Improvement : A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Health Care, and Social Welfare

The challenges we face in education, health care, and social welfare are multifaceted, reflecting the complex systems in which we live. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver-bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities.

Journey to Improvement serves as a road map for teams that are ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience, the authors walk teams through the phases of an improvement journey from launching the team to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. This book highlights the personal, relational, and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real-world examples from across the social sector and around the world.

Alicia Grunow is co-founder of the Improvement Collective, a company that partners with organizations to improve a wide variety of outcomes that impact children and families. She trains teams, coaches and leaders on the application of improvement science methods and helps people design improvement initiatives to get tangible results. She co-authored the seminal book Learning to Improve; How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Grunow began her career as a bilingual teacher and holds a Ph.D in education from Stanford University.

Sandra Park is a co-founder of the Improvement Collective where she trains improvement coaches and advises large-scale education networks and projects. She led one of the first improvement networks to apply improvement science in the field of education at the Carnegie Foundation. Sandra previously taught elementary school in Oregon, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., and was director of programs at First Graduate in San Francisco. She holds a Ph.D. in education policy from UC-Berkeley, and an Improvement Advisor certificate from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Brandon Bennett is an advisor, teacher and author who helps organizations in health care, education and social welfare improve outcomes for the communities and individuals they serve. As the founder of ISC LLC, Brandon Bennett teaches advanced improvement methods and partners on a range of global initiatives including disease-specific processes, academic outcomes for students with disabilities and country-wide improvement efforts. Brandon has a B.S. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis and an MPH from Loma Linda University School of Public Health, specializing in global health. He is the author of several results based and methodological papers on the application of improvement science methods and has been a featured speaker at quality conferences around the world.