The Field Guide Is Here

Somewhere in your health system this morning, an 8:40 appointment didn't show. By 8:52 the slot was gone and the visit became a statistic. Someone will suggest reminder texts. Someone else will point out you already send three.

The problem was never information. The 8:40 was designed for a person with a car, a flexible morning, and childcare, and it was offered to a person with none of those. She did the math. The math said no. You logged it as her decision.

Healthcare is not failing because people don't care. It is failing because the system was never designed to heal, and it is producing exactly what it was built to produce. Your job is not repair. It's redesign.

Designed to Heal: The Field Guide is available now

The Field Guide is the redesign tool. It treats empathy as infrastructure: seven design specifications, remembered by the letters E.M.P.A.T.H.Y., that a system built to heal has to meet, with evidence you can point to either way. You score your organization twice on every specification, once on how much you say it matters and once on what's actually built. The distance between those two numbers is your Performative Progress Gap. Finding it is the point.

Inside:

• The Organizational Design Index (ODI-29) and the private Individual Practice Inventory (IPI-21)

• A routing rule that tells you which module to work first, based on what your system needs rather than what's comfortable

• Seven modules, each with a core exercise, a team exercise, and a build plan

• The Workaround Debt Register, for the heroes who are keeping your defects off the dashboard

• A ninety-day build plan and a one-page version you can take to your board

Get the Field Guide on Amazon (paperback, $34.99). Bulk orders for leadership teams, boards, and facilitated sessions: nneka@nnekasederstrom.com.

Scoring is free through the portal at portal.nnekasederstrom.com. No account, no sign-in.

Wide margins. Write in it. A pristine copy of this guide is a failed copy.

The companion book, Designed to Heal: Why Healthcare Isn't Working — and How to

Finally Get It Right, is forthcoming.