Saturday, November 1, 2014

Application of Knowledge - My first Capstone Event

We've gone through the first Capstone event, based on Department of Motor Vehicle inefficiency, and I thought it was good. As I said in my prior post, it was hard to wrap my head around foreign new terminology (and acronyms – oh, the incessant acronyms) but beginning to go through the material “live” helped clarify and solidify some of the ideas. I'm interested in more “live” application, as I think this is where (as with most concepts) the knowledge comprehension, retention, and transmutation (into wisdom-based experience) get tested out. In walking through the preliminary concepts actively, it was a bit more conceivable to me than before how one could eventually approach clinical issues and begin to tease them apart into manageable, solvable problems.

There was something nice about beginning with the affinity diagram. It’s an unassuming organization tool with a lot of potency. It’s appealing in its uninhibited, creative beginnings, brainstorming off of what one has to analyze, to figure out what the issues might be, the raw reality of a situation. It’s a starting tool for all of us, situationally assessing and then taking our assessments and grouping them together into relationships. The Project Charter was more challenging because of the foreknowledge required: it’s tough to know without prior experience what angle one should take with an objective. The SIPOC diagram was also a bit tougher to relate to, especially because it’s hard as a clinician to think in terms of suppliers and customers, inputs and outputs – even that terminology seems remote and out of our sphere (we’re used to conversing in specialized medical jargon which is highly remote to everyone else). We went quickly at the end through the CTX tree, and I’ll need some more time with that. We left things off with our project at analysis still, and it will be interesting at the next Capstone event to push our interim knowledge acquisition forward further.

“Live” application of knowledge over time is crucial to becoming wise. Medicine may be the ultimate field where this is tested out, as the stakes are high in getting things right. Doing an exercise like the Capstone event is a mini-scale way of reminding ourselves of the necessity of application of knowledge, of not presumptuously remaining in our heads but playing things out in a challenging forum. Process improvement, or likely any improvement, needs to be thought out and then brought to life. I’m looking forward to learning more study-wise and then seeing what edification the next Capstone event will bring.

MP  

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