From Insight to Action: Connection Is the Correction - Building the Conditions for Integrated Care

We are discovering a shared truth: collaboration is necessary to improve population health outcomes, yet often difficult to reach. The personal desire for working together is strong and absolutely imperative.  This is WHY we need to collaborate. What is missing are the enabling conditions that make collaboration possible and sustainable. When we focus on the HOW, we realize our potential for impact.

When it comes to large-scale human centered change (i.e. integrated care), it is highly productive to have a keen focus on the HOW.

Our work is to shift aspiration into action. We focus on the approach of system orchestration which encompasses breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, and shaping integration that serves individuals, communities, organizations, and entire systems. This is how strategic priorities are advanced, how intent is aligned, and how transformation lasts.

This is the work of integrated care

This is the work of system leadership

This is the work of system transformation

This is the work that enables health and wellbeing of people and communities.

Sometimes the work begins inside organizations by collectively developing skills, shifting mindsets, and building readiness for collaboration. Other times it means building the shared space and structure for organizations to collaborate across boundaries. Both are forms of system orchestration. Both are strategic.

Through national summits, regional convenings ,and organizational workshops—whether within teams, across organizations, or between sectors—we have seen the same patterns emerge: people want to work differently, but systems are not yet designed to make collaboration easy.

The Gap Between Evidence and Practice

Research and policy are clear: integrated care and collective leadership are essential to improving population health outcomes. But more importantly, people and families need systems that feel connected and seamless. For many people and families, the lived experiences are fragmented, requiring leaders and teams to find ways to connect what is not yet aligned. The challenge is not knowing what to do — it is knowing how to do it.

Across the system, healthcare workers and leaders operate in environments that do not enable the conditions for collaboration. They may believe in collaboration and may or may not have frameworks to guide them, but they are not equipped with the relational infrastructure or support to integrate it into daily practice. This is the skill gap — policy levers, strategies, research and people and their families are calling for integrated care, but the system does not yet have the enabling conditions to enable transformation.

Our role is to build those enabling conditions by:

●      Equipping those who work in health and care(regardless of role) with the skills to create space for honest dialogue.

●      Coaching individuals, teams, organizations, sectors, partnerships, and networks to build trust across differences.

●      Partnering with teams to move beyond entrenched barriers.

●      Developing the courage and capability to lead together, not only separately.

Although we may offer a single coaching session or workshop, our purpose is always to build capability into sustained action. In every case, the focus is the same: strengthening the skills, mindsets, and structures so people and organizations can carry the work forward themselves.

This is ongoing system orchestration and culture change, learned and practiced together. It is about co-creating the conditionsfor community-centered collaboration and new power ways that prioritize shared leadership and belonging.

From Insight to Action

This blog series will explore how examples of these conditions come to life. It will also shareinsights from our work—insights learned and practiced together. Through thisprocess, we learn, unlearn, grow, and create impact together,shifting how collaboration takes root.

1. Connection Is the Correction - Building the Conditions for Integrated Care (this blog)
2. The Nervous System of Change – how neuroscience shows us that trust is embodied, not abstract. As Stephen M.R. Covey reminds us, “Change happens at the speed of trust.”  And  in our work, we see the next layer: trust happens at the speed of the nervous system — across  individuals, teams, organizations, and sectors.
3. Elephants that need to be named and addressed to move  forward – how unspoken barriers keep systems stuck. Naming them is the first step, but the real work is in identifying which are within our control to change and then  acting on them.
4. Advancing on the  Collaboration Spectrum –   what our data tells us about the gap between the collaboration leaders  whether as a person with lived experience, a clinician, a community worker  or those in formal leadership roles across policy, research,  organizational and sector leadership want and the collaboration they   experience. It also highlights where individuals see themselves in their  own growth, where their teams and organizations are positioned, and where  hey aspire to be.
5. Individual and Collective Commitments – how personal and collective commitments translate insight into measurable action.

Together, these elements form a process: from self-awareness to shared understanding, to evidence, to action. Transformation requires alignment at every level—macro, meso, and micro. Our work focuses on building the conditions across all three so changes can take root.

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This Insight to Action series is an invitation to learn together about how conditions for collaboration are built, how barriers can be named and addressed, and how commitments turn intent into action.

To learn more about our collective pursuit and see the upcoming blogs, explore 4CImpact.org or to get in touch with Jodeme (jodeme@4cimpact.org) or Meghan (info@4CImpact.org).

This series was made possible by the 4C Impact team: Jodeme Goldhar,  Deb Gollob, Justin Levinsky and Meghan Perrin.