Everard Van Kemenade
Everard Van Kemenade
I was born in 1953 in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, currently a centre of design with worldwide renown. I started as a university lecturer, researcher, consultant on Quality Management at Fontys University of Applied Sciences and worked in many countries in the world on quality management systems, like Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Ghana, Tanzania, Viet Nam, Romania, India and the Caribbean. I took my PhD in Certification, Accreditation and the Professional from the Rotterdam School of Management. I wrote books and articles for TQM Journal, Quality in Higher Education, and Quality Progress and others. I am the director/owner of Van Kemenade Audit Coaching and Training. Besides, I am at the moment senior lecturer and researcher at the Master of Integrated Care Design, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences.
What is exciting me in my work at the moment?
A few years ago, I was puzzled by the difficulty of using the PlanDoCheckAct cycle, famous in healthcare as well, in times of continuous change. How can we plan and measure in such uncertainty? I became enticed by complexity theory in quality management and quality of care. My specific topic of research became ‘emergence’. Prof. T.W. Hardjono and I just finished a book: “The Emergence Paradigm: a way towards radical innovation”, to be published later this year. Currently, I research emergent leadership. How can leadership facilitate the emergence of (radical) innovation. An important area for me to investigate is Integrated Care.
How might what I am doing relate to EHFF’s mission?
EHFF is “looking beyond the present crisis but also incorporating the lessons to be learnt from it, to promote a radical change of healthcare systems and the status of well-being in our society as a whole”. I strongly support the idea that radical innovation of healthcare is needed. I believe we need complexity theory thinking (more than just system thinking) to help
us to understand what exactly is needed and how to co-create the future. That requires embracing uncertainty and more attention to a process like emergence (the phenomenon where out of a network of interacting internal and external elements over time arises a coherent new pattern, that is unpredictable, unexpected, unplanned and irreducible to the separate parts). That also means we need Personalised and Integrated care. Our research and education might contribute.
Comment from the Editorial team: EHFF strongly endorses the spirit of Everard’s contribution. We absolutely agree that radical/transformational change requires new ways of thinking about how change in complex organisations can take place. Complexity thinking applied to social systems is not that new, but the application of these ideas over the last ten or fifteen years has proved challenging. Messy problems don’t have neat solutions!