Rethinking Healthcare: Why Paradox Science Is Core to the Future of Health and Health Leadership

Solutions to healthcare's most persistent and pervasive challenges remain elusive because we approach them as navigating oppositional tensions: the need to drive efficiency versus improve quality, to leverage cutting-edge technology versus maintain human compassion, to address population health versus providing care to the patient in front of you. The key to transforming healthcare lies in the ability of healthcare leaders to recognize when oppositional tensions are in fact paradoxes at play, to increase the capability and collective capacity to navigate them. Paradox science contends sustainable solutions to intractable challenges come not from eliminating the tensions that operate within the complexity but from the ability of those involved to hold opposing ideas in productive balance. It empowers leaders and their teams to find innovative paths by engaging with tensions directly. This perspective piece outlines three steps healthcare leaders can take to apply paradox science in practice, providing descriptions and example actions for each: 1) Clarify the paradox, 2) Encourage experimentation, and 3) Adopt a dynamic view. Moving forward, health leaders must leverage paradox science to drive forward innovation agendas in order to truly transform the healthcare experience for patients, populations, and the health workforce that serves them.