Connecting the Dots

Michael Hein, MS, MD, MHCM, Associate Certified Coach (ACC), believes that when healthcare leaders don’t fully understand complexity, it leads to burnout, turnover, and poor patient care—issues he considers preventable forms of human suffering. Healthcare is more complex than ever, and traditional top-down methods often exacerbate these challenges. Success today requires leaders who adapt, absorb uncertainty, and react quickly. For many, this means embracing new leadership mindsets. With over thirty years of experience in healthcare, Michael is Senior Vice President and an executive coach at MEDI Leadership, the top healthcare coaching firm in the US. Drawing from clinical and executive roles, he helps leaders make the mindset shifts needed for success in complexity.

Previously, Michael was CEO of a nonmerger hospital network and Chief Medical Officer at Catholic Health Initiatives. He led transformations at the Veterans Health Administration and cofounded KPI Ninja, a healthcare data company.

Michael holds degrees from the University of South Dakota, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and St. Cloud State University. He is a certified executive coach through the International Coaching Federation, trained at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His experience bridges frontline care and strategic leadership, coaching leaders to drive sustainable change in complex organizations.

His book, Shifting Toward Unorthodoxy: Ten Unconventional Mindsets that Help Healthcare Leaders Succeed in a Complex World, encourages a shift from outdated leadership mindsets to adaptive ones. A lifelong athlete, Michael enjoys cycling and swimming.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Michael Hein, MS, MD, MHCM, Associate Certified Coach (ACC), believes that when healthcare leaders don’t fully understand complexity, it leads to burnout, turnover, and poor patient care—issues he considers preventable forms of human suffering. Healthcare is more complex than ever, and traditional top-down methods often exacerbate these challenges. Success today requires leaders who adapt, absorb uncertainty, and react quickly. For many, this means embracing new leadership mindsets. With over thirty years of experience in healthcare, Michael is Senior Vice President and an executive coach at MEDI Leadership, the top healthcare coaching firm in the US. Drawing from clinical and executive roles, he helps leaders make the mindset shifts needed for success in complexity.

Previously, Michael was CEO of a nonmerger hospital network and Chief Medical Officer at Catholic Health Initiatives. He led transformations at the Veterans Health Administration and cofounded KPI Ninja, a healthcare data company.

Michael holds degrees from the University of South Dakota, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and St. Cloud State University. He is a certified executive coach through the International Coaching Federation, trained at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His experience bridges frontline care and strategic leadership, coaching leaders to drive sustainable change in complex organizations.

His book, Shifting Toward Unorthodoxy: Ten Unconventional Mindsets that Help Healthcare Leaders Succeed in a Complex World, encourages a shift from outdated leadership mindsets to adaptive ones. A lifelong athlete, Michael enjoys cycling and swimming.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Michael Hein, MS, MD, MHCM, Associate Certified Coach (ACC), believes that when healthcare leaders don’t fully understand complexity, it leads to burnout, turnover, and poor patient care—issues he considers preventable forms of human suffering. Healthcare is more complex than ever, and traditional top-down methods often exacerbate these challenges. Success today requires leaders who adapt, absorb uncertainty, and react quickly. For many, this means embracing new leadership mindsets. With over thirty years of experience in healthcare, Michael is Senior Vice President and an executive coach at MEDI Leadership, the top healthcare coaching firm in the US. Drawing from clinical and executive roles, he helps leaders make the mindset shifts needed for success in complexity.

Previously, Michael was CEO of a nonmerger hospital network and Chief Medical Officer at Catholic Health Initiatives. He led transformations at the Veterans Health Administration and cofounded KPI Ninja, a healthcare data company.

Michael holds degrees from the University of South Dakota, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and St. Cloud State University. He is a certified executive coach through the International Coaching Federation, trained at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His experience bridges frontline care and strategic leadership, coaching leaders to drive sustainable change in complex organizations.

His book, Shifting Toward Unorthodoxy: Ten Unconventional Mindsets that Help

Healthcare Leaders Succeed in a Complex World, encourages a shift from outdated leadership mindsets to adaptive ones. A lifelong athlete, Michael enjoys cycling and swimming.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Michael Hein, MS, MD, MHCM, Associate Certified Coach (ACC), believes that when healthcare leaders don’t fully understand complexity, it leads to burnout, turnover, and poor patient care—issues he considers preventable forms of human suffering. Healthcare is more complex than ever, and traditional top-down methods often exacerbate these challenges. Success today requires leaders who adapt, absorb uncertainty, and react quickly. For many, this means embracing new leadership mindsets. With over thirty years of experience in healthcare, Michael is Senior Vice President and an executive coach at MEDI Leadership, the top healthcare coaching firm in the US. Drawing from clinical and executive roles, he helps leaders make the mindset shifts needed for success in complexity.

Previously, Michael was CEO of a nonmerger hospital network and Chief Medical Officer at Catholic Health Initiatives. He led transformations at the Veterans Health Administration and cofounded KPI Ninja, a healthcare data company.

Michael holds degrees from the University of South Dakota, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and St. Cloud State University. He is a certified executive coach through the International Coaching Federation, trained at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His experience bridges frontline care and strategic leadership, coaching leaders to drive sustainable change in complex organizations.

His book, Shifting Toward Unorthodoxy: Ten Unconventional Mindsets that Help

Healthcare Leaders Succeed in a Complex World, encourages a shift from outdated leadership mindsets to adaptive ones. A lifelong athlete, Michael enjoys cycling and swimming.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Nigel Thurlow previously served as the first-ever Chief of Agile at Toyota, where he created the World Agility Forum award-winning “Scrum the Toyota Way” and co-created The Flow System™, a holistic FLOW-based approach to delivering customer-first value built on a foundation of The Toyota Production System.

Throughout his career, Thurlow has gained an enviable recognition as a leading expert in Lean and Agile methods, tools, techniques, and approaches. He specializes in developing effective organizational designs and operating models for organizations to embrace both Lean and Agile concepts. By leveraging knowledge from various sources, Thurlow helps optimize organizations to enact successful, long-lasting transformational strategies in applying Lean thinking, Agile techniques, and Scrum – while combining complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and team science, represented by a triple helix structure known as the DNA of Organizations™.

As of 2024, he has trained over 8,500 people worldwide in Scrum, Agile, Lean, Flow, Complexity, and organizational design. Thurlow is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST).

An instinctive problem solver, Nigel Thurlow takes a method-agnostic, cross-industry approach in helping organizations find the right tools, methods, and approaches to overcome challenges within their contextual situation. He advocates for the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach to agility; all tools have utility, but they also have contextual limitations. From this vantage point, Thurlow equips an organization’s people to become an army of problem solvers, expanding their perception of what they do so they can better understand and prepare for potential challenges along the way.

Thurlow is currently the Chief Executive Officer at The Flow Consortium, a collection of highly regarded companies in the Lean and Agile world — as well as the scientific and academic communities at large. The Flow Consortium strives to expand the boundaries of current Lean and Agile thinking through the understanding of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science by tapping into the minds of top thought leaders from these concentrations.

While at Toyota, Thurlow worked to frame Scrum as more than just a standardized behavioral process by applying and advancing fundamental methodologies to spur innovative, forward-thinking solutions to Toyota’s most complex challenges. He also founded the Toyota Agile Academy in 2018. These efforts signaled a transformative phase for Toyota, leading the company towards organizational agility and helping its team members better understand this concept in an automotive production context.

Additionally, Thurlow has been a board presence at the University of North Texas since 2019, serving as an advisor to the Department of Information Science Board and a member of the College of Information Leadership Board. He has also served as the President of CDQ LLC since 2012. Prior to that, Thurlow held executive coaching and training roles for companies including Vodafone, Lumen Technologies, Scrum, Inc., GE Power & Water, 3M Healthcare Information Systems, Bose Corporation, The TJX Companies, Inc. – as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has also taught Scrum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As an author, Thurlow was named a Forbes top 10 author for co-authoring the book “The Flow System™” in 2020. He has recently co-authored “The Flow System Playbook” published in 2023 which presents a practical study guide and reference book to all the concepts covered in the first book.

His other notable publications include “Introducing the Flow System (2019)” and “TPS and the Age of Destruction (2019).” He is also the co-author of The Flow Guide and The Flow System Principles and Key Attributes Guidebook. Recently, Thurlow co-authored “The Substrate Independence Theory,” a peer-reviewed scientific article exploring sensemaking techniques as a means to provide cognitively based scaffolds that guide and structure learning. His latest research is around Assemblages Theory and the interactions and novel emergence when combining diverse tools, techniques, methods, and approaches in contextual situations.

Thurlow also serves as a member on the Forbes Coaches Council writing and advising on business and leadership topics. He is the co-author of the upcoming book on Decision Making in Complexity.

As of 2024, Nigel Thurlow has been nominated and will appear in Marquis Who’s Who (both print and online) as a notable American public figure, recognizing his work on methods and The Flow System. Established in 1898, Marquis Who’s Who presents unmatched coverage of the lives of today’s leaders and achievers from the United States and around the world, and from every significant field of endeavor. More information will be released soon once press releases have been issued.

Today, Nigel Thurlow remains at the forefront of innovation across the Lean, Agile, and Complexity Thinking disciplines, striving to push existing ideologies to new horizons while eliminating critical misconceptions surrounding modern applications.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Nigel Thurlow previously served as the first-ever Chief of Agile at Toyota, where he created the World Agility Forum award-winning “Scrum the Toyota Way” and co-created The Flow System™, a holistic FLOW-based approach to delivering customer-first value built on a foundation of The Toyota Production System.

Throughout his career, Thurlow has gained an enviable recognition as a leading expert in Lean and Agile methods, tools, techniques, and approaches. He specializes in developing effective organizational designs and operating models for organizations to embrace both Lean and Agile concepts. By leveraging knowledge from various sources, Thurlow helps optimize organizations to enact successful, long-lasting transformational strategies in applying Lean thinking, Agile techniques, and Scrum – while combining complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and team science, represented by a triple helix structure known as the DNA of Organizations™.

As of 2024, he has trained over 8,500 people worldwide in Scrum, Agile, Lean, Flow, Complexity, and organizational design. Thurlow is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST).

An instinctive problem solver, Nigel Thurlow takes a method-agnostic, cross-industry approach in helping organizations find the right tools, methods, and approaches to overcome challenges within their contextual situation. He advocates for the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach to agility; all tools have utility, but they also have contextual limitations. From this vantage point, Thurlow equips an organization’s people to become an army of problem solvers, expanding their perception of what they do so they can better understand and prepare for potential challenges along the way.

Thurlow is currently the Chief Executive Officer at The Flow Consortium, a collection of highly regarded companies in the Lean and Agile world — as well as the scientific and academic communities at large. The Flow Consortium strives to expand the boundaries of current Lean and Agile thinking through the understanding of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science by tapping into the minds of top thought leaders from these concentrations.

While at Toyota, Thurlow worked to frame Scrum as more than just a standardized behavioral process by applying and advancing fundamental methodologies to spur innovative, forward-thinking solutions to Toyota’s most complex challenges. He also founded the Toyota Agile Academy in 2018. These efforts signaled a transformative phase for Toyota, leading the company towards organizational agility and helping its team members better understand this concept in an automotive production context.

Additionally, Thurlow has been a board presence at the University of North Texas since 2019, serving as an advisor to the Department of Information Science Board and a member of the College of Information Leadership Board. He has also served as the President of CDQ LLC since 2012. Prior to that, Thurlow held executive coaching and training roles for companies including Vodafone, Lumen Technologies, Scrum, Inc., GE Power & Water, 3M Healthcare Information Systems, Bose Corporation, The TJX Companies, Inc. – as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has also taught Scrum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As an author, Thurlow was named a Forbes top 10 author for co-authoring the book “The Flow System™” in 2020. He has recently co-authored “The Flow System Playbook” published in 2023 which presents a practical study guide and reference book to all the concepts covered in the first book.

His other notable publications include “Introducing the Flow System (2019)” and “TPS and the Age of Destruction (2019).” He is also the co-author of The Flow Guide and The Flow System Principles and Key Attributes Guidebook. Recently, Thurlow co-authored “The Substrate Independence Theory,” a peer-reviewed scientific article exploring sensemaking techniques as a means to provide cognitively based scaffolds that guide and structure learning. His latest research is around Assemblages Theory and the interactions and novel emergence when combining diverse tools, techniques, methods, and approaches in contextual situations.

Thurlow also serves as a member on the Forbes Coaches Council writing and advising on business and leadership topics. He is the co-author of the upcoming book on Decision Making in Complexity.

As of 2024, Nigel Thurlow has been nominated and will appear in Marquis Who’s Who (both print and online) as a notable American public figure, recognizing his work on methods and The Flow System. Established in 1898, Marquis Who’s Who presents unmatched coverage of the lives of today’s leaders and achievers from the United States and around the world, and from every significant field of endeavor. More information will be released soon once press releases have been issued.

Today, Nigel Thurlow remains at the forefront of innovation across the Lean, Agile, and Complexity Thinking disciplines, striving to push existing ideologies to new horizons while eliminating critical misconceptions surrounding modern applications.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Nigel Thurlow previously served as the first-ever Chief of Agile at Toyota, where he created the World Agility Forum award-winning “Scrum the Toyota Way” and co-created The Flow System™, a holistic FLOW-based approach to delivering customer-first value built on a foundation of The Toyota Production System.

Throughout his career, Thurlow has gained an enviable recognition as a leading expert in Lean and Agile methods, tools, techniques, and approaches. He specializes in developing effective organizational designs and operating models for organizations to embrace both Lean and Agile concepts. By leveraging knowledge from various sources, Thurlow helps optimize organizations to enact successful, long-lasting transformational strategies in applying Lean thinking, Agile techniques, and Scrum – while combining complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and team science, represented by a triple helix structure known as the DNA of Organizations™.

As of 2024, he has trained over 8,500 people worldwide in Scrum, Agile, Lean, Flow, Complexity, and organizational design. Thurlow is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST).

An instinctive problem solver, Nigel Thurlow takes a method-agnostic, cross-industry approach in helping organizations find the right tools, methods, and approaches to overcome challenges within their contextual situation. He advocates for the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach to agility; all tools have utility, but they also have contextual limitations. From this vantage point, Thurlow equips an organization’s people to become an army of problem solvers, expanding their perception of what they do so they can better understand and prepare for potential challenges along the way.

Thurlow is currently the Chief Executive Officer at The Flow Consortium, a collection of highly regarded companies in the Lean and Agile world — as well as the scientific and academic communities at large. The Flow Consortium strives to expand the boundaries of current Lean and Agile thinking through the understanding of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science by tapping into the minds of top thought leaders from these concentrations.

While at Toyota, Thurlow worked to frame Scrum as more than just a standardized behavioral process by applying and advancing fundamental methodologies to spur innovative, forward-thinking solutions to Toyota’s most complex challenges. He also founded the Toyota Agile Academy in 2018. These efforts signaled a transformative phase for Toyota, leading the company towards organizational agility and helping its team members better understand this concept in an automotive production context.

Additionally, Thurlow has been a board presence at the University of North Texas since 2019, serving as an advisor to the Department of Information Science Board and a member of the College of Information Leadership Board. He has also served as the President of CDQ LLC since 2012. Prior to that, Thurlow held executive coaching and training roles for companies including Vodafone, Lumen Technologies, Scrum, Inc., GE Power & Water, 3M Healthcare Information Systems, Bose Corporation, The TJX Companies, Inc. – as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has also taught Scrum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As an author, Thurlow was named a Forbes top 10 author for co-authoring the book “The Flow System™” in 2020. He has recently co-authored “The Flow System Playbook” published in 2023 which presents a practical study guide and reference book to all the concepts covered in the first book.

His other notable publications include “Introducing the Flow System (2019)” and “TPS and the Age of Destruction (2019).” He is also the co-author of The Flow Guide and The Flow System Principles and Key Attributes Guidebook. Recently, Thurlow co-authored “The Substrate Independence Theory,” a peer-reviewed scientific article exploring sensemaking techniques as a means to provide cognitively based scaffolds that guide and structure learning. His latest research is around Assemblages Theory and the interactions and novel emergence when combining diverse tools, techniques, methods, and approaches in contextual situations.

Thurlow also serves as a member on the Forbes Coaches Council writing and advising on business and leadership topics. He is the co-author of the upcoming book on Decision Making in Complexity.

As of 2024, Nigel Thurlow has been nominated and will appear in Marquis Who’s Who (both print and online) as a notable American public figure, recognizing his work on methods and The Flow System. Established in 1898, Marquis Who’s Who presents unmatched coverage of the lives of today’s leaders and achievers from the United States and around the world, and from every significant field of endeavor. More information will be released soon once press releases have been issued.

Today, Nigel Thurlow remains at the forefront of innovation across the Lean, Agile, and Complexity Thinking disciplines, striving to push existing ideologies to new horizons while eliminating critical misconceptions surrounding modern applications.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Lisa (Elizabeth) Joyce Freeman serves as a Senior Advisor in the School of Medicine at Stanford University. She administratively supports the Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement. The goal of the Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement is to become the best at getting better Inspiring and accelerating the delivery of consistent, excellent care across Stanford Medicine measured by performance improvement in Safety, Quality, Patient Experience, and Cost Reduction (Collectively=Value) from today's baseline and ultimately developing a reputation as a national leader, to which others look for inspiration and as an educational resource. From 2001 through 2016, she was the Chief Executive Officer of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS). VAPAHCS is a $900M, 800 - bed federal health care system with three inpatient divisions and seven outpatient clinics serving 90,000 Veterans in 10 counties in Northern California. It is affiliated with Stanford University School of Medicine, has the second-largest research enterprise in VA ($58M), trains 1500 residents, internsand students yearly and is home to every specialized Veteran treatment modality offered in the VA system. She was responsible for all administrative and clinical aspects of VA Palo Alto, including strategy and master planning for facilities. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Notre Dame in Civil Engineering and a Master of Business Administration degree from Louisiana Tech University. She is a licensed professional engineer and a Fellow in the American College of Health Care Executives. She is the recipient of two Presidential Rank Awards, one at the meritorious level and the second at the distinguished level.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Gary Peterson - Executive Vice President, Supply Chain & Production at O.C. Tanner Company

As our Executive Vice President of Supply Chain & Production, Gary specializes in creating cultures of continuous improvement through manufacturing and leadership excellence. He leads our manufacturing, buying, engineering, refining, and logistics teams. Gary has been at O.C. Tanner for over 35 years and has helped transform the company’s manufacturing operations from “batch” to lean while pioneering team-based procedures that allow each unit to take full ownership of their results. His greatest joy on the job comes from interacting with and inspiring people—empowering them to do their best work.

Gary enjoys traveling across the globe to assist organizations in generating newfound outcomes for their people and their machines. He retires at the end of this year and is looking forward to expanding his impact in the world of continuous improvement culture. A member of the Shingo Academy and the AME Hall of Fame, he also currently serves on the Executive Advisory Board for the Shingo Institute and is a Shingo Examiner. He holds an MBA from Brigham Young University and enjoys basketball, snowboarding, hiking, golfing and spending time with his family, including 19 grandchildren.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Dr. Sarah Womack is a distinguished researcher and consultant in the field of Industrial Engineering. Her Ph.D. in the department of Industrial & Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor focused on the intersection of lean manufacturing practices and ergonomics. She has published peer-reviewed articles, presented as guest speaker at conferences and universities, and facilitated copious workshops on lean manufacturing. She has established herself as a leading scholar and consultant of one of the world’s most coveted management systems, the Toyota Production System. She spent eight years on a journey in various leadership roles of “learning by doing” under some of the world’s greatest lean thinkers at Toyota. Applying Toyota’s management thinking, she consults across an array of industries with an innovative and practical approach to continuous improvement, organizational transformation, and operational excellence - coaching at every level from the C-suite to the shopfloor. She continues to learn and collect a patchwork of stories to teach and inspire others on their operational excellence journeys. In addition to her writing, consulting, and speaking engagements, Sarah is passionate about traveling the world and immersing herself in diverse cultures.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.