On 17 June 2019 Steven de Waal will lecture about his latest book: ‘Civil Leadership as the Future of Leadership. Harnessing the disruptive power of citizens.’ at the annual conference of the European Health Management Association in Espoo, Finland.

Of course he will start with the main strategic analysis in the book. We are currently living in the #DigitalCivilRevolution because of the ongoing introduction and implementation of all kinds of digital technologies. In his analysis this is not only causing disruption in markets, but also, by giving much more power to citizens, disrupting democracy, public services (like health care) and civil society.

He will further focus on the impact and disruption of health care. He sees 5 major challenges or even disruptions occurring in most Western health care systems:

1. A new form of governance will become more dominant by giving citizens more say, especially cooperatives and commons (in the book to be found in Ch. 11 ‘Disruption of Public Services’ and Ch. 14: ‘Commons: Future Governance Mode of the People, by the People, for the People’)
2. An active civil society, like in mutual care in neighbourhoods and informal networks
3. Increasing public pressure: the permanent public grandstand as this was observed and analyzed in the book (Ch. 8: ‘The Battle between the Media for Dominance as Public Channels’) will increase all kinds of public pressure on health care institutes by publicly signaling complaints, incidents and mistreatments. This will be publicly shared (and no longer just quietly delivered at the organization itself), publicly supported or recognized, so, the answer of the institutes must also be publicly shown and explained as well. The most impactful consequence of this new public power will be that it will be about individual professionals as well as about general institutions!
4. Self-management by patients of their own chain through the health care system. They will tell health care organizations and professionals how much their own informal network and family can and want to do, how this will be planned and how they see their own possibilities in this ‘chain management’. Because of their training in selfchoice, selforganization and self-planning they will no longer behave as a passive unit to be transported and planned by official health care.
5. Growing knowledge that patients have about their own diagnosis, illness and treatments through their  search on the internet and by being part of all kinds of informal networks, including that of patients with the same illnesses (patient platforms and patient associations).
6. ICT: no longer is it all about protecting the privacy of their data (by other people and institutes and government regulations), but about their ownership of their data: they decide with whom and why to share their medical files and data!

Dr. De Waal will further explain all this at the conference. He knows this will trigger much debate and discussion and is looking forward to that!

Download Dr. De Waal’s presentation here