Navigating complexity in healthcare: exploring multiple pathways to knowing

For many years, researchers have studied complexity with the goal of understanding and reducing it. My research, however, centres on the question: how do we deal with complexity? How do we actually do this in, for example, today's healthcare?

In my inaugural lecture, I explain the ways in which I try to find answers to the question of how complexity is dealt with in healthcare. The starting point of my research is an exnovative approach. Exnovation is about learning from what is already there but has been taken for granted and has therefore fallen out of our field of vision. To bring back to the surface what we have “forgotten,” I use two research methods: a visual method in which daily work is filmed and discussed and a conceptual method based on the idea that other ways of knowing generate alternative analyses and insights. I will explain how these methods work through three case studies: interruptions, a paradox, and Polynesian seafarers.