LEAP is San Mateo County Health’s approach to improvement of all types, to optimize the way we do our work today and in the future. To continuously improve County Health’s clinical and supportive services and public health programs, we use LEAP approaches that support innovation, collaboration and experimentation. LEAP tools and practices create safe spaces for collaboration, build structures to work across our divisions and units, enhance leadership effectiveness and support powerful problem-solving.

Improving a complex organization in an ever-changing world is a challenge. LEAP represents our collective best thinking about how to do this, based on our past experiences and always evolving as we learn more. To support the integration of LEAP across the system, County Health has a small unit called the LEAP Institute to codify LEAP practices, assist staff in understanding their purpose and use, hold space for the reflection and questioning that are necessary for learning and bring in new ideas that may enrich LEAP. 

Who is LEAP for?

Everyone who touches County Health is an important part of LEAP.  We believe getting better at improving ourselves and our systems requires learning about and experimenting with all aspects of being a great organization: how we understand our community’s needs and design our processes to meet them, how we manage our daily operations, how we develop and inspire ourselves and the people who work with us along the way and how we strategize for the needs of tomorrow.  

LEAP is grounded in improving the value our organization can provide to everyone we serve. Through our LEAP practices, we strive to deepen our understanding of the needs of our clients, patients and county residents. 

We believe every staff member has wisdom and experience that can make our systems better. LEAP processes are designed to engage and empower staff to improve their work, while building connections across the organization and improving their skills at scientific problem solving. All staff can use LEAP tools such as local area improvement huddles, where ideas are discussed and prioritized for small teams to tackle, and everyday problem-solving methodologies in which staff work with supervisors to solve issues to root. 

Many LEAP tools are designed to improve management systems that ensure everyone has what’s required to do their work every day, including understanding priorities and goals, and that people are provided what they need to grow in all the capabilities they need to do their work better. In the longer term, LEAP strategy processes support leaders to understand the context and the need their organization meets, articulate their vision and identify new systems the organization will need to be successful in the future.

How did LEAP get here? 

More than a decade ago, San Mateo County Health looked to learn from best practices in organizational excellence. Our first deep foray focused on studying and applying a model called Lean, which came from the manufacturing sector and is based on Toyota’s management system or “The Toyota Way,” a gold standard for quality and improvement that has been applied effectively in medical care settings around the world.

We quickly realized that we had to make Lean our own, not only because we needed to learn from other best practices beyond Toyota’s but also because we knew that learning from our own personal experiences and experiments locally was just as important. That’s how LEAP came about. 

County Health’s focus on learning leads us to continually evolve LEAP itself.  Since our first experiments in 2011, our LEAP “toolkit” has expanded to include many different practices for learning, collaboration, leading and problem-solving beyond our initial capabilities. Anchored in Lean management principles from Toyota’s approach to manufacturing that have been applied effectively in hospitals around the world, LEAP has also integrated practices from fields such as quality improvement in health care, servant leadership, change management, systems thinking, conscious leadership, regenerative design, cultural humility, psychological safety theory and more.