It’s Not What You’re Thinking

About It’s Not What You’re Thinking

It’s Not What You’re Thinking by Dr. Rick van Pelt introduces a revolutionary approach to solving the most pressing challenges in healthcare today. With rising costs, persistent patient safety issues, and caregiver burnout at an all-time high, the current system is failing despite technological advances and tireless efforts by healthcare professionals. Dr. van Pelt’s “Precision Problem Solving” provides a fresh alternative to traditional methods that rely on preconceived hypotheses and subjective assumptions. Instead, this approach focuses on understanding the nature of conflict for creating a safe collaborative learning environment, objective observation, comprehensive understanding of the key functional problems, and insight-enabled creation of precise and sustained solutions.

Drawing from over thirty years of experience in clinical practice and leadership, van Pelt explores the entrenched dysfunctions in healthcare systems. He highlights how fragmented solutions and conflicting perspectives lead to suboptimal outcomes, and why efforts to improve patient safety and reduce burnout continue to fall short. By addressing conflict and integrating peer support, interprofessional collaboration, and the principles of high-reliability operating systems, van Pelt offers a practical framework for achieving sustained, transformative change.

The book provides real-world examples of how misaligned problem-solving approaches have perpetuated failure. For instance, the author discusses how healthcare systems have struggled with patient safety initiatives for decades, with little improvement, and explains how traditional methods often exacerbate burnout among frontline workers. By learning to look at problems without bias, and adopting a practical, user-friendly methodology that emphasizes shared comprehensive understanding of critical functional problems rather than reliance on incomplete hypotheses, readers can finally move beyond superficial fixes to create precise, resilient, and sustainable solutions.

Perfect for healthcare professionals, administrators, and anyone involved in high-stakes environments, It’s Not What You’re Thinking is an essential guide for those ready to challenge conventional wisdom. With actionable insights and a proven framework for system transformation, this book equips its readers with the tools they need to enact real change in healthcare.