Breakthrough thinking is necessary to move forward, but it does not happen without a culture of openness to new ideas and willingness to take risks. Leaders are wise to encourage staff to engage in renewal activities as often as possible.

Alison-Napolitano and Pesut, authors of Bounce Forward: The Extraordinary Resilience of Nurse Leadership, state that personal renewal is important for your health and well-beingit allows you to show up for your life, and it gives you energy to do meaningful work . . . Renewal provides you with the interludes you need to solve complex problems with creativity (2015, p. 42).

Interludes that lead to breakthrough thinking are built into work advances at Cincinnati Childrens. During quarterly advances for assistant vice presidents and vice presidents of the Patient Services Division, fun activities pull thinking away from the task of creating strategy or budgets. Cooking healthy meals and repairing a playground for developmentally disabled children provide mental breaks and the opportunity to develop camaraderie and forge personal relationships.

A report published in The Lancet reviews strategies for transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world. The authors indicate that competencies to be developed include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice (EBP), continuous quality improvement, use of new informatics, and integration of public health. In short, undergraduate education needs to provide students with a foundation for lifelong learning (Frenk et al., 2010).

Part of the learning process is unlearning, which is necessary to enhance quality and safety. Unlearning is letting go of old knowledge or old ways of doing business. As difficult as unlearning may be, it is a skill that prepares you for a better way of doing something (Uldrich, 2011).

The inability to unlearn can be detrimental to moving forward. As leaders, we can become victims of our own insights and past successes. This can cause us to cling to outdated recipes for success (Porter-OGrady & Malloch, 2011). They add that moving into a new age does not mean leaving everything behind. It does mean thinking about what needs to be left behind and reflecting on what does go with us as we move into an age with a different set of parameters (Porter-OGrady & Malloch, 2011, p. 10).

Unlearning and breakthrough thinking can be supported by how our workplace and workflow is organized. Often, new structures and processes can help us to see different, more innovative possibilities that can be implemented.

provide an example you can use in breakthrough thinking.