Coming off a major strike, with burnout scores at historic highs, Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California senior leaders spent a full day learning engagement tools and narrative rituals. Months later, the rituals are still running.
Kaiser Permanente is a $72.6B integrated health system. Its Southern California senior leadership came into the room carrying the aftermath of a major strike and some of the highest burnout scores in the organization’s history. Healthcare is living through its worst burnout wave since COVID, and it is getting worse.
The instinct is to treat burnout as a math equation: too much work, too few people. But the math rarely explains it. Burnout is more often a measure of workplace loneliness, an idea echoed in Brené Brown’s research, and of people losing sight of the meaning in their work.
Matt opened with his own story: the busiest job of his life, the one where he sometimes slept under his desk, was also one of the most rewarding, because the meaning never went missing. Meaning is the buffer. When it disappears, the same workload that once energized a team starts burning it down.
The day started with communication. One example did the heaviest lifting: the polyp versus the wart. A doctor who tells a frightened patient that a polyp is “an abnormal proliferation of cells forming a growth or protrusion from a mucous membrane” is being accurate, and losing the patient. The one who says “think of a polyp like a tiny wart growing on the inside of your body: usually harmless, but if left alone too long, it can sometimes turn dangerous” takes less time, builds more trust, and gets better follow-through. Same facts. Different story. Different outcome.
The evidence backs it up. Matt walked leaders through work like Columbia University’s narrative medicine program, which shows that story, infused at touchpoints across a hospital system, from discharge conversations to treatment adherence, can measurably improve patient outcomes.
Then came the build. Rather than ending with inspiration, the group designed narrative rituals that fit inside Kaiser’s existing rhythms, so meaning gets reinforced on a schedule instead of by accident.
Months later, the rituals are still running. In labor and delivery, parents are now interviewed about who on their care team made the biggest difference. Those stories are then mirrored back to the teams who earned them, so staff hear, in a patient’s own words, exactly why their work matters.
“Matt dove into our complex culture and within short order was able to tell our stories better than anything I’d seen us do before. He’s a rare combo of heart, empathy and execution. He just gets it.”
Watching burnout scores climb while engagement sinks? That’s a story problem.
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