The Salus Forum
The Salus Challenge
The Salus Forum
Salus: A Wish for Health in a Health Care Commons
Salus: A Wish for Collective Health In The Health Care Agora
Salus: A Generative Forum
A Mall of Innovation and Unconventional Thought and Action
How can our healthcare leaders build the right new skills and engage the appropriate strategies when guiding healthcare in the future? What is the nature and impact of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity in healthcare settings?
In what ways do health care leaders escape into a distorted world of serenity?
Read More about Escape into Serenity
In what ways might a health care leader find an effective strategy to deal with the Essentials and Essence in a VUCA-Plus environment? A book which provides descriptions of these strategies and more detailed descriptions of VUCA-Plus and the Escape into Serenity is available, free of charge, as a downloadable pdf document: “The New (Ab)Normal”
A book has also recently been published that explores a radically different way of adjusting to the challenging conditions of VUCA-Plus. It concerns the capacity to anticipate these conditions, adjust baselines (Polystasis) and modify behaviors (agility) in a way that enables us to “Dance Between the Raindrops.”
Challenges of the Present
Complex Adaptive Systems in Health Care

US health care is a complicated tangle of health care organizations that are influenced by politics, the economy, and evolving public needs. Labeled today a “complex adaptive system”, we want to analyze, simplify and understand how best to improve US health care for the future.
Heading towards Tomorrow
Plans for Changes and Growth in Health Care
Understanding theories and models is key as we try to make sense of what’s happening in today’s health care. Only after we understand these experiences can we determine what they mean for us. We gain insights from case studies shared by our friends in the Salus Forum who have been leaders in different health care systems. We learn from their experiences.
We explore models of illness, disease, and health from the perspective of culture and ethnicity rather than primarily from the now dominant individual perspective. Our models color how we approach disease, illness and health both in planning and critiquing systems of care. They also impact the approach we take to our own health.
Health Care Team Operations and Design
Leadership in Health Care: Coaching, Balancing and Moving Across Multiple Cultures
Salus Health Care Forum: Collaborative Conversations
Diverse communities of thought aided by constructive dialogue often bring about new perspectives and practices in the field of health care.
Here is a link to the Eight 2024 Salus Health Care Forums. Here is a link to the Six 2025 Salus Health Care Forums that concluded our first series of forums.
Here is a link to the Ten 2025 and 2026 Health Care Forums that constituted our second series of forums.
Requesting information regarding ways to participate in the collaboration among health care communities
ApplyHealth Care: Right Train? Right Track?
Four Cultures of Health Care
The Four Cultures of Health Care provides a potential framework for understanding the complexities of contemporary health care systems and the relationship between culture and health care anxiety: Anxiety and Health Care
Physician-Leadership and Health-Based Coaching
Physician leaders in contemporary health care systems? A link to series of essays concerning this question.
Health-based coach bridges gap between disciplines? Health-Based Coaching and a Biopsychosocial Perspective
Library One: Recommended Resources
Cassatly, Michael, (2013) The Transformative Shifts in Health Care Compels Coaching, Library of Professional Coaching, April 14.
Emerson, Brian and Kelly Lewis, (2019) Navigating Polarities: Using Both/And Thinking to Lead Transformation. Paradoxical Press.
Johnson, Barry (1996) Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. HRD Press.
Lustig, Robert (2021) Metabolical. New York: Harper.
Meadows, Donella (2008) Thinking in Systems. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Means, Casey (2024) Good Energy. New York: Avery/Penguin.
Miller, John and Scott Page (2007) Complex Adaptive Systems. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Snowden, Dave (2023) Cynefin Framework. Retrieved from: https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/
Stacey, R.D. (1996), Strategic Management & Organisational Dynamics, Pitman, London
Brief Biographies of Salus Forum Members.
The following link provides information on Salus Forum Members.
Jeremy Fish, M.D.
William Bergquist, Ph.D.
Perry Pugno, M.D.
Library Two: Documents Published by Participants in Salus Health Care Forum
Mindi K. McKenna. and Perry A. Pugno
Physicians as Leaders: Who, How, and Why Now
Christie Lewis, Kendell Munzer and William Bergquist (Editors)
Margaret Cary and William Bergquist (Eds)/Library of Professional Coaching/Future of Coaching:
Health-Based Coaching and Wellness
Michael Cassatly and William Bergquist


