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"Basketball - Health Benefits." Go for Your Life. Web. 30 Mar. 2011. <[]


 * Teach you about being a good team player
 * Be played by people of all ages and all abilities
 * Be played all year round because it’s usually an indoor sport
 * Be a fun game that kids of all levels and ages can enjoy.
 * **Establish common values.** “You have to work a lot on your vision, your mission for the system, and your basic values,” says Henriks. “Winning teams always have signs of this.” (He gives the example of the Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era.) The Swedish County Council has signed on to the quality improvement values embodied in the [|Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award].
 * **Set high goals.**Just as basketball players benefit from playing rivals who are slightly better, health care team members should benchmark themselves against best practices worldwide.
 * **Consider how your coaching will be received.**The challenge is to get other people to accept the knowledge you want to transfer. In a basketball analogy, you want to “develop the receiver,” Henriks says. “Many coaches put a lot of effort into the technical skill of passing, but it’s almost more important to understand how players receive the ball.”
 * **Let team members improve their own performance.**As a basketball coach, “you can’t change the player — you give him the picture so he changes himself,” Henriks says. The same applies to clinical professionals learning new skills. “You can’t just announce to them that they need new skills. They have to develop their own work processes to change their work habits.” Particularly in health care, people are highly motivated to do so, he adds. “It’s quite easy to make people change their performance if they get time for it.”
 * **Take different perspectives.**After years of training and practice, health care professionals can “become narrow in their problem-solving capability, because they learn to think only one way — the biological/scientific way,” Henriks says. Using different creativity tools can help to solve problems, he suggests.
 * **Think of the whole system**. Coaching basketball, you must grasp the entire situation, and so must every player on the team. “We have to teach the players directly to see where their teammates and opponents are on the court,” Henriks says. Similarly in health care, “the most important thing is the system approach. We are all part of the system, and it’s the system results that are important in the end.” Reaffirming this approach can be difficult if some participants “feel as if they //are//the system,” he points out, which can be a particular problem in environments with a lot of money.
 * **Create a learning culture.** “In sports, we teach you to try to make your own move — to use your capability as much as possible,” Henriks says. In health care, “people understand they have two jobs — their current job, and the job to learn and improve. People need help and support to change their own views on what to do. They also need help to change their environment.” Asking individuals to try to improve their own performance, Henriks continues, is “the only way to do a quick change, because otherwise the old structure always wins.”