Why Listen: You’re drowning in information and need a real framework for sense-making, not just another buzzword to add to the pile.
Episode Description:
Healthcare is one of the clearest examples of a paradox playing out across every industry right now: deep specialization is more necessary than ever, and it’s exactly what’s leaving so many wicked problems unsolved. Rhonda St. Croix, Executive Director of the Office of Learning and Connecting at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, has spent three decades moving between non-profit, government, and for-profit systems, and landed on a simple but under-practiced answer: someone has to be the connective tissue. Rhonda and Julie dig into why sense-making has become the leadership skill nobody quite named ten years ago, why “agile strategy” scares people even when it’s exactly what they need, and why being the one generalist on a team of specialists stops feeling like being a lone wolf once you get comfortable with the value you actually bring.
Key Highlights:
Design Thinking in an Hour: A real example of giving a room of specialists permission to “think wild” — and the usable ideas it produced fast.
Sense-Making as a Skill: Why filtering signal from information overload has become a defining leadership capability — and how to actually build it.
The Specialist Paradox: How healthcare’s deep expertise creates exactly the kind of siloed thinking that wicked problems can’t be solved by.
Agile Strategy, Without the Scary Name: Why calling it “iterative” instead of “agile” makes leaders more willing to actually practice it.
Comfortable Being the One: What changed once Rhonda stopped seeing herself as the outlier on a team of specialists and started seeing it as the value she brings.
About Rhonda:
Rhonda St. Croix is the Executive Director of the Office of Learning and Connecting at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. She has spent more than 30 years in non-profit, government and for-profit sectors and developed experience in change leadership, learning and leadership development, and growing high-value creating teams. She is a reformed “change-the-world” advocate whose core belief is that transforming ourselves and growing our own leadership makes the greatest positive contribution to the spaces we work and play in together. She is an insight junkie, passionate about the future of life/work and on a mission to learn and share the best wisdom to support people to grow, lead, mobilize and thrive in these uncertain times. She is a fitness enthusiast especially loves hiking and strength training (recently managed to do a real chin up).
(Rhonda said this bio is fine as-is, or shorten it if needed.)
Find Rhonda Here: