Member since December 2024
Jo Ann Endo, MSW, is a speaker and founder of Improvement Catalyst Coaching, LLC. She is a strategist who helps people use story telling and active listening to navigate tough conversations, build trust, and lead meaningful change. She delivers interactive, practical talks on how to effectively communicate in complex environments. Drawing from her experience in healthcare, communications, quality improvement, and social work, Jo Ann has worked with nonprofits, healthcare systems, Lean organizations, higher education, and foundations, including New York City Health + Hospitals, UMass Memorial Health, In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, United Vision for Idaho, and Meharry Medical College. She has spoken at national and international conferences, provided workshops for audiences ranging from students to seasoned professionals, and interviewed internationally known thought leaders and innovators.
Jo Ann was the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Director of Dissemination & Digital Content and also served as senior managing editor of the IHI blog. Before joining IHI, Jo Ann was a clinical social worker. She is a graduate of Smith College and the Simmons College School of Social Work.
I love helping people without communications backgrounds use communications strategies to lead improvement, advance quality, and manage change. I help organizations and individuals use listening and storytelling to gain understanding, learn from resistance, address conflict, build engagement, and work more efficiently.
I am also passionate about helping people to bridge differences without compromising their principles. I envision a world in which teams increase the impact of scarce resources, benefit from a range of perspectives, honor the dignity of all, and take more satisfaction in their work by using strategic communications methods.
”The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This quote, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, sums up one of the challenges we often face when we are responsible for change initiatives. We typically think because we have repeated a message multiple times, or said it in a way that is clear to us, that we have done our best to communicate. The reality, however, is that we often spend too little time thinking about our audiences, what matters most to them, who they are most likely to listen to, and what messages will resonate most with them.
A team leading a large-scale improvement effort for a major healthcare system once came to Jo Ann because they wondered if using internal communications strategies might help them advance their efforts. She encouraged the team to shift their mindset about how they were communicating with their key partners and participants.
Jo Ann helped them customize messages for the multiple audiences they needed to engage and worked with them to identify the most effective messengers. Within a few months, they reported that these strategies helped them convince their leaders to elevate their project to a system-level priority. They also got the resources to hire more staff and recruited more participants for their project.
Before focusing on communications, Jo Ann Endo was a clinical social worker. She saw up close how much most people want their hard work to make a difference. She also saw how overburdened or broken systems can undermine the efforts of even the most dedicated workers and harm the well-being of caring professionals.
While working for one of the world’s leading healthcare improvement organizations, Jo Ann realized that storytelling and other communications methods were essential to making change initiatives more effective and sustainable. While teams typically had a measurement strategy, she found that communications planning was too often left to the end of a project or forgotten entirely. When storytelling and story listening are embedded in an initiative from the beginning, however, Jo Ann has seen change accelerate, spread, and have a more lasting impact.
When we think about the important elements of effective communication, we tend to focus on what we say and how to say it. Sometimes, however, we focus so much on talking, that we overlook the importance of listening. This interactive workshop explores how to use active listening to rethink resistance to change as part of the healthy conflict necessary to make positive change. Participants will practice a technique that helps to build trust, psychological safety, and momentum for improvement.
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
> Recognize resistance to change as essential feedback.
> Practice and demonstrate active listening.
> Describe how listening to other people’s stories is an essential part of learning to effectively tell our own stories.
This interactive workshop focuses on building confidence, deepening human connections, and strengthening adaptable, values-based storytelling skills for a variety of audiences. Developing the discipline of centering values — our own and those of others — in our storytelling helps us stay true to ourselves when facing pressure or pushback while broadening our reach and building real relationships.
Takeaways:
> Build storytelling confidence.
> Strengthen values-based message adaptation skills.
> Deepen human connections.
Nonprofit organizations are under more pressure than ever. They need help to do their crucial mission-driven work more efficiently with fewer resources. Amid so much uncertainty, this can't be done without strong teamwork and effective communication. In this interactive workshop, teams learn to communicate more strategically to accelerate their progress toward outcomes that matter.
Takeaways:
> Practice storytelling techniques to develop listening and communications skills.
> Learn how developing psychological safety is essential for building effective teams.
> Understand the science of storytelling and why storytelling is essential to make positive change.
This workshop helps non-communications professionals to apply strategic communications methods to engaging team members and spreading insights about their work.
Takeaways:
> Learn the advantages of tailoring communications to different audiences.
> Identify a key population to focus outreach efforts.
> Draft a basic communications plan to engage this population.
This workshop was originally developed for healthcare quality improvement teams in hospital and ambulatory settings, but can be adapted for other non-communications professionals leading change efforts.
”The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This quote, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, sums up one of the challenges we often face when we are responsible for change initiatives. We typically think because we have repeated a message multiple times, or said it in a way that is clear to us, that we have done our best to communicate. The reality, however, is that we often spend too little time thinking about our audiences, what matters most to them, who they are most likely to listen to, and what messages will resonate most with them.
A team leading a large-scale improvement effort for a major healthcare system once came to Jo Ann because they wondered if using internal communications strategies might help them advance their efforts. She encouraged the team to shift their mindset about how they were communicating with their key partners and participants.
Jo Ann helped them customize messages for the multiple audiences they needed to engage and worked with them to identify the most effective messengers. Within a few months, they reported that these strategies helped them convince their leaders to elevate their project to a system-level priority. They also got the resources to hire more staff and recruited more participants for their project.
Before focusing on communications, Jo Ann Endo was a clinical social worker. She saw up close how much most people want their hard work to make a difference. She also saw how overburdened or broken systems can undermine the efforts of even the most dedicated workers and harm the well-being of caring professionals.
While working for one of the world’s leading healthcare improvement organizations, Jo Ann realized that storytelling and other communications methods were essential to making change initiatives more effective and sustainable. While teams typically had a measurement strategy, she found that communications planning was too often left to the end of a project or forgotten entirely. When storytelling and story listening are embedded in an initiative from the beginning, however, Jo Ann has seen change accelerate, spread, and have a more lasting impact.
When we think about the important elements of effective communication, we tend to focus on what we say and how to say it. Sometimes, however, we focus so much on talking, that we overlook the importance of listening. This interactive workshop explores how to use active listening to rethink resistance to change as part of the healthy conflict necessary to make positive change. Participants will practice a technique that helps to build trust, psychological safety, and momentum for improvement.
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
> Recognize resistance to change as essential feedback.
> Practice and demonstrate active listening.
> Describe how listening to other people’s stories is an essential part of learning to effectively tell our own stories.
This interactive workshop focuses on building confidence, deepening human connections, and strengthening adaptable, values-based storytelling skills for a variety of audiences. Developing the discipline of centering values — our own and those of others — in our storytelling helps us stay true to ourselves when facing pressure or pushback while broadening our reach and building real relationships.
Takeaways:
> Build storytelling confidence.
> Strengthen values-based message adaptation skills.
> Deepen human connections.
Nonprofit organizations are under more pressure than ever. They need help to do their crucial mission-driven work more efficiently with fewer resources. Amid so much uncertainty, this can't be done without strong teamwork and effective communication. In this interactive workshop, teams learn to communicate more strategically to accelerate their progress toward outcomes that matter.
Takeaways:
> Practice storytelling techniques to develop listening and communications skills.
> Learn how developing psychological safety is essential for building effective teams.
> Understand the science of storytelling and why storytelling is essential to make positive change.
This workshop helps non-communications professionals to apply strategic communications methods to engaging team members and spreading insights about their work.
Takeaways:
> Learn the advantages of tailoring communications to different audiences.
> Identify a key population to focus outreach efforts.
> Draft a basic communications plan to engage this population.
This workshop was originally developed for healthcare quality improvement teams in hospital and ambulatory settings, but can be adapted for other non-communications professionals leading change efforts.