Cultural Change in a Medical School: A Data-Driven Management of Entropy

Medical school organizations are incredibly complex entities operating within multifaceted systems that exert multiple environmental pressures on the internal practices of the schools. Moreover, the components of medical schools operate within the contingencies of the medical school as a whole, such as the recent curricular change that occurred at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. That change required organizational and cultural changes in many different areas within the school and at all levels of the school’s organizational hierarchy. Three separate studies were conducted during this time of transition to evaluate the practices of major stakeholders within the organization: emerging leader interviews and a Faculty Forward© survey for faculty and the application of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure for students. The results are depictive of ways by which behavioral systemic assessments can serve as important tools for guiding comprehensive and empirically based success in complex organizational systems.