Strategic Design: Filling Future Nursing Leadership Gaps

In a little over a 150 years, nursing has developed into a profession full of structure, processes, and outcomes surrounded by traditions. These nurses created professional associations such as the American Nurses Association, state boards of nursing in every state, and moved nursing from apprenticeship to university based education. In any one of those defining moments, the future may have seemed uncertain. Nursing leaders in each era have always sought to ensure our profession carried onward successfully. This is not the first time generations have handed off within our profession, and it will not be the last. But this time, we have the knowledge and ability to strategically design a more structured professional handoff. It is not the change that is difficult, but the transition.