Screenshot 2016-04-06 15.40.01Pat Spitzig is a facilitator for organizational learning and she served for several years as the Co-Chair of the cross-government virtual team that was the predecessor of the Public Sector Consortium. She was a facilitator of organizational learning in the US Food and Drug Administration for five years and has thirty-two years of varied experience working for the F.D.A. in both headquarters and in the field. No one at the F.D.A. was more enthusiastic than Pat about the opportunity to bring organizational learning and systems thinking to bear on the Agency’s work. She facilitated working sessions and a workbook course, wrote and presented proposals for expansion of this work in the Center for Devices, and actively used the tools in her work and encouraged others to do so as well; she was even called the “Office Conscience.”

Pat was best known as a change agent at the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices as well as a health policy analyst. She was the leader of a major six-year partnership initiative agency-wide, which recognized and expanded considerably the proud F.D.A. tradition of working with groups outside government. As the leader of this ambitious enterprise, Pat worked to apply this invaluable partnership leveraging to most aspects of the Agency’s work. She developed and ran a seminar with presenters from several federal law enforcement agencies as they shared inspiring examples of partnering with outside groups; volunteers then created and pursued several projects of their own design, and Pat acted as a consultant and valuable support to these small groups. Since she found little in the existing literature to guide such efforts, she undertook to document this far-reaching partnership initiative; the resulting “Stone Soup” chapter contained examples, resources, and inspiration for both people in government and their potential partners, and it became an integral part of the F.D.A.’s leveraging website. Later she developed and ran a nationwide teleconference on this topic, using both the seminar and the “Stone Soup” chapter as its foundation. Concurrent with these efforts, Pat was a catalyst for the instituting of a new system of controls for medical device products. Having seen it work in the Center for Foods, she secured management support for and then industry acceptance of voluntary HACCP controls. This work proved so successful for the firms that participated that many of them still subscribe to this more rigorous and rewarding route to great products.

Pat is a Certified Coach for Performance Scorecard work, and she earned her Health Policy Masters Degree at MIT, including coursework with Chris Argyris of Harvard University. Her complete resume includes film work, screenwriting, production assistant, camera operator, and actor for short film productions and watercolor painting, and she enjoys bringing these talents to bear in her current career working with various groups. In addition, her environmental background – undergraduate degree and community organizing – contribute to her work with organizations and reflect her long-standing commitment to service.