Purpose - Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) suggests that, to promote widespread improvement within health services, focusing on the good, the excellent, and the brilliant is as important as conventional approaches that focus on the negative, the problems and the failures. POSH offers different opportunities to learn from and build resilient cultures of safety, innovation, and change. It is not separate from tried and tested approaches to health service improvement - but rather, it approaches this improvement differently. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - POSH, appreciative inquiry (AI) and reflective practice were used to inform an exploratory investigation of what is good, excellent, or brilliant health service management. Findings - The researchers identified new characteristics of good healthcare and what it might take to have brilliant health service management, elucidated and refined POSH, and identified research opportunities that hold potential value for consumers, practitioners, and policymakers. Research limitations/implications - The secondary data used in this study offered limited contextual information. Practical implications - This approach is a platform from which to: identify, investigate, and learn about brilliant health service management; and inform theory and practice. Social implications - POSH can help to reveal what consumers and practitioners value about health services and how they prefer to engage with these services. Originality/value - Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.

Engaged, inter-disciplinary, inter-organisational research is vital to address complex problems and influence practice and theory. The Brilliance Group is a community of research practitioners from Australian universities who voluntarily work together to locate, understand and spread what is brilliant in our healthcare system. The Brilliance Group Community of Practice (CoP) evolved around a shared knowledge-domain of health management. This paper explores how using an unfamiliar research paradigm, dissimilar expertise and shared leadership have shaped the Brilliance Group. The Brilliance Group operates in an unconventional research space, deals with an under-appreciated research topic and works with undervalued sources of evidence in healthcare. The paper explores how the Brilliance Group CoP presents an innovative approach to researching healthcare with potential to provide break-through knowledge.

The motivation behind having brilliance as a focus for a project in healthcare is about trying to understand it, and from that, trying to find ways of spreading such understanding widely so that the topic of brilliance is more pervasive in health services and in health management. This paper is about how research on brilliance in healthcare could be undertaken and how a group of academics, with no previous research connections, have come together to collaborate through a Health Management Research Alliance (HMRA) and started a conversation about how to achieve this challenging objective. The paper describes the challenges they have identified and outlines some of the projects that they have developed to pursue the brilliance agenda in healthcare.