It’s great to have modern health care in Canada, but we all know and have experienced that our Health Care System is excessively administered and not properly designed for people to understand and be empowered to lead their own health initiatives. In fact, we all have all found it to be overly confusing and too complex even for simple tasks. Have you often wondered if health professionals feel the same way? And how could designers help?
Health Care Design – Do you remember ParticipACTION?
I was asked the other day about strategy and what that meant for client engagements. Obviously an open ended question, with few parameters. There was no use case study to help construct a foundation nor was there any sense of timeline for this imaginary engagement. So I gave my best response at the time but I have been thinking about ever since.
In life we ask questions to elicit information we need. But the questions we ask may not motivate people to deeply reflect, or inspire a careful response. The idea of exchanging information through questions and answers is something that we take for granted. We don’t always think if the question is the right one or if the answer needs more thought. It is unfortunate because great questions can be the inspiration for groundbreaking or alternative solutions, especially in design.
Questions Issues
On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 I participated in a session that dealt with the practice of Positive Deviance (called PD after this). This conversation was facilitated by Erika Bailey who calls herself a ‘Human Systems Consultant’. I have had the good fortune of talking with her in the past but I never had the opportunity to hear her speak.
The Power of Positive Deviance
Appreciative Inquiry was first conceived in 1986 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva while they were studying an organization. In this study they interviewed half the organization looking for “problems to be solved” and the other half looking for “miracles to be embraced”. What they discovered was that the information they collected was significantly different in each case.
Appreciative Inquiry Cycle
Late last year I attended a lecture in which Uffe Elbaek, founder and former Principal of the KAOSPilots – International School of New Business Design & Social Innovation, recounted his time with KAOSPilot and gave a talk on his challenging but satisfying role as the CEO of the World Out Games held in Copenhagen.
KAOSPilot’s Intelligent Ecology
Presently I am enjoying a informative workshop headed by Peter Jones of reDESIGNreSEARCH. Once a month a diverse group of us discuss how to best organize and assist people and organizations to make positive change using different methods of dialogue to engage them. Most of the time these discussions are limited to a three hour timeline and we rarely revisit them, but the topic of design and transformational change has recently overflowed into a few extra sessions.