Health 3.0 Blog

"5 Rules for a Creative Culture By Ben Chestnut
1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).
2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.
3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.
4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.
5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)"

Creative Cultures: MailChimp Grants Employees “Permission To Be Creative” | Fast Company

These are really great ‘principles’ or aphorisms for promoting and sustaining an innovative (and healthy) culture. It would be great to see more of this type of thinking come to healthcare.

Trying to reconcile the idea that creativity is an individual characteristic that ‘resides within us’ as opposed the output that occurs ‘between us.’ @frogDesign captures this debate brilliantly here: 

1. Creativity is BETWEEN Us (Not Within Us)

Creativity emerges out of relationships; it’s the tension between different ideas and perspectives and so it is risky to define it as an ability that we inherently possess. Wile E.’s inventions always fail because he has no one to collaborate with, only Road Runner to inspire them. And all Road Runner ever does is beep beep and zoom off.

A very cool project in NYC that Promotes Community Health and encourages people to Engage in Healthy Habits. The 4-in-1 design is great, too.

(via Pool: A Floating Pool in the River For Everyone by Family and PlayLab — Kickstarter)

A deficit of wonder…

There’s a deficit of wonder, happiness, imagination, and especially health. 

grantrharrison:

I was just reading Keith Richard’s autobiography.  In a quote from Tom Waits talking about music he suggested that there was a “deficit of wonder” in the music industry nowadays.

I suggest that there is a deficit of wonder in many business areas as well. Particularly health.

grantrharrison:

There is a deficit of wonder in many of our lives.  This is a great wonder creation activity.

This is health

spytap:

heressomeawesome:

Illegal swings LA

I’ll admit that a full 50% of this video’s awesomeness comes from the mere idea of there being legal and illegal swings. Having something as innocuous and representative of innocence as a swingset be given an official legal status seems utterly bizarre on every human level. In my mind, there are few things as wonderfully representative of innocence as a swingset because for most people, it’s a first taste of freedom.

Apparently I’m not alone in my thinking because that’s what the amazingly-named Awesome Foundation (not making that one up) deemed worth funding for their June project. Watch the video to see the truly awesome (and whimsically heartwarming) results of their efforts; then visitSwingSetting.org to see where the group plans on taking the idea next.

This week’s Here’s Some Awesome.

This seems like a no-brainer, but I suppose you can always be surprised when it comes to health care ‘insights.’ Now, if we could only move the conversation along to people-centered health instead of patient-centered care.

This is an interesting approach to the issues surrounding childhood obesity. There are many conflicting points-of-view on the utility of using video games to promote healthy habits.

(via TRIZ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

TRIZ seems like a wonderful problem-solving methodology. Anyone with experience using it to complement other facilitation patterns?

Advertising is just another form of design meant to exert control over our heads, hearts and wallets and influence our decisions and behaviors. 

@ourfounder highlights the importance of context and choice. Many significant implications here for health, design, etc. Think about grocery store layouts and the difference between a Trader Joe’s and Safeway.

Keith’s Liberating Structures work is incredibly cool and the different methods and practices can truly generate breakthrough ideas, conversations, and environments.

Our Healthiest State in the Nation Campaign is built around this type of context change model where people need to take greater personal responsibility for Healthy Living while at the same time we drive collective actions to build Healthy Systems.

jayparkinsonmd:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows or tag it with graffiti. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

This is the Broken Window Theory first described by social scientists in a 1982 The Atlantic article. It basically states that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may prevent further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime. 

I think it’s the same way with our bodies. At some point in our lives, our bodies undergo a change for the worse. We get a little pudge on our belly. Our arms, once toned, get weak because we’ve been so busy at work for the past few months. Something goes wrong with our body and it’s going to take some serious dedication to fix it. And we don’t make the time to fix it. Things at work are too busy. Kids are sapping all our energy.

So we vandalize our body. This one little broken window in our body is all it takes for us to let our bodies get out of control. A little pudge turns into an extra 50 pounds. Ten years later, diabetes.

The secret is to have no broken windows.

The Cynefin Framework (by CognitiveEdge)

This has been quite influential in the way we’ve been thinking about complex systems and how to drive contextual change in them.

I’m not sure I share the same enthusiasm for G+, but can certainly see it becoming an integrated part of the Google ecosystem - especially in things like the Chrome browser.

We use this format for weekly #LeanCoffee meetings hosted by @ourfounder and it’s incredibly effective. It’s particularly useful for organizing and visualizing conversations about change & innovation.