One of the people in this video, Kathryn, is a friend of mine. Have a gander at what she is saying, which is that due to a preexisting medical condition in her young son, there is no way she ever return to live in the US, because his condition would bankrupt her.
I travel and work a lot in the US and two things always stand out to me about the lack of public health care in the US. First, many people I know have been kept from doing truly interesting work because they have had to remain slaves to a job they hate only for the benefits. To be able to go out on your own and make creative contributions to the world often means leaving behind a health care package. It is a life decision and one which is tantamount to playing dice with your life. When I left my government job in 1999 to start my company, I had nothing to worry about. With the exception of things like glasses and dentistry, I didn’t miss my health benefits at all, and this was a package from a unionized federal government job.
Second, I have never understood the argument that somehow single payer health care is unAmerican or that it restricts your choice of doctors. Listen to Kat’s story above. I have never been restricted by anyone in receiving medical advice. I can switch doctors at will, limited only by how many patients each has in his or her practice. In my own case, I have been hospitalized twice for surgery and seizures as a kid. Two members of my family have been to the emergency room on multiple occaisions for accidents, and several extended family members have had cancer, heart disease and other serious life threatening illnesses. Several of my friends have had rare and dangerous health conditions and only one of them chose to go to the US for his treatment to see the world’s only specialist in a very particular type of brain surgery. In every case, the only plastic card that was ever produced was a CareCard.
In short, although our health care system has many flaws, and we could all find stories to show how it fails people from time to time, it works. We are free here to see any doctor we wish, no one lacks health care, you are never asked to pay FOR CARE before receiving it, and no one sends you a bill. We pay a little more than $100 a month for our family of four for premiums, but if I couldn’t afford that, it would be free. We pay higher taxes, but most Canadians would say that of all the things we are taxed on, health care is the one we most appreciate. Most politicians run on a health and education platform. These things are sacred cows.
So here is my suggestion. There is so much good about public health care, and so many lies distributed in the US about our system here, that I propose that we Canadians help out our American friends by making ourselves available to answer questions. If you want to find out what it is REALLY like living with a publicly funded health care system, drop me an email (chris at chriscorrigan.com) and I will answer you questions. If you are a Canadian who would like to share your story, leave your contact info in the comments. If you are an American with a question, leave it in the comments. I promise to tell you exactly what my experience is.
Instead of getting the story from pundits and PR firms, just send me an email. Let’s talk instead.
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.
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I love Bobby McFerrin, and I love what he does with music. Watch in this video how he pulls out of an audience their inherent collective talent. Beautiful!
Thanks to Thomas Arthur for the link.
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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Thank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.