Phil's Plan

A great perspective..

And the winner is....

Thanks to everyone who voted in the Connor's House logo contest. The winner with 66% of the vote is option B. Be on the lookout for updated marketing materials coming in September.

What's the real issue?

The real issue preventing us from moving forward with health care reform in this country is not politics, advanced directives, end of life care, public plans or any of the other myriad of reasons you hear in the news.

Those are all just convenient distractions that allow us to ignore the real issue. The real issue preventing us from moving forward with health care reform is us. You and me. 'Us' you say? How could we possibly be the problem? Simple because fundamentally we are selfish. Our own human nature and society have ingrained in us a "me first" mentality. We may say we care about others and are committed to helping the poor and down-trodden, and many of us do many great things to help those less fortunate than ourselves. But (and this is a BIG BUT) the harsh reality is, we largely only care about other people to the extent that helping them will not require us to either pay more or give up something we feel we have earned or deserve. In other words helping other people is great as long as we don't have to sacrifice too much.

The notion that we can insure the approximately 46 million uninsured Americans without each and every one of us either paying more, or giving up something, is ludicrous.

So there is the real issue. Are you willing to pay more so someone without the ability to pay can go to the doctor? Are you willing to forgo an elective procedure so your neighbor can receive preventative care?

What are you willing to give up, or pay more for, so 46 million Americans can have health insurance?

Help Connor's House choose a logo

Help Connor's House choose a logo to use on our new marketing materials. VOTE HERE.

Compassion vs. Social Justice

Both are important and necessary but they are often confused. Here are a couple examples to help understand the difference between the two:

Compassion: Giving a hungry person something to eat
Social Justice: Doing something about why they are hungry

Compassion: Giving an unemployed person money to help pay the bills
Social Justice: Helping to remove the barriers that keep them from getting a job

What is the goal of medicine?

A great clip from Mental that highlights one of the primary issues preventing the widespread adoption of palliative care principles. What is the goal of physicians?





So What is the Goal? To heal the injured or to alleviate pain and suffering?

We have so far to go..

NPR ran a story this morning discussing how one of the provisions in the current version of the proposed health care plan, which will make advanced directive planning a covered service under medicaid (every 5 years), is being misrepresented as a provision to teach people how to die sooner in order to save the government money.

Setting aside the political issues raised in the story, the fact that our societal views (fears really) about death and dying would even allow the issue of advanced directives to be misconstrued in such a way, tells us how far we still have to go to achieve an appropriate balance between the pursuit of curative treatments and quality of life concerns.

It takes more than good ideas

If you want to create sustainable change it takes more than good ideas. It takes implementation. All the ideas in the world are worthless without good implementation. So why do so many good ideas fail to get implemented? Because ideas are relatively easy to come up with. Even a dysfunctional group of people, with the aide of a good facilitator can typically in just a couple of hours come up with ideas to solve problems (and some of them might even be good). But implementation is different. Implementation takes dedication and hard work and there is not a high probability that the dysfunctional group will be able to implement any of their ideas, no matter how good.

So here is my hierarchy of ideas and the ability to implement them from least effective to most effective.

1. Problem, what problem?
2. We have a problem but we have no idea how to fix it.
3. We have a problem. We have ideas (not necessarily good ones). What's implementation?
4. We have a problem. We have good ideas. We can't implement them.
5. We have a problem. We have great ideas. We don't know how to implement them.
6. We have a problem. We have ideas and an implementation plan.
7. We have a problem. We have good ideas and an implementation plan.
8. We have a problem. We have great ideas and an implementation plan.

You could keep slicing this down and discuss the effectiveness of the implementation plan, the evaluation cycle, etc. etc.. but the point is even mediocre ideas that can be implemented are better than great ideas that you don't know what to do with.

So, what are you doing with all the good ideas you have?

Recruiting Volunteers

When you are trying to recruit supporters and volunteers to your cause you need to be very specific. Telling them what you are doing is important but more importantly you have to tell them what you want them to do.

Where are you going?

If you want to complete your projects and achieve your goals you have to know where you are going. To develop a successful plan for any endeavor you must begin with the end in mind. You must be able to clearly define success and see the completed work in your minds eye.

When I build a training plan for a race I begin with my target finish time. When we remodeled and expanded one of our bathrooms we began by developing a final floor plan. When we started the strategic planning for Connor's House we asked a simple question: What will be the newspaper headline in 5 years? A long time ago when I started my consulting career I set a goal date for when I wanted to get my second promotion (yes second because I wanted a big enough goal). At the beginning of every project I have ever managed I ask the client to answer two of the following three questions and I calculate the answer to the third:

1. What is the target implementation date?
   
2. What is the budget?
   
3. What are the requirements?

Once you know where you are going then you can start working backwards to build your plan. If you start your planning based on where you are today you will likely never get where you want to go (and almost certainly will not get there on time, on budget or with all the requirements met). If you start from where you want to end up and work backwards from the goal, step by step, until you figure out what your next step should be you will understand what it really takes to be successful.

So where are you going?

Am I in the right place?

I often use my time in the car to catch up on the news and my station of choice is NPR. Today like many other days I got in my car to go to a mid-afternoon appointment and as usual the radio was already turned on. I found myself listening to Moby Dick by Led Zeppelin. An excellent song (imho) but certainly not the typical fare of NPR so I figured the station must have somehow gotten switched (not exactly sure how) so I instinctively reached for the NPR radio preset button and much to my surprise found myself still listening to Moby Dick. The song eventually faded out and the announcer came on and began talking about how John Bonham would often play the drum solo from Moby Dick for up to 20 minutes in concerts while the rest of the band left the stage. At this point I turned the radio off, too confused to stick around and figure out why NPR was talking about Jon Bonham's drum solos.

Innovation is good and I do like when organizations try new things but always be careful not to do something so drastically different that your customers instinctively don't think it is you anymore.