Engagement: It's more than checking the "like" box.

There is much to be said about the power of our connections to each other. Relationships should be more than passing moments where the currency of our exchange is social media "likes".  To be meaningful (and authentic) our relationships and the engagement we use to develop them, need to have depth and a degree of vulnerability. 

Last week I was looking for assistance with elements of a design-thinking challenge I am helping create, so I asked a couple friends to introduce me to their networks. Their willingness to do so, and then go beyond what I anticipated with the connections they made, was humbling. Being able to pick up the phone and ask to be connected to a someone's network is sort of like showing up at a friend's house and asking permission to raid the fridge. It takes trust, knowledge that there is something more than ketchup and beer in there, and the understanding that you would return the favor if you could. It takes relationships born from engagement.

Why is this important?  Because checking the "like" box in our interactions is fleeting, superficial, and has become somewhat indiscriminate. Collectively, we "like" so many things, but do we truly know what we are liking?  Unless that "like" is followed by more a more substantive set of maneuvers to actually connect with each other, it will not yield much for anyone.  In order to collaborate effectively we need to know each other. Our interactions will be more authentic, and our communication improved. If we claim our purpose is at all associated with the business of making change, the effort necessary for real engagement to occur is worth it.

The Passion Puzzle

Purpose; I am not sure how we exist without it in our lives, no matter what facet of that existence we are referring to. When I am talking to people about their careers, their work, and what works drives them, it is always fascinating to hear them tell me what they are passionate about. It may have nothing to do with what they scheduled the appointment for, but it helps frame our conversation in a few different ways. It helps me understand how well they know themselves, how clear they are in articulating their visions, and whether they're ready to influence through sharing.

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Knowing what you're passionate about means that you are aware of yourself. Passions run deeper then interests, and because of this they are things that may elicit a visceral response when we talk about them. Some self-study is required to be able to understand this. Personal notes taken in a journal, and open / vulnerable conversations with those who are close to us, can help us identify the things that make us tick.

Self-awareness is one thing, but being able to speak to it is something else entirely. I am not talking about creating "your pitch", I am talking about being able to very naturally speak to what you do that makes you happy. For me, connecting people, and seeing people succeed, are two the cornerstones of my happy place, and I will do almost anything to make those things happen.

The last piece of the passion-puzzle (having identified it and learned how to speak to it) is to put it into action. This is where the beauty of community comes into play. If you are (or want to be) in a social impact space, you have really no choice but to be engaging with other like-minded people interested in seeing communities thrive. Come to think of it, you ought to be engaging with some "unusual suspects" who may not yet be of the same mindset as you. Learning how to influence potential employers, collaborators, funders, etc. by speaking to your passions and having people understand the value you bring with respect to outcomes of mutual interest is clutch. Time and place on these conversations is important (something I will get into in a later post), but whenever you have the conversations, understand that the timing will choose you, not the other way around, so stay nimble. 

Cookie, Anyone? Empire's Impactful Communications Opportunities.

It occupied the number one spot on network TV viewership charts with the first episode netting almost 10 million viewers and the numbers only going up from there. The soundtrack beat Madonna's new album to the top of the Billboard charts, debuting at number one. It may rescue the Fox Television network, and it is no wonder because the show features four actors with Oscar nominations or wins on their resumes. All this from a prime time hip-hop soap opera (sounds like an oxymoron to have a show of this type "rescue" that network).

America's "tanning" is in full effect, no salon required, no risk of cancer, and no stopping the process. While I embrace this evolution tightly, I have to admit to being slow to start watching this show. Not being much of a soap fan, it took some convincing by a close friend to start watching it with her. But life can be busy, taxing, and just generally stressful, so there are times when we need to let go and allow ourselves to be entertained. The images and lyrics may not always resonate, and we may disagree with a perspective or the decisions made by a character (or the director). On the other hand we might relate to a story-line, appreciate an actor doing their work, or just want to switch off, allowing ourselves to be entertained. But, is there something more?

Will I create a class around any of the topics and issues highlighted by the show? I do not know yet, but phenomena with high-volume data to support a conversation are ripe for discussion by marketers, so why not academics and social architects? Who would have predicted that Jay Z or 9th Wonder would make their way into Ivy League curricula and classrooms? While I am in this paragraph, I find myself considering a marketing challenge presented by network TV successes. Between Scandal, Black-ish, Empire and the more popular reality TV shows, the opportunities for more sitting and watching by a viewership already captive on couches doing a lot of sitting and watching just went up. Side-note, my introduction to Empire came from someone who discovered the show while running on the treadmill at her gym. An outlier experience no doubt, but an inspiring observation nonetheless. The scientist in me wants to know if the show can inspire change. Can it move the needle on the topics already in the story-line like how we view gay black men, family dynamics, gender equality, chronic disease and mental health? What if the writers wove other themes into the story-line, might they have impact? 

Perhaps I am over-reaching and over-thinking this. With almost 14 million viewers, Empire is a hit, but it is not a revolution. Empire is popular, but it is not a movement. It is a TV show, it is entertainment, and it is fun. My desire for it to be an impactful communications opportunity beyond that is optimistic, possibly premature, and may be wholly unrealistic. For the moment, I am being entertained, and with all the madness that makes life heavy at times, I am thankful for that. Cookie, anyone?

Movement and Direction

When I use any navigation app these days I get a lot of information about which route to take. Tolls vs no tolls, highway vs backroads, short vs long, all these options are given to us at once. Ultimately I make a choice based on how long the trip is going to take me. Will it be smooth or will I be sitting in traffic?

Speed is important, because taking forever to get anywhere is rarely of value. But our pace should not be so quick that we lose our footing, or miss a turn.  Smooth progress trumps those missteps every time.  I think that as long as I am moving and headed in the right direction, I am doing the right thing. At the end of the day, most of the decisions we navigate come down to just that, movement and direction, not pace. Patience is a leadership trait worth honing, even when it feels uncomfortable.   

Brooklyn Kool Aid

I have spent some time interacting with people concerned about the health of communities.  The topic of the definition (and utility) of public health as we know it has been broached many times, and whether my conversation has been with students, peers or friends there tends to be agreement that when certain circumstances arise public health is critically important and worthy of attention. We also agree that soon after the situation passes, like waning immunity, public health fades from memory. Truth is, the "situation" never really passes because health and the factors that impact it are ubiquitous and long-lasting. 

This piece is for anyone interested in defining or redefining their role in public health and social impact. It is an invitation (or even a challenge) to engage in a deliberately diverse way. It starts with a nostalgic look back, and ends leaning forward with an eye to the future (think Leo DiCaprio at the front of the Titanic, but leave the ice-berg part out). 

All the talk about the upcoming NBA All-Star Weekend in New York made me think back to my first exposures during summer trips from London to Brooklyn in the early '80's  The place was so different, and I found every sense stimulated by something new. Bright lights, Viper car alarms, incense, and a host of flavors I was not accustomed to, made it an epic urban adventure. Little did I know it was also my first exposure to public health. 

Besides being in the city running the streets with my cousins, these trips were a chance to experience foods I did not get to eat at home.  From beef patties at the Jamaican joint, to cheese straws and tamarind balls from the Trini shop, and brown paper bagged wine-coolers from the bodega, I had an array of food options that my teenage palette took to very quickly.  Salt, sugar, and fat just taste so good.  But it was the cheapest thing that made a lasting impression on me - my Aunt's Kool Aid. 

Yes, Kool Aid…that magical diabetic powder with the portly logo. Ten for $1!  To make it, you needed a big jug, a big spoon, a big bag of white sugar, water, and one tiny Kool Aid packet. My Aunt would pour the sugar into the jug straight from the bag. She never used a measuring cup and I assumed that she just had some mystery muscle memory that granted her the skill to know when she had dispensed exactly "2 cups" of sugar as called for by the instructions.  She would then add the crayola-color contents of the packet and open up the faucet.

The big spoon came next. Usually metal and well worn from banging around many a cast iron "pat" (that's Guyanese for "pot"), she would take her strong right arm and start to stir.  The stirring was supposed to stop when the grating sound of the sugar in the jug stopped, but that never happened because all the sugar never dissolved. Being in the midst of some serious scientific discoveries in school at the time I knew why this was, it was called saturation, and it could be rectified can by simply adding more water to the mix...but why would you do that? Everybody knows, Kool-Aid tastes better with a nice layer of partially dissolved sugar on the bottom.

Years later, wanting to improve the health of communities, I have familiarized myself with a few concepts beyond saturation.  I understand how our health is impacted by a complex mesh of factors that involve our entire day. From the neighborhood we wake up in, to how much sleep we can get there, "what's (for) breakfast?", and where we go to work (if we have a job), it all impacts our health and well being.  Public health teaches us how unbalanced diets and a lack of physical activity impact obesity and cancer statistics. We see how inequities in education, housing, socio-economic status and access to transportation contribute to poor community health. We realize the price of some goods makes them very attractive (particularly when the funds are low), and how maintaining one’s health is forced down the priority list under the weight of taking care of shelter, clothing and the next meal.

My experiences from providing care in emergency departments to oversight of a coordinated case management operation and leadership of health agencies makes me clear that while public health is about surveillance, emergency response, vaccinations, and soda bans, it is also the ultimate “dot-connector” for all social-impact endeavors. New collaborations between unusual partners like social impact investor Goldman Sachs and community-facing social service providers via social impact bonds, or innovative healthcare finance partnerships between investors and health insurance companies seeking non-medical living environment interventions to help improve the outcomes of asthmatic children. These options represent upstream approaches to population health problems. Problems that require public health's involvement to provide strategic engagement plans, design, monitoring and evaluation, systems-level thinking, and adaptive leadership.  Our relevance in the next era of population health is as the cogs in innovative social engines that will reshape communities and how we live. 

But before we break out the beverages, we have a few things to do. At a time when public health is in the spotlight for another outbreak (measles), it may be considered challenging to make the case for engagement beyond the emergency but this is the time to do just that.  As unfortunate as any outbreak is, this one was predictable. Our work with schools and providers to spread a wide vaccination net only worked for as long as we vaccinated enough people. When that number waned so did our community protection. Measles was going to come back.   We were successful because we engaged partners in healthcare and education to bring a public health measure to a population we knew were at risk. What if we took a similarly collaborative approach to childhood obesity through collaboration between healthcare providers, an after-school soccer program, a wearable technology provider, and a school of public health? In that scenario we might find a solution worth taking to scale, a new program approach could make it’s way to more inner-city school children, exposing them to their full potential as scholar athletes and members of a team.  The wearable tech company might place this on their corporate- social responsibility platform helping them with their double-bottom line and potentially contributing to a dent in an important disease index.

How about using a design-thinking process team to facilitate a problem-solving session for a local  a group of researchers from a diverse group of disciplines so they can better integrate with the communities they serve? I will stop stirring now, and leave it to you to decide where this takes you as you consider how to engage in creating new, diverse, interdisciplinary teams and approaches to changing population health outcomes.  I think we can drink to that, just not Brooklyn Kool Aid. 

Forget-me-not

The challenges of identity, comfort, and managing change are ever-present on our leadership journeys, and they require our close attention. Sometimes we can arrive at a new place (job, school, social-gathering, etc.) and try to become someone we think, "fits". We forget some of the traits that led us to that place at that time. As we expose ourselves to new people and opportunities, learn, grow, and develop new skills, we should strive to remain authentic and true to ourselves. True to our core, the mental and spiritual place that drives our thinking, and inspires us. 

As we immerse ourselves in new surroundings, or find ourselves in new situations, we should feel encouraged to be our true selves and not allow the power of the present moment to deter us from maintaining our natural states. Sometimes I need to be reminded to "forget-me-not", because next to my faith, not forgetting who I am gives me a cornerstone for all my movements and dealings. I think it does for all of us.

PV