The “Right” Way

What’s the “right” way to improve anything, let alone the health of all Arizonans?

We are a dozen years into a new millennium flooded by connectivity and information, and all around us debates continue on “right” way to go about accomplishing an objective or fulfilling a need. Diets, fitness, sleep, business approaches, governance, the economy and even the simple act of running are caught up in the endless back and forth. The question of how foundations can best accomplish their mission is no exception.

Technologies, disciplines and grand strategies wax and wane over time. Some endure, while not always popular. Others are relatively ephemeral, flaming out in short order. What remains are outcomes, and questions about whether the results are the best that could have been achieved when all externalities and factors are considered.

Taken all together, what’s considered “standard” or “normal” today may not by default be the most conducive, natural, or even best path to reaching goals and objectives – regardless of the fact that it has been the path we’ve seemingly been on “forever.”

How should we spot the fad inherent in any health approach? On what side should we land regarding the practices of modern health care, the built environment, nonprofit organizational capacity or community development? Are approaches validated by scientific method immune to being fads? When far older practices are supplanted by novel techniques that completely enthrall us, how is it that the discarded methods with an actual track record over time are saddled with the burden of proving their worth in contrast? These are questions worth considering.

Resistance to change is natural, but so is change itself. Despite predictions that the life expectancy of future generations will decline in part due to health and well-being factors, people are fighting changes to health care, the structure of communities, and the design of our everyday lives.

It is difficult to know at what pace change will come, but we can be certain that SLHI will help to encourage those changes focused in creating better lives for all Arizonans. There are a few things that seem more certain than others as we look back on FY2012 and ahead to the premise and promise of the coming years:

  1. There’s not much sense in preserving any status quo that reveals itself to be either less effective than desired, broken, or too costly both intrinsically and when externalities are considered.
  2. It can be a dangerous thing to cede too much of our health, our communities or our most pressing societal issues to a small group of so-called experts. Experience counts, but expertise can potentially engender blind spots.
  3. We need to be careful with giving data total dominion over intuition, common decency or common sense. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.”
  4. Question everything, and you’re bound to get more answers. If you question nothing, then don’t be surprised when your path seems limited or inevitable.

For SLHI, FY2012 has been yet another abject lesson that the best way to do anything is to make sure that plenty of us are involved in gut-checking assumptions, testing competing philosophies and challenging each other to see as clearly as possible, act as earnestly as we can, and listen as intently as if our lives depend upon it. Which in fact, they do.

Inquire, Connect, Inform, Support. That is how we build healthy communities. Together.