More than once in the past few weeks I have attended meetings with people involved in long-term care (assisted living and/or nursing home participants). In our on-going search for improvement we have discussed culture change, increasing regulations and increasing quality. Most often the answer has been a twenty-year old idea that is presented as if it is new. What is the definition of insanity? Isn’t it “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results”? Think about this. If an idea has been around for twenty years (no matter how good the idea) but it hasn’t been the solution, are we on the wrong track?
I am going to leave the world of assisted living for a moment. Have you heard of Cynthia Ong and the work that she is doing in the environmental field? Cynthia, is the executive director and CEO of Land Empowerment Animals People (LEAP). Cynthia was frustrated by the development-conservation polarity (the struggle between those who want to develop land and those who want to conserve land). The push-pull, the good guy-bad guy attitude on both sides did not seem productive to her. So she founded LEAP “to facilitate partnerships and projects across sectors and hemispheres based on a core belief that real, robust, and resilient solutions are found in connection and relationship with each other.”
Now I am going to steal her ideas, paraphrase and adapt to the business of assisted living…
• The regulatory/provider arrangement is an old frame, which no longer serves us.
• The regulatory/provider framework pits us against each other, constrains us in us-them dynamics, makes one right or better and the other wrong or bad, and the divide is a chasm. It is a disconnect which keeps our solutions partial, oftentimes conflicted and always limited.
• Our current mindset is not going to cut it in the world with huge numbers of people over 80, many without the resources to care for themselves.
• Even for those with resources, where are the caregivers going to come from? The proportion of elders to youngers is increasingly tipping toward toppling.
• We need to put our attention and energies into connecting dots, issues, people, groups and sectors. We need to create spaces for conversations about the future that include the elderly, the needy, the carers, the regulators, the payers and the providers of service.
I’m still stealing ideas here….
• We are invested in our constructs, the patterns and formats by which we engage, and their underlying assumptions.
• We roll out the same old processes and get the same results.
• We stay in our corners, interact with people like ourselves, compete amongst each other for finite resources.
• We build campaigns that say if only the other corner would change their ways everything would be fine and the world would be better.
Do you find any of this intriguing? We talk a lot about what we don’t want to have happen: we don’t want people to fall; we don’t want people to be isolated; we don’t want people to run away. Perhaps we should shift our focus and ask what do we want to have happen? I am enlisting recruits. Who wants to help figure that out? I want to start a collaborative conversation. Will you join me?
Steve Moran, in his Senior Housing blog, encouraged us to step out of our silos. So here I am – searching for clues in other silos. Even my concluding remarks are Cynthia’s words: “The challenge is to get ourselves out of the way, stop thinking it’s all about us, scrutinize, question our assumptions and constructs, and work hard and smart to redesign and recalibrate. Radically different results – which are what we need – are going to take radically different approaches and processes. If we continue on the tracks of business-as-usual, government-as-usual with the elders silently screaming in the margins (ok, elders was a substitution from the words she used). I’m afraid we are not going to make much impact on our own trajectory.”
JanNow 