April 2011

What If Research Was Like the Restaurant Industry?

Take a moment and envision what research could look like if we handcrafted it to meet the needs of our audience, still taking the time to create art like great chefs, warm our day like a host, and treat us like royalty like a great server. What might that look like and why should we not take some queues from the diners we visit and the restaurants we visit as models for a tasty future for knowledge generation and translation.

Creative Intelligence or Design Thinking?

I welcome more discussion on CQ and believe anytime creativity is bared for people to explore and nurture society benefits. But the risks of abandoning one idea without science to create a new one is that design’s influence itself might wind up the victim. Creativity is an old concept and many disciplines hold it as part of its central tenets and design risks losing the good in design thinking while reaching too far into creativity unless it has the science to back it up

Thinking Different Requires Different Thinking

Understanding not only what we think about, but how we think about it in relation to the issues we face is important if we are derive strategies that take the complexity of human systems into account. Teaching for thinking and not for knowledge in itself requires different thinking and acting. The question is: Are we ready and willing to do this? Most people love change so long as they don’t have to do anything different. Hopefully, our health and research systems are different. And if not, how can we inspire the thinking to make them so?

The Know-Do Gap in Knowledge Translation Human Resources

Health content needs systems in place to do support its integration into practice. These are human systems and those are built on relationships. We are starting to pay more attention to the way in which content is created now it is time to pay as much attention to how it is translated in real human terms and create the same kinds of supports for people that we try to do for content.

What the Slutwalk, Marshall McLuhan and Rebecca Black Have in Common

Poverty, racism, access to health services, mental health and wellness, and education are all issues that are complex. They cannot or will not allow themselves to be understood in simple terms, yet are issues that speak to the wellbeing of society. Slutwalk was about rights and freedoms for more than one half of our population. It was about respecting people for who they are, honouring their sexuality, and educating everyone about the prevalence, consequences and risks associated with unwanted sexual advancement and assault. When it becomes a Rebecca Black Friday issue, it is about things like the salacious use of risque’ language and when it is a McLuhan issue, it takes a library to understand it.

Surely with our amazing tools we can find some middle ground to make the complex accessible, and the simple more sophisticated.

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