When does common sense make little sense? How do we sense-make evidence when it seems to make little sense? The answers could lie in getting inside the heads of those we seek to influence and designing our communications for empathy and health. Evidence in public / health Last week there was a brief uproar in …
Matthew Ingram does a good job of doing a retrospective on the state of newspapers and questioning the fit their current predicament has with disruptive innovation. Interesting to consider that public health and its communications are facing similar challenges with how people get and use health information. I can’t help but think there is a …
Of digital riptides and original sin — was the decline of newspapers inevitable? Read More »
Yesterday I posted on the story of Toronto Public Health tweeting a call for its followers to voice concerns to the TV show “The View” about the recent hiring of Jenny McCarthy, a prominent anti-vaccination advocate, as its new co-host. Today, Nicole Ghanie-Opondo reflects more deeply on what kind of impact such tweeting really has …
Attack on Anti-vac – Toronto Public Health vs. Jenny McCarthy Read More »
Public health is regrettably not a field that I often think of when I consider powerful examples of using social media for change and impact, but every so often something changes that. Monday something changed. Toronto Public Health, one of the largest health units of its kind in North America, took to Twitter to voice …
Public Health and Social Media: Catching Fire From Small Sparks Read More »
How to maximize the creative potential of what you do? Becoming good at something is a huge start. But what if getting good at being a generalist is what you aspire towards? It’s an interesting challenge for those who see value in those with the kind of cross-disciplinary, multi-faceted sets of skills often needed to …
If public health is important, should the presumably ‘top job’ in the field in a particular country not be highly coveted? Not if that position is tied to the government’s discretionary decision making. Andrea Hill looks the matter of replacing David Butler-Jones, Canada’s outgoing Chief Public Health Officer, and how there is a real risk …
Low-profile public health job could mean best candidates won’t apply Read More »
The MOOC offers enormous potential to re-shape the way people learn and promoting access to content and expertise that many in this world could have only dreamed of years ago. But the naivete that such learning can be done in an monocultural way without losing something special about the context in which people learn and use what they learn might lead to some expensive lessons.
Yes, but does it scale? – Question asked at nearly every presentation on a social innovation ever made* It is maddening to see wheels get reinvented and something that is so impactful in one setting never seen outside of that context. At a time of widespread austerity, global resource constraints, and pressing social problems it is tempting …
Mythmaking about speed and scale in social innovation Read More »
Developmental evaluation is an approach to evaluating programs that takes account of complexity and changing conditions, supports innovation, and serves as a vehicle for adaptation for leaders seeking feedback on how to adapt to these evolving forces. It is not simply about improving programs, but developing them. From a technical point of view, this means …
The Developmental Evaluation and Design Imperative Read More »
Design’s relationship with space is complex and well documented in the literature on architecture, interior design, and product innovation. The relationship with time is much more complicated particularly with the rise in popularity of the concept of design thinking. The discourse on design thinking largely focuses on applying the cognitive patterns and creative techniques more …
