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Friday, December 26, 2014

HammeringTheDashboard

Gaining new insight into well-being, with respect to individual and organizational health, has been a critical part of my learning in recent years.

One of the most profound nuggets of learning has been laying right under my nose the whole time.  I was just too busy to notice it.  That nugget:  When we focus on treating symptoms we end up ignoring the root causes of illness.

To our own demise.

I recently heard an analogy used to accentuate how we have come to conventionally combat disease or ailments of one kind or another:
Most of us drive vehicles electronically equipped to activate the "check engine" light when something is amiss.  While annoying, that "check engine" light is an alert, a warning, that there is someone wrong "on the inside" that will eventually cause significant compromise to our/organizational health (and probably cost us a lot of money, ,too).  Not one of us (that's an assumption) would promptly take a hammer to the check engine light on the dashboard, in belief that if we simply eliminate the symptom the problem is solved.

Yet, that is exactly what we do so often with our individual and organizational health.  We attack the symptoms, with drugs, with initiatives, with surgery, with new regulations, with...  We can most assuredly make the symptoms go away.  We have not, however, addressed the underlying causes of those symptoms.  Unaddressed, those root causes will cost us a high price down the road if we choose to believe that, since the symptoms are temporarily gone, the problems have been cured.

I have developed,
                             am developing,
                                                      and am revising,
responses/remedies that I believe cut to the root of our ill health (both as individuals and as organizations).  It's a process of continual monitoring, learning, adjusting, observing, and learning some more.  As I learn, I share that learning with you in this blog.

For now, please consider how that analogy above applies to your personal health.  And, consider how it applies to the health of the organizations/communities to which you lend your efforts.

Drop the hammer, and move away from the car.


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