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UNCONVENTIONAL
How Ideas Spread (and It’s Not by Hitting ‘Send’)
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Stately Surroundings The George W. Bush Presidential Center sits on 25 acres, which includes a 15-acre Texas prairie recreated by landscape architects, and 20,000 square feet of event space, such as Freedom Hall (above).
n his influential 2009 book, The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande, a professor at Harvard Medical School, argued that we need more than our memories
to effectively navigate the complexities of the modern world — we need to make lists and follow them. The adoption of Gawande’s ideas in the medical field since the book was published has resulted in reductions in complications and death rates around the world. (See convn.org/gawande-checklist.)
Now, in “Slow Ideas,” a recent
shopping, to a 19-block Arts District, which includes a mix of venues. The park not only is a convivial place where in their free time meeting attendees can wander among food trucks, gar- dens, an outdoor reading room, and, opening this month, a restaurant, but also provides meeting spaces. Before they departed the Bush Cen-
ter, many think-tank participants took a tour of its museum, which includes exhibits related to Bush’s two terms as president and a full-scale replica of his Oval Office. There’s also an out- door rose garden modeled after the Rose Garden at the White House — its plantings adapted, like Dallas’s elegant and easygoing meetings venues, to the local environment.
. —Barbara Palmer
For more information: bushcenter.org and visitdallas.com
article in The New Yorker, where he’s a staff writer, Gawande addresses the question of why some good ideas spread, while other, equally good ideas — even lifesaving ideas — don’t. He uses as an example the persistence of preventable infant and maternal death in low-income countries due to the failure of health workers to adopt basic, low-tech steps, like hand-washing or giving children rehydrating fluids. Education pro- grams that use person-to-person methods to train health workers in these lifesaving methods have been far more successful than those that provide the same information but with no human interaction. Effective change requires more than the dissemination of good ideas or even providing incentives, Gawande concludes. “People talk- ing to people,” he writes, “is still how the world’s standards change.” More from the article:
“The most commonapproach to changing behavior is to say to people, ‘Please do X.’ … That is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public- service campaigns, and it works, but
only up to a point.… In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, ‘turnkey’ solu- tions to the major difficulties of the world — hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teach- ers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. “But technology and incentive programs are not enough. ‘Diffu- sion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,’ wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the deci- sion to make that effort is a social process.”
. — Barbara Palmer
For more information: convn.org/slow-ideas
SEPTEMBER 2013 PCMA CONVENE 33