When I chase around a bunch of disparate things that've been rattling around in my head and try to make a whole single thought out of them you get stuff like the McMansions and Italian villas post.
Today I've got another one. Several months ago, I saw The Fog of War, a movie length set of interviews with Robert McNamara. Just today I finished Talk of the Devil, which is a set of 7 interviews with fallen dictators: Idi Amin, Mira Milosevik (Slobidon's wife) and Baby Doc among others. Last week I ran across a fantastic article about places to intervene in complex systems and their efficacy/difficulty This led me to go finda set of patterns for expressing feedback loops in complex systems. And somewhere else -- I forget where -- I read something about how Intuit is a revolutionary and how they could begin to reparadigim the healthcare system with their new product, Medical Bill Manager.
So I've been reading/listening to people who have lived through and been responsible for apalling history self-justify or deny responsibility. Either they did what was absolutely right or they were somehow powerless to do other than they did. They were in the moment and usually saw themselves in spite of their sins as saving their people from even worse abuses by someone else. Most of them were irresponsible assholes. A few were genuinely nuts. The road to hell is definitly mostly paved with good intentions.
That gets me contemplating what one person can truly change and where they have to be in the system to change it. And THAT gets me excited when I look at patterns of behavior in complex systems and looking at leverage points. The most effective system changes are not necessarily coming from a command and control structure.
This all brings me to a concrete example of power shifting. For years we've been hearing everyone whine about how the health care system is screwed up, who owns our personal medical records and how the government should or the insurance companies should change everything. But the government and the insurance companies don't actually have that much incentive to change things. People who buy healthcare do. So what would happen if you helped people to balance the knowledge and record keeping advantages that business has over them? If people who buy health insurance could actually see how often their claims were misprocessed and what the total cost of ownership of a healthcare policy is, would they start buying differently? Maybe.
Intuit is offering a new product that gives the patient or policy holder tools to manage insurance processes outside of a single insurer's system of self care. It is trying to do to insurance filings what it did to tax returns and give people a single place to store everything about your doctors and your coverage that belongs to you -- not putting it in the hands of some third party (although you can bet they'll have a web portion of their product just like they do for Quicken).
Anyhow, I don't expect Intuit to save the world or even "fix" healthcare. I don't expect dictators to become self actualized. I don't expect a hurricane triggered by butterfly wings in a way I can directly trace and follow. The world is the same place it was before I started making some of these connections. I just have this sensation as though the true control structures of the universe have been exposed for me -- which all in all is a pretty cool thing.
Posted by karen at December 19, 2005 12:33 PM