Standards are a funny thing. You either agree with them or figure out a reason why they don’t apply to you. I attended the United States Air Force Academy for my undergraduate degree and I remember dreading one particular standard every semester… Male cadets were required to complete seven pull-ups as part of our mandatory twice a year physical fitness test (PFT). Although I never failed to meet the standard, I would have to put in a ton of prep work and still struggle to pass every semester.
As a result, I loathed the test in general and pull-ups specifically. Failing this test meant 6 months of athletic probation which would inevitably translate to six months of embarrassment and confinement. So this was a high stress event for me twice a year that I took very seriously. But what’s funny is that the standard didn’t really motivate me in any constructive way. I actually hated it. To make matters worse, most of my classmates seemed to have no problem meeting and surpassing this particular minimum requirement.
So what was my problem? The only rational answer was the hundred or so reasons I could come up with as to why it was more difficult for me to meet the standard and how unfair it was for me to have to be accountable to it. As a result, I despise pull-ups to this day and have vowed to only maintain the ability to do one pull-up, in the event of a catastrophic emergency wherein I am required to pull my own body weight up in order to rescue myself from a dire predicament…
In short, I now have a life-long obsession against a particular standard because of the stress it caused me. Therefore the standard itself has been counterproductive to compelling me to want to achieve it.
Let’s follow that line of thinking with what has become a de facto health standard. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Body Mass Index (BMI) is a "reliable indicator of body fat ratio for people." It is an inexpensive way for clinicians and individuals to compare their status to that of the general population. That being said, when the BMI standard was raised in 1998, 25 million Americans became overweight overnight. Some of these individuals being professional athletes.
To be clear, I’m not here to attack the BMI. But with obesity rates climbing, you have to wonder: has a healthy BMI become unattainable for most Americans and therefore irrelevant?
Understanding both the benefits and shortcomings of the actual measurement… I think that this is a very important question. I’m not suggesting that standards be lowered because the calculations themselves were created based on actual health data. People within specific BMI ranges have a higher/lower likelihood of specific medical conditions. However, I think its important to ask whether or not the standard is motivating people in a positive or negative direction. When used as an individual guide, is BMI actually motivating people with weight problems to be healthy? Or is the opposite true?
Is the BMI standard that we use to measure our health actually keeping us from becoming a healthy society? Would love to get your take in the comments below.
@hallicious
photo by: sylvar
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the way humans process input from their environment can be classified into five categories:
- Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
Ex: It is raining.
- Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
- Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
- Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.
Underlying this theory is the assumption that there is enough content in each of the related input streams to create relationships, identify patterns as well as identify and understand principles.
Recently, microblogging tools like Twitter emerged, which forcefully restrict users’ input to 140 characters, while still allowing for references to original authors’ tagging of keywords and providing URLs for content and location.
News channels like CNN, celebrities like Oprah and many companies are embarking into the microblogging adventure up to a point, where it seems that we often can read about people’s comments before they had the time to think about them.
Recently, a colleague attended his first event at which heavy underground tweeting accompanied a formal presentation-style conference. He claimed, that the dynamics that this underground chatter – combined with occasional public outbursts of emerging self-proclaimed representatives of the twitter community – added a completely new and possibly valuable dimension to the knowledge exchange at these types of professional gatherings.
Well, I don’t know…
Let’s look at it more closely: The knowledge and wisdom that a well-prepared speaker is communicating to the crowd based on a lifetime of experience in the form of simplified slides, multimedia materials, his or her voice, mimicry and gestures are absorbed by a most likely less experienced attendee whose mind is in parallel occupied by competing with others in the crowd commenting on the input in rapid sequence – 140 characters or less at a time.
Experiment: Turn on the TV, take a sheet of paper and capture what’s being said…. Done? Easy, isn’t it !
Now: Instead of capturing content, comment on what you hear while listening to the TV show. Still easy? What if I asked you now about details of the show? Most likely, you would draw a blank, since your mind was so occupied with creating an opinion and putting it to paper, that you had to stop following the show. We humans are just not good in parallel processing once we turn on our cognitive abilities and start thinking about the data we are absorbing.
In addition, since there is not enough space to put any contextual information and most tweeple (i.e., people that tweet using twitter) don’t know each other personally, the communicated information is reduced down to bits and chunks of data flying through the twittersphere. Since the speaker might not have had his twitter address on the first slide, he might not even get referenced appropriately for the space, thus removing the last hope for the data being interpreted in context.
So we have just reduced the wisdom of an individual down to a multitude of data chunks being broadcasted through the networks. What makes matters worse is the way some people use microblogging tools like Twitter to seek information and build knowledge. Busy with keeping up with their legions of followees (people they are following) and trying to make sense out of the multitude of parallel discussion threads they are engaged in, many people don’t seem to have the time anymore to reflect while critically inspecting the origin and context in which the data was presented. However, this process is crucial to finding relationships between data samples in order to turn them into information.
In consequence, any data is elevated to the level of being trustworthy information, which then makes pattern recognition easy: Knowledge is what is read more than once from different sources. However, usually that should mean – for instance also in serious journalism practice – from independent sources. Unfortunately, microblogging sites are also social networking sites. The social networks propagate information multiple times and it is very hard to ensure independence. Surowieki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds emphasized that such wisdom requires independent knowledge contribution and aggregation rather than the unfiltered propagation of word of mouth data.
Don’t you think there are better ways to gain information and build knowledge?
And what’s wrong with listening to and trusting the wisdom of an expert?
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
It’s the first really warm day of spring, today. I’m certain that, being a Friday, today’s balmy breezes will summon downtown workers outside like a siren’s song. This is the time of year that many people rediscover the outdoors, the fact that the sky doesn’t end 7.5 feet over their heads, and that the airlock door in front of their workplace actually leads to a space that’s pleasant.
In the tumble of employees heading out in the mid-afternoon, there are the inevitable business emergencies, last-minute reports, and obligatory meetings. We contend with them like grown-ups, but part of us rails against the idea that we’re “stuck” inside. Do we really need to be there? I’m not saying we shouldn’t take professional obligations seriously, but do you really need to do the work in a closed room? Why not go and enjoy the rest of the world?
The last time I saw groups of people influencing their organizational meetings like this was in college. Does anyone else remember this question, “Professor, can we have class outside?” Why not ask that same question in your current context? Likely, you’ll get the same kind of support we saw in school: other students wanted to be outside, and the professor (given the choice) often felt the same way. Generally, we had an endorsement to relocate, as long as the lecture didn’t require overhead slides. Hmmm. Need to work on the outdoor video conferencing problem.
We’ve managed to convince the members of our weekly staff meeting that the day is calling for exactly this kind of change. We’re taking a bike ride, conducting business at an “undisclosed location,” and rediscovering our community. As an aside, for the benefit of any senior leaders reading this post, we will return to the office for a full day of work.
I would encourage others to consider how easy it is just to get outside and do what you need to do. Whether you have Seasonal Affective Disorder or not, I leave to your clinician, but I know I get an attitude boost just from being in the great outdoors for a few minutes a day.
If, even after your best pitch to your manager, you’re still bound to the inside of the building, at least try to say close to a window. It might be a tease, but it makes finally getting out there that much better.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
For those of you who may have missed it (and judging from the comments, you probably didn’t), our blog was host to its first dash of controversy yesterday (On CNN, Earth Day and Obesity ).
I think that any blog editor would tell you that controversy is a double-edged sword – and one that, for me, engendered a lot of reflection throughout the day (and night). It caused me to step back and think about what it is that we’re doing, and why.
I mentioned in a comment yesterday that we do what we do because we’re incredibly passionate about health. We know exactly how hard it is to make lifestyle changes – and as a result, our products are all geared to be so much fun, and so engaging, that you don’t even realize that you’re making a change. They’re positive and constructive. They’re empowering and they bring people together.
And it made me think about why we’re working so hard on this blog. One of the reasons is that we’re hungry to get people as engaged and passionate as we are about health. By that count, I guess I’d say that yesterday’s events were a success. Boy, were people ever engaged!
But the other thing that we want to do is to inspire people . . . not just to think nice thoughts, but to fuel a social revolution in health. To motivate people to deep thinking and to action. But as we attempted to inspire deep thinking about a serious social problem, we were also agitating.
I’ve known Tony Tomazic for four years. He’s my friend and I’m proud to say it. He’s not only one of the most intelligent and articulate people I know; he’s also among the most caring. And I can tell you that there was never, ever, any intent to be hurtful in that post.
Did we want people to challenge their thinking on obesity and its relationship to our society? Yes. Did we want to provoke real, sincere impassioned conversation on the subject? Yes. Did we want for everyone to agree? Nope. Constructive disagreement is the mother of revolutionary solutions.
But I know that we offended many of our readers yesterday – no matter how much we explained our intentions , beliefs and principles (which I’ll stand by to my grave).
When you’re offending, you can’t inspire. And we want to inspire. Sometimes you have to learn what you already know. And that’s what I learned yesterday.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
It’s been a pretty wild day at the CrumpleItUp blog. We’ve set a new record for comments on a blog post . . . and in attempt to continue the dialog, we’ve inadvertantly cut it off.
When you look for Tony Tomazic’s post from this morning, you’re going to notice two things.
First, that it has a different title. After a morning of dialog with our readers, it became clear that the title of the post was distracting from its real intent . . . to have a conversation with our readers about our culture’s role in the obesity epidemic.
So we changed the title . . . and that leads to the second thing you’ll notice. We didn’t realize that in doing so, we’d be disassociating the entire comment stream from the post.
The comments are on their way back right now . . . in fact, hopefully they’re back by the time you’re reading this. I’m hoping that this is a conversation that’s going to keep going, and keep going for a long time . . . and that you won’t let my status as a novice blog editor distract from that conversation.
Thanks in advance for your patience.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
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