Why I Blog

I like to read.
I used to read everything. 
Something changed.
In spite of, or maybe because of, the lack of orcs, robots, damsels in distress, etc., I discovered that real life is actually more exciting than the made-up stuff.
Real people doing real things and facing real consequences ... now, that's exciting.
History, science, biography, thought leaders - they're all good.
And then I discovered something else.
In each field, no matter how outwardly unrelated, I keep finding connections to the activity profession.
It's like I can't avoid seeing the connections.
Well, so what?
I believe the activity profession is at a transition point.
What many of us are doing is not sustainable.
What if we let outsiders, other professions, other times, other situations inform us?
Maybe we'll find a path to change.

No Gas? Thumb a Ride

Sometimes we need to figure out what's really going on.  “A drill company thought it was selling drills.  Their customers were actually buying holes”(25).  I pulled this quote from a mind-sharpening book Alan M. Webber put together, called “Rules of Thumb.”  Webber describes 52 truths he picked up while hobnobbing with folks like those at the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company magazines.

Webber sums it up as Rule #6:  “If You Want To See With Fresh Eyes, Reframe The Picture”(25).  Most companies, he states, “don’t see what business they’re really in.”  He draws from the classic article, “Marketing Myopia,” by Ted Levitt, who famously differentiated between marketing and selling.  Levitt taught that selling was all about exchanging your product for cash.  Marketing had to do with satisfying the actual needs of the customer through the product:

…a truly marketing-minded firm tries to create value-satisfying goods and services that consumers will want to buy.  What it offers for sale includes … how it is made available to the customer, in what form, when, under what conditions, and at what terms of trade (Levitt 143).

I’m an activity professional.  A good nursing program can help keep our residents alive.  A well-run activity program will remind our residents of the reasons they have for wanting to BE alive.  Is that something they or their families would be interested in buying?

So, how does my job in activities at a CCRC intersect with marketing?  “KTR,” they tell us in our national certification classes, “Know Thy Resident.”  We do our best to find out what makes each resident tick, what they used to like to do but can’t anymore, what they might enjoy doing now if they had the chance and didn’t talk themselves out of it, what they never really did before but might someday, at some precious moment, decide to give a try.  We know that how we stage an activity, what we call it, what time and day we put it on the calendar, where we hold it, and what incentives go with it, will make a BIG difference in participation and satisfaction levels.  We market to those with dementia as much as to those who are cognitively intact.  Just because someone has dementia doesn’t mean they don’t want a life.  So, yes, part of what makes for a well-run activity program is the marketing that we activity professionals do with the residents.

Let’s say I have a resident who won’t come out for crafts, games, exercise, music, bingo, anything.  But they are interested in joining a group of other residents for ice cream and conversation on the patio after supper, when the worst heat of the summer day is past.  What are they buying?  Ice cream?  Nope.  They tell me they are still full from supper.  People and conversation?  Just left that a few minutes ago in the dining room.  Sweat and the occasional fly?  Not so much.  The chance to feel like what they consider to be a “normal adult" again.  Absolutely.

Levitt said, “When people buy gas for their cars, they don’t really want the gasoline – they want the freedom to continue driving down the road” (145).  That is so true it makes me laugh.  I don’t want gasoline, do you?  Activity Directors (by whatever title we’re called) are not selling activities – we’re marketing freedom from “boredom, helplessness and loneliness,” as The Eden Alternative suggests in their vision statement.  Or maybe it’s freedom from meaninglessness and from anger about still being alive.  How do the residents define what they’re buying?  Some days it feels like we’re actually marketing an alternate reality where the residents are younger, more capable and controlling their own lives again.  Your activity professionals are doing successful marketing all the time to your target demographic.  If you want to increase your census numbers, maybe you should ask us how we do it.

©Donna Stuart, ADC      July 21, 2017

Levitt, Theodore. "Marketing Myopia." Best of HBR July-August 2004: 143, 145.

Webber, Alan M. Rules of Thumb. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2009.

http://www.edenalt.org/about-the-eden-alternative/mission-vision-values/

An Astronaut’s Guide To Activity Professional Training

How long does it take to get to the International Space Station (ISS) and back?  “The trip takes a lifetime,” according to Col. Chris Hadfield.  In his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth, Hadfield describes what we call the "right stuff" looks like, feels like and costs.  The cost part is something he wants us to reframe.  You could say the cost included time spent behind the scenes in endless training, filling other ground-based jobs, helping other astronauts be successful, and marketing space exploration to the world.  He looks at it differently.

To Hadfield, training and experience are always good, even if you don’t use them directly. He was always signing up for extra training opportunities or teaching himself.  If he got to use his robotics training to install a giant robotic arm on the ISS, that was great.  If he learned to actually pilot the Soyuz capsule, but in the end, only got to go along for the ride, it was great because he got to understand the process better.   If he taught himself “Rocket Man” on the guitar, hoping that Eton John would invite him onstage for a duet, and Elton didn’t, well, Hadfield would still know how to play “Rocket Man” on the guitar.  It still made him a better astronaut and more interesting human being.  In the activity profession, we have lots of opportunities for extra training in things like dementia care, use of technology, horticulture, public speaking or event planning.  Some of this we’ll put into practice.  Yay!  Some will be back-shelved.  But all training increases the depth of our competence as activity professionals.

In a sense, everybody hopes to find the perfect job and stay there forever.  However, moving to a new job, a new facility, or a different level of responsibility can be good for your professional development.  That includes moves that are not necessarily upward.  Hadfield worked many different jobs over the years:  test pilot, astronaut trainee, ISS Operations in Houston, capsule communicator, NASA Operations at Star City in Russia, NASA robotics, and, of course, sitting on committees.  Most of those jobs could not hope to match the apparent glamour of astronaut in orbit, astronaut spacewalker, and astronaut just back from space.  But, they gave him a better big picture perspective and made him more useful no matter where he was.  I used to be a teacher.  However, when I switched to healthcare, I started out as a CNA and then dropped to merely NA.   I sat with groups of residents at high risk for falls, raced around the building delivering ice, accompanied residents in the van to outside appointments, and ran the dining room on weekends.  Was this useful experience once I joined the activity department?  Oh, yeah.

 ©  Donna Stuart, ADC    January 29, 2017

Hadfield, Chris. An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Anything but the Facts, Ma’am.

In dementia care, we are looking to science for the cure.  We are hoping that someone will study the facts about dementia, come up with that epic hypothesis for what’s going on, test it with an equally epic experiment and present us with a little white pill that will save the day.  Yeah, keep writing those care plans.

Actually, to do science, you have to cultivate your inner ignorance.  Ignorance: How It Drives Science is the title of biologist Stuart Firestein’s 2012 book.  He has surprising advice for his college students and readers, “Forget the answers, work on the questions.” (p.16)  He documents how knowledge is piling up at a very disconcerting speed and how, based on the experience most of us had in school, laypeople think science is all about this pile of facts.  However, Firestein claims that real scientists select facts “for the questions they create, for the ignorance they point to.” (p. 12) That is, scientists aim their research at what they wish they knew.  He compares it to looking for a black cat in a dark room when there might not be any cat after all.

Firestein goes on to discuss the problems with facts.  Not only are there are way too many of them to digest, but they tend to, um …, change with time.   “No datum is safe from the next generation of scientists with the next generation of tools,” he points out on p. 21.  He also states that it’s ridiculous to think that the facts that we are presented with are untainted by biased observation or interpretation.  He agrees that the more widely accepted a fact is, the more of a risk there is that it will become too entrenched and resist needed revision.

All of this aside, Firestein has another purpose in writing this book.  He wants to encourage non-scientists to peek in more often on what’s happening.  So what if you can’t follow the details of current research?  He cajoles, “You can enjoy a painting or a symphony without possessing any of the know-how of an artist or a musician.  Why not science?” (p. 125)

This sounds good, to a point.  Still, if I go to a concert or look at a painting, I can think about it.  I can form my own opinion.  That’s part of the deal.  Saying the emperor has no clothes is not just a fashion opinion, it is an assessment of a “fact.”  Laypeople might not follow the calculations that a physicist uses, but we are often pretty good at spotting bias and politicalization.  You can look for the black cat that might or might not be in the dark room, but we see the elephant that definitely is in the room, namely that the “facts” are not as dependable as we are told and that it does matter.

As part of a case history, Firestein explains on p. 120, “The universe is not so much expanding; rather space is being created and the universe, the things in it, galaxies and the like, are simply filling up the expanded space.”  Then he adds “… No sense asking what’s on the other side of that expanding edge of the universe.  It isn’t there; it hasn’t been created yet.  Just because a question can be asked doesn’t make it a meaningful question.”

Really?!?  I’d be ‘lacking sense’ if ask a question?  Oh, sorry, my question isn’t “meaningful.”  Well, history is full of examples where scientists said there was “nothing else there,” when there really was something else on the other side.   Firestein blithely goes on to document how, in this case, they had to tweak the original theory to fit some new data.  Yes, that happens. Theories get changed.  Regularly.

To me, the main time when science has credibility issues is when scientists are the only ones who get to ask the questions.  Don’t tell me to just enjoy what science dishes out today, without any comment other than “Bravo!” I’m not going to be an uncritical consumer.  What we call “science” is constantly upgrading itself like your average cell phone.  Science has always been politicized, funding-driven, and pock marked with cover-ups and in-fighting.  When science gets it wrong, it affects my life, my residents’ lives, our future, our children’s future.  I do enjoy science – but I like to add a grain of salt myself.

© Donna Stuart, ADC                 December 10, 2016

Firestein, Stuart. Ignorance: How It Drives Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Conscience and Compliance

Anyone who has worked with children, served in the military or managed a healthcare institution knows how important it is to achieve compliance (or obedience) to rules and expectations.  Yet, compliance has also led to some of the most egregious atrocities ever perpetrated against humanity.  We all know the testimonies of war criminals who were “just following orders.”  Unfortunately, studies show that most normal, decent people (like you and me) will still do bad or stupid things under the influence of our cultural training to comply with the authority system where we find ourselves.  Kind of scary.

Ira Chaleff, in Intelligent Disobedience, Doing Right When What You’re Told To Do Is Wrong, describes the types of situations where compliance can obviously be detrimental, even career-ending or deadly.  Airplanes have crashed because a co-pilot didn’t stand up to the pilot who was making a mistake.  The WorldCom accountant, who was asked by management to move funds around illegally, thought about refusing, but that wasn’t enough to keep her out of jail.  A guide dog that sees an oncoming car, but obeys his blind master’s signal to cross the street, is going to get them both killed.  A teacher witnesses bullying by another teacher, does nothing about it because it wasn’t her classroom, and gets fired.

Chaleff noticed several red flags to watch for:  conflict between orders you’ve been given and a higher set of values you hold, technical answers given to smooth over moral questions, unwillingness of an authority figure to put orders in writing, noticing that you are avoiding implementing an order unless the authority figure is physically present.

He points to items which can help people intelligently disobey:  voicing problems sooner, withdrawing your support if you are also an authority figure, having bystander support, and training your subordinates to feel comfortable questioning unreasonable orders (you’d want them to, wouldn’t you?).

It is easy to complain about the problems created by the authority structures around us.  Listen in on any break room discussion.  It is harder to identify when to take a stand and how to take a stand.  We’re really talking freedom of conscience here.  Problems can arise suddenly.  The costs can be high.  There are no guarantees you’ll win.  It pays to be prepared.

© Donna Stuart, ADPC                     February 27, 2016

Chaleff, Ira. Intelligent Disobedience. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2015.

Generalities on Leadership

While on the topic of “Leadership” in my activity director class, I picked up the autobiography of retired army 4-star general, Ann Dunwoody.  A woman general should have some insight on leadership, after all.  Now, a lot of the details in her book, A Higher Standard, are strictly military issues.  But, at the same time, Dunwoody explores how the military deals with staff: assignments, training, evaluation, advancement, and discipline, as well as planning, appropriations, logistics, and office politics.  All good stuff for an activity professional.

I was especially drawn to her assessment of the goals of training.  Dunwoody describes the irony of training to meet “standards.”  A standard might be something like being able to hit a target 65% of the time when you shoot a gun.  This sounds reasonable until you think back to school days.  What is 65%?  That’s a grade of “C.”  

Dunwoody points out, “We spend a lot of leadership time at the lower levels training and retraining soldiers so that all of our troops can meet the standards.  For what?  A whole unit of C students?”    P.28

She goes on to state her own goal of challenging her soldiers to make their own personal standards something much more than average.  And she feels it is important to “eliminate, separate, isolate, or retire those who are not willing to improve.”   P.30

She "wanted them to be proud of what they did and to be the best at what they did.” P.31

Obviously, Dunwoody didn’t lead where she hadn’t been.  Her personal standard was extraordinary enough to land her the position of general in charge of the U.S. Army Material Command (AMC), moving and tracking equipment and supplies all over the world.  In other words, she is an expert at organization and planning.  One of her major successes was in convincing the army to change the way it was doing things and adopt a centralized online tracking system.  That Culture Change allowed the AMC to move into the modern world, and it was just barely in time to meet the current world military situation.

Dunwoody wanted her soldiers to be successful, too.  She did all she could to make sure that the training she gave them (plus the right attitude on their part) could actually lead to success and advancement.  What a gift!

©Donna Stuart, ADPC             September 19, 2015

Dunwoody, Ann. A Higher Standard. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015.

The Great Chicken Rides Again

What do you know about the history of the world?  It’s chickens, symbolically, economically, gastronomically, geographically, politically, scientifically.  It’s all chickens.  At least you’d think it was after reading Andrew Lawler’s book, Why Did The Chicken Cross The World?  264 pages, not counting 42 pages of references, trace the path of chickendom across continents and oceans to its ubiquitous position on a Chick fil-A® billboard along a highway near you.

I grew up with chickens in the background.  They were my dad’s hobby and a source of extra income.  We lived in Buffalo, and I can remember my dad having to trudge to the chicken coop through the snow in order to thaw out their drinking water during the winter.  (He was a generation too early to cash in on the Buffalo chicken wing craze, though.  Nobody in Buffalo wanted to buy chicken wings back then.  He had to practically give them away!)

For my dad, the fun side of keeping chickens was to raise show birds.  Most people don’t realize how many dramatically different - looking chickens there are.  The prototype bird started out as a beautiful, but wily and fierce jungle animal, hard to catch, hard to domesticate.  Still, it seemed like every time humanity took a step, the chicken was carried along.  

Lawler documents times in the past when collecting exotic chickens was a tremendous fad.  Even Queen Victoria got in on the action.  But the fads faded.  There was real money to be made if someone could genetically build a chicken that matured faster and produced more meat or eggs.  So, of course, they did.  And these “industrial” chickens are warehoused, slaughtered, and delivered plastic-wrapped to our grocery stores without us ever catching a glimpse of the live bird.

Chickens were never my hobby, but I caught myself nodding and smiling as I read some of the stories.  They were never my hobby, but I was there.   If I were admitted to a nursing home and they were filling out my activity history intake form, I would never put “raising chickens” as something I had done.  But the memories - happy memories almost forgotten – would surface if I were exposed to an activity related to chickens.  Maybe, in providing  person-centered care, we need to ask what someone’s parents did for a hobby?

© Donna Stuart, ADPC   April 14, 2015

Lawler, Andrew. Why Did The Chicken Cross The World? New York: Atria Books, 2014.