My career path has involved several pivots along the way. Each role contrasted the previous and yet was connected by a common thread. Problem solving. Engaging others in understanding and therefore acting on this new-found knowledge to produce a new outcome.
Understanding the How
I have become a story weaver, where I pick up threads of context that a person can relate to, and tie those to contexts that are new and unfamiliar. When someone understands the ‘how’ they are better equipped to do the ‘what’ that needs doing.
When someone understands the ‘how’ they are better equipped to do the ‘what’ that needs doing.
As a physiotherapist, specializing in cardio-respiratory hospital-based treatment, I would help the family of people with Asthma understands what Asthma feels like by getting them to breathe through a straw, and only through that straw, for a minute. Most people can’t make it that long. You quickly learn what air-hunger is, and how alarming it feels. The straw mimics the tightened airways that reduce the flow of air. Not all analogies need to be experienced and can be understood by describing.
Visual or relatable cues
For those same people who were struggling with phlegm, which in itself reduces the available airway space, it helps for them to understand the question of why do I have phlegm? Why do I cough so much especially in the morning?
Your airways are always producing mucus as a lubricant, and one role of this lubricant is trapping dust and pollutants that we breathe in. The upper airway is lined with cilia, little tiny hair-like structures that act like a bucket-brigade, sweeping mucus upward and out of the lungs to the back of the throat where most of us swallow tiny amounts with each swallow. The bucket-brigade of cilia can get damaged by smoking, aggressive inflammation, infection or intubation from surgery. When the cilia cannot pass the mucus up, it collects to the point where the cough reflex is triggered to catapult the phlegm out of the airways to where it can be disposed of.
This bucket-brigade imagery worked well when communicating to the older generation. Analogies are context based, as technology and personal experiences change, so must the analogy!
Clinical Significance
When my career pivoted to health information and learning the art and science of querying health data for clinical significance, the challenge was explaining scenarios presented in the data in a relatable context. Some data patterns cannot be understood by the data alone. When one set of hip replacement patients had an average stay that was a day longer that the rest, the common factor turned out to be the consultant. It was not related to the age, health, complicating factors, or any other metric measurable. It was related to that consultant being part-time, and so there was a delay in authorizing the discharge of these patients.
Everyday Scenarios make sense of data and processes
That clinical information position led into the management of a national community of users of a specialized clinical software, my role became training new users in the system by engaging them in scenarios that helped them understand how the data was collected, stored, and retrieved. It also involved working with people in the health sector front lines who didn’t understand or trust the technology. Learning to explain data-transfer protocols by likening it to telephone calls, only if the data stream is interrupted, and some data is not received, the system can re-request it. I learned to read network diagrams, to understand server processes, and how if you can query the data in the right way, you can find a way to the answers.
Most adults can relate to the the steps involved in building a house, yet few know anything about what goes into making a website.
Understanding is essential to human motivation. There are precious few scenarios where we feel comfortable doing something that we don’t understand unless it is in the context of following a leader we trust implicitly from previous experiences – for example, our mothers.
Entering the world of web
The next pivot was to working for a web development agency, where the focus was more on messaging, SEO, and user experience rather than pure data. There was so much that was new for me to learn. Learning about Domain Name Server (DNS) was one of them. Our human ability to locate each other had previously been all about our presence in a physical space. We were the house on the hill, or by the lake, next to the cobblers shop, and then evolving to street names, house numbers, unit and apartment numbers. Along the way we added phone numbers, and the marvel of switchboard technology that could take a request from one phone, and connect it to another including across oceans.
If you know the location of the start and end points you can connect them together. Switchboards help us make sense of the principles of DNS. The relatable process is furthered by the use of a registry that holds the connection information, similar to the old white pages. I have enjoyed relating this technology more in my About DNS post.
Relating is empowering
My relatable, story-telling, context-driven approach to sharing understanding is about empowering people to become comfortable in a new area, comfortable enough to put their trust in the people and professionals they engage to help them in their projects and needs. The core of this concept is that most adults can relate to the the steps involved in building a house, yet few know anything about what goes into making a website. By equating these processes I hope to demystify the art and science of web development and make it accessible to the everyday person.
