I’m in the final days of a group project report for my advocacy class. I hated this project for the first several weeks when I couldn’t get a single person in my group to respond. Now, in the final days, with 4 separate contributions to knit together cohesively, some idiosyncratic (mis)interpretations of the brief to work with, and a lot of references to get into one referencing software, I find myself surprised to be enjoying it. Our report is vastly different from anything I’d have written myself, including our choice of topic, and yet it’s been fun to let go of the usual goal of top grades and instead focus on engaging and supporting and the usual herding-of-cats that is pulling together a group project.

Tonight I am reading up on Advocacy strategies and I laughed out load at a quote from pg 16 of The fight for public health by Chapman, S., & Lupton, D. (1994).

Looking at the vast literature on health promotion programmes, it is almost as if there is… an inverse analysis law operating in public health: the more trivial the intervention, the greater the research interest; while the greater the potentional for population-wide effect, the scarcer the analysis.

Simon Chapman

Complexity is tricky, folks, and we don’t like it much. I was inspired recently by a conversation about one of the biggest challenges in health is trying to move from linear (one cause, one outcome) to systemic thinking (multiple causes and multiple outcomes including vicious or virtuous cycles). Systemic thinking is hard when you are used to linear, like going from juggling two balls to ten. But in a way it’s also much more intuitive, we know that the context of a person’s life is crucial to their health in multilayered ways that go far beyond the reductionism of simple cause and effect, even in the realms of trauma.

I do love this work.