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Episode Summary
In this conversation, Ursula and Anne Marie sit down with Mark Stolow, Founding Director of People Before Patients, to explore what it truly means to humanize healthcare.
Drawing from early caregiving experiences and over two decades in public health, Mark challenges the industrial logic shaping today’s system and offers new metaphors—like forests, ecologies, and “the dome”—to help us reimagine care in a more relational, alive, and humane way.
He also introduces the practice of asking “more beautiful questions,” examines the difference between cold and warm data, and shares how slowing down might be the most urgent step toward redesigning healthcare for the future.
Why you should listen
- You’ll rethink the phrase “humanizing healthcare”—and why it reveals how far we’ve drifted from care’s original purpose.
- Mark offers powerful metaphors (forest ecology, The Truman Show dome, bonsai) that reframe how we understand illness, suffering, and systems.
- You’ll learn why data alone can’t capture a person’s lived experience, and why healthcare must balance cold metrics with warm context.
- This episode gives clinicians, patients, caregivers, and leaders a new lens for imagining what healthcare could become if we widen the frame.
- It invites us to ask better, more beautiful questions—the kind that open new pathways instead of repeating old answers.
Episode highlights
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00:00 – Welcome to Amplify
Ursula, Brent, and Anne Marie introduce the episode and its focus on perspectives that can reshape healthcare’s future.00:34 – Meet Mark Stolow
Mark is introduced as a thought explorer and founding director of People Before Patients, with more than 20 years in the human development and health space.01:04 – Mark’s origin story
How caring for his mother during severe bipolar episodes shaped his lifelong interest in human suffering, psychology, and healing.02:28 – Eastern philosophies and “the wisdom of anxiety”
Mark shares how Buddhist and Indian schools of thought influenced his academic and personal exploration of the mind.04:00 – What does “humanizing healthcare” really mean?
Why the phrase surprises Mark, and what it reveals about how far we’ve drifted from a human-centered understanding of care.05:45 – A family carrying the weight
Mark reflects on growing up in a household affected by mental illness and what he wishes the family had understood earlier.07:54 – Healthcare professionals are longing for humanness too
The increasing dissatisfaction and yearning for meaning among clinicians.08:56 – The forest metaphor: Healthcare as a living ecology
How interconnected systems like forests can teach us more about care than industrial models.11:00 – What’s getting in the way? The limits of industrial thinking
Why healthcare’s “input-output” mindset fails to capture the complexity of human lives and chronic illness.12:52 – Expanding the edges of illness
Cancer isn’t only what shows up on scans—Mark describes its ripple effects across relationships, identity, and daily life.13:45 – Discreet solutions to complex problems
Why industrial solutions are often partial—and what’s missing.14:38 – A better metaphor: ecological thinking
Shifting from centers and hierarchies to interdependence and mutuality.16:00 – Ask a more beautiful question
What makes a question “beautiful,” why it requires patience, and how it helps us understand problems more deeply.17:12 – Healthcare keeps asking the same questions
And why repeating old questions can never lead to new answers.18:45 – Data as the map, not the territory
Mark explains the difference between cold data and warm data—and why both matter.20:00 – Pain scales and lived experience
The limits of numerical measures and why lived context always spills past the edges.21:45 – Waiting rooms, design thinking, and engineering mindsets
How “efficient” spaces often fail the lived experience, and what inclusive design can offer.23:00 – A simple starting point for humanizing care
Creating space to sense, feel, and reconnect before rushing to solve.24:00 – “The times are urgent; we must slow down.”
Why slowing down may be the most important move in a system that feels on fire.25:07 – The chessboard metaphor
Why rearranging pieces isn’t enough—we must redesign the board itself.28:15 – Are we lacking will or skill?
Mark argues our challenge is neither—it’s about how we look, not what we know.28:40 – The Truman Show dome
Healthcare as a confined world, and the invitation to notice the staircase leading beyond it.30:21 – What Mark is reading
Surprisingly: books on bonsai—and what this art teaches about tending living, growing systems.31:00 – Closing reflections
Ursula shares why this conversation left her wanting to reflect, slow down, and rethink the metaphors she uses for healthcare.
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Mark Stolow
Founding Director at People Before Patients – Health in service to life
Mark Stolow is the Founding Director of People Before Patients, with over two decades in human development, public health, organizational leadership, and coaching. His work blends psychology, Eastern philosophy, and systems thinking to help individuals and institutions rethink what it means to design care that is truly in service to life.
Transcript
Episode 11
[00:00:00] Anne Marie: Welcome to Amplify Elevating Patient Voices, a podcast powered by patient voice partners, where real stories spark bold conversations. I’m Ursula Mann.
[00:00:11] Brent: And I’m Brent Korte. Together we’re talking with [00:00:15] patients, caregivers, and the healthcare change makers who are listening and taking action.
[00:00:20] Ursula: From personal journeys to policy shifts, these are the voices shaping a healthcare system that listens.[00:00:30]
[00:00:34] Ursula: Welcome back to Amplify. Today, Ann Marie and I are gonna explore ideas, perspectives, and the power of sense making to shape a different future in healthcare. The [00:00:45] conversation is with a thought explorer, an engineer of human growth, and a cultivator of new possibilities. Mark Stolow is the founding director of people before patients and has been immersed in the human development and health space for over 20 years.
[00:00:58] Ursula: Anne Marie, I [00:01:00] understand you’ve had the pleasure of knowing Mark for a number of years now. Tell me a bit more about this.
[00:01:04] Anne Marie: Yes. Thank you Ursula. I’m very excited to have Mark join us today. Mark and I have worked together both personally and professionally, personally through a program called Growing [00:01:15] Through What You’re Going Through and professionally through a number of multi-stakeholder projects as well as some leadership coaching.
[00:01:21] Anne Marie: Interesting. Yeah. Today we’re gonna explore this concept of humanizing healthcare. So Mark, welcome to our show today.
[00:01:29] Mark: Thanks for having [00:01:30] me.
[00:01:30] Anne Marie: Maybe we just kick things off with you sharing with our listeners a little bit about yourself and what motivated you to do the work that you do.
[00:01:38] Mark: Yeah, people have asked me that question in the past, and it’s hard not to go back to a time early in my life where I was caring [00:01:45] for my mother in some pretty profound moments of depression.
[00:01:49] Mark: So I think when you’re that young, I was in my early teens and you have a really direct contact with someone who’s experiencing a level of suffering and it’s, in a way, it’s hard not to take [00:02:00] an interest in the human condition. So I’d say, the experience being with my mother was probably the catalyst for an interest in better understanding illness and suffering and how do we alleviate pain? And that probably just [00:02:15] started a cascade of events including, studies in psychology and. Eastern thinking and Eastern philosophy. And then I had landed in healthcare actually by chance in a public health institute as I was doing my undergraduate degree.
[00:02:28] Mark: And that [00:02:30] started my work in healthcare about roughly about 24 years ago.
[00:02:33] Anne Marie: Oh wow. We have spoken a little bit about those beginnings and I know that part of what I experienced in growing through what you’re going through with you was some of this Eastern [00:02:45] philosophy.
[00:02:45] Anne Marie: And maybe can you just give us a little bit of a flavor of, I know you’ve got the academic background, but you’ve also explored some of these other philosophies, and what has that brought to your thinking?
[00:02:55] Mark: it’s even describing, having said Eastern philosophy, it’s a difficult way [00:03:00] to describe it.
[00:03:00] Mark: ’cause there’s so many nuanced and different schools of thought that come out of the East. And there’s also how we interpret it in the West, which is sometimes different than maybe the kind of the origins. I was particularly, interested in Buddhist thinking and certain schools of Indian thought many of [00:03:15] whom were.
[00:03:15] Mark: Interested in kind of the nature of understanding mind and human behavior. So I, for example, my undergraduate degree, my thesis was called The Wisdom of Anxiety. And it looked at different ways of understanding anxiety, both through a [00:03:30] kind of contemporary psychological perspective and then through a more Buddhist or Indian thought lens.
[00:03:37] Mark: Yeah, I think the draw towards. Buddhist thinking was one, obviously a very clear interest in preoccupation with [00:03:45] suffering. And then this very in depth examination, I would say of the mind and the human experience. So it seemed to naturally, organically fit well with my interest in the human experience.
[00:03:58] Anne Marie: Yeah. We [00:04:00] talk sometimes of the heart mind connection. I know that’s something a theme we’ve talked about and that maybe is a nice segue into where I’d like to start this episode as we think about humanizing healthcare and what this means. I think in a world where [00:04:15] data is king, technology more innovative than ever but also a health system that was designed around an institutional model.
[00:04:22] Anne Marie: So it’s not surprising that humanness often feels neglected as we navigate health. So what comes to mind for you [00:04:30] when we use this term humanizing health.
[00:04:33] Mark: To be honest with you, I said that phrase myself a number of times, but I silently giggle when I hear humanizing healthcare because you wonder if it wasn’t about humans, what would it be about?
[00:04:44] Mark: So I think [00:04:45] that’s revealing ’cause it points to maybe how far we’ve drifted from this fundamental understanding that healthcare. Is about the human experience. And so that’s primary, right? it’s like the first mover. So [00:05:00] when we talk about humanizing healthcare, it’s almost like we’re all trying to remember something we’ve forgotten.
[00:05:05] Mark: So in a way it’s one part restorative, coming back home to this experience of care, of seeing each other, of being with each other. [00:05:15] Particularly in moments of deep vulnerability, a deep pain, deep suffering, and then also moving towards, so there’s a future element of moving towards a different kind of experience that helps to bring us back home to being with each other.
[00:05:29] Mark: I [00:05:30] think we’re talking more and more about humanizing healthcare or putting people at the center of healthcare because there’s a collective sense that somehow we’ve lost our way.
[00:05:38] Ursula: Mark, I’m interested, and I wanna say a big thank you for sharing the situation with your mom that led you down [00:05:45] this path.
[00:05:45] Ursula: Did you have very open conversations with your mom about her diagnosis, or was it something that was tough to talk about and how did she do over time?
[00:05:54] Mark: My mother, she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was what? Some would [00:06:00] describe as someone who would oscillate quite frequently through periods of mania and depression.
[00:06:05] Mark: Early on when I was caring for her the most I understood was that she wasn’t well.
[00:06:09] Ursula: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:06:10] Mark: And my job was to. Be with her in a way that just made her feel better. It [00:06:15] was only later that I could understand the depth of what was going on. So yeah, when I got to a certain age where I could make sense of it, there was a lot more discussion about it.
[00:06:23] Mark: But then there was also very vivid experiences where it was quite obvious that, this was more than just mom needing to be [00:06:30] home. There was her at Attempt Suicide. Found changes in the family. My father with his experience seeing events of mania which were sometimes extremely intense, and so it was all very vivid.
[00:06:41] Mark: There were definitely explicit conversations, but it was really obvious and [00:06:45] implicit that something was very different
[00:06:46] Ursula: here.
[00:06:46] Ursula: Yeah,
[00:06:47] Ursula: that’s
[00:06:47] Ursula: a lot of pressure growing up with some uncertainty to really make sense and understand what’s happening for, if you could go back in time, is there something you wish you had known earlier that would’ve helped to make sense of this at an earlier [00:07:00] stage?
[00:07:01] Mark: I think overall, the family could have used probably more external support. I think father was just, like a lot of parents doing the best he could with I’d say limited know-how. So there’s his experience of what’s going on and that creates a level of [00:07:15] disorientation and that is the experience of what’s going on with the family.
[00:07:18] Mark: He was also a very private person. It made it difficult for him to want to reach out and. Get extended support and I think it was natural for him to lean on his, there’s three of us, three sons. [00:07:30] His three sons to support my mother. Yeah, it’s hard to say. I don’t tend to be a regretful person.
[00:07:35] Mark: But the experience was incredibly important for me. There was definitely periods. Like a lot for me to unpack over time around that experience, but I don’t think I would really change [00:07:45] anything.
[00:07:45] Anne Marie: I wanna pick up on something you said a few minutes ago you were talking about healthcare being centered around people and as we’re talking about.
[00:07:54] Anne Marie: Humanizing care means I think sometimes we make the [00:08:00] assumption that when we’re talking about this, we’re talking solely about maybe patients or people who are going through a diagnosis or a chronic illness, but really this longing for humanness. It expands beyond that. I think also you’ve talked a lot [00:08:15] about the healthcare professionals and everyone in healthcare longing for more of this humanist.
[00:08:21] Anne Marie: Can you maybe share some of your thinking and maybe conversations you’ve had with healthcare folks who are also struggling with this sense of longingness?
[00:08:29] Mark: [00:08:30] Yeah. It’s difficult to describe why all healthcare professionals go into healthcare practice, but we’d have to assume maybe at some level there’s an interest in care.
[00:08:39] Mark: There’s kind of longing to again, be with, connect with discover [00:08:45] with and help others. So I think there’s a growing angst, among healthcare professionals who are feeling healthcare being stripped. The kind of, the varnish is coming off and we’re noticing that this experience that doesn’t feel quite as fulfilling what is [00:09:00] meaningful as maybe a lot of ’em hoped it would be.
[00:09:02] Mark: We could have a long conversation about why that’s the case. So I think this yearning, this wantingness to reconnect, to be in a practice that feels meaningful, that where they feel they can [00:09:15] use the best of their skills, the best of their capacities in a system that’s supportive is definitely a growing.
[00:09:22] Mark: Sign or a growing interest that we’re seeing bubbling up in the healthcare professional community. I think for a long time, patients and [00:09:30] caregivers were the ones trying to voice concern about the loss of care inside of healthcare, but I think this is now becoming a more universal cry.
[00:09:39] Mark: So what we’re really, what we’re talking about is this idea of restoring this ecology of care. [00:09:45] When we think of systems that are truly alive and systems that are in service to life do they do? If you look at a forest and how a forest forests what is it in service to?
[00:09:56] Mark: How does it move and [00:10:00] connect and weave together? We talk about healthcare like it’s a system, I would maybe make the case that it doesn’t actually work like a system. A forest is a system. A forest is a recognition of the interdependence of all of the moving elements inside of that system, and everything [00:10:15] is necessary inside of that ecology.
[00:10:17] Mark: And what we often experience in healthcare are like deep fragmentation. Things that don’t connect, things that don’t speak to each other. The sense that some things are more valuable than others, and living systems don’t work that way. [00:10:30] So if we’re going to create a healthcare system that’s truly in service to life, what would it mean for it to be in service to life, to be, to being actually a living ecology?
[00:10:39] Mark: And I don’t think that we need to reinvent the wheel. I think there’s lots of [00:10:45] examples. Of systems that are truly alive, that are in service to life that we could find inspiration in.
[00:10:50] Anne Marie: I love this analogy of the foresting and really interesting. Yeah. And this sense of this living ecology.
[00:10:57] Anne Marie: And I’ve often heard you use the [00:11:00] phrase, the way we hold the problem often. Is the problem. What do you think is getting in the way? Why is it so hard?
[00:11:08] Mark: Yeah. It’s generally hard to be in service to life because it’s a very complex, it’s a really rich, [00:11:15] complex matrix, and in fairness to healthcare it’s dealing with these really complex issues of, the human experience, collective experience, all of the context that are moving in and around healthcare that impact how people feel and how they heal or if they heal.
[00:11:29] Mark: I [00:11:30] think that, from our perspective, the people before patients, the thing that. A lot Of what’s getting in the way is how we’re making sense of healthcare. It’s the frame that’s holding how we understand and make meaning of healthcare.
[00:11:42] Ursula: Do you think that ties into [00:11:45] expectations of healthcare?
[00:11:45] Ursula: Is that what you’re alluding to when you’re talking about making sense of it?
[00:11:48] Mark: It’s more like what’s informing. What is creating the container that’s holding healthcare. And if you look at historically how medical practice has evolved, it’s in a [00:12:00] modern sense, it’s mostly evolved in kind of an industrial metaphor.
[00:12:03] Mark: And so we’ve created a healthcare around industrial thinking, right? Inputs, outputs, data in, data out efficiencies the language of an [00:12:15] engineering language, not dissimilar to how we think about, bringing a car to a repair shop, right? You plug it in, you get your diagnostics and you solve the problem.
[00:12:23] Mark: That’s good. If you’re dealing with kind of static problems like a broken car , right? It might be [00:12:30] complicated. It’s not overly complex, but when it comes to human lives, it’s difficult to think about a human kind of entering a bay. And being plugged in and then being fixed and everything’s okay. Because a human’s experience is so complex and so rich [00:12:45] that the cascade of what they’re experiencing is so far reaching that we have to start thinking in new metaphors.
[00:12:52] Mark: We have to start thinking in layers of complexity and. Embedded in the current sense making [00:13:00] healthcare is the struggle to hold that complexity, which is one of the reasons why we struggle so much with chronic care. ‘ cause chronic care is notably complex,
[00:13:08] Ursula: fair. We can’t tick the box, send them out, it’s done.
[00:13:11] Ursula: It’s not done.
[00:13:12] Mark: What’s the edge of the cancer? If You look at [00:13:15] cancer through a discreet lens, you’d say, now we’ve put a scan and the scan indicates that there’s a tumor. And so that’s the cancer. That’s not really the edge of the cancer. The edge of the cancer is how it’s touching the person’s life their relationships, their work their [00:13:30] thoughts about themselves and the world.
[00:13:31] Mark: The cascade of cancer is so far reaching that to think that we can just treat the cancer prescriptively is to misunderstand what cancer is. We have a system that thinks in these industrial metaphors that thinks if we can [00:13:45] detect the cancer and eliminate the cancer, we’ve done the work.
[00:13:48] Mark: That’s only part of the work. So how do we start extending how we’re understanding the nature of illness, the nature of human suffering, so that we can hold this complexity? We’re gonna have to reach further than the [00:14:00] industrial model. That’s just bound by certain limitations of sense making and understanding.
[00:14:04] Mark: Is now creating this cascade of other problems because it doesn’t do a good job at really widening the aperture or holding a larger frame on the problem. So I think this [00:14:15] is one of the kind of core constraints that’s binding how healthcare is thinking about the problem. And a lot of the solutions are solutions that have this kind of very discreet logic and I would say are missing the fuller point.
[00:14:29] Mark: They’re not [00:14:30] wrong. Just partial.
[00:14:32] Anne Marie: Is there a better metaphor that you’ve been thinking about? Something that is a little bit more open?
[00:14:38] Mark: Yeah. I think I naturally come back to ecologies when I think about metaphors because I think about inside of [00:14:45] ecologies, how things are relating to each other.
[00:14:47] Mark: This idea that everything is in a deep. Connected experience. So for example , like in ecology, there’s no center, but we talk a lot in healthcare about what’s at the center of healthcare, right? [00:15:00] So the idea that a patient would be at the center sounds right to us, it feels like it makes sense.
[00:15:04] Mark: But when you look at ecology, there’s no real center. There’s just a multitude of elements and experiences woven into each other and connected to each other. So I naturally come back to [00:15:15] ecological metaphors because that is if we’re looking for how things thrive or if we’re looking to understand how things evolve, if we’re trying to understand mutuality and reciprocity and resilience it would seem like we would naturally [00:15:30] turn to living systems that do this well.
[00:15:32] Mark: And that includes our own biology. Think about your body’s own capacity to ecologically maintain. Its homo homeostatic resilience. Its capacity to heal and to function. It’s [00:15:45] again, we don’t need to invent new notions. There are lots of examples around us of things that are alive and in service to life, and we just start have to asking ourselves some deeper questions about what is it that makes these systems work.
[00:15:58] Ursula: Now Mark, [00:16:00] speaking about questions, I am interested, there’s something Anne-Marie told me that she’s heard you say a lot and it’s a very interesting theme. I love the challenge. So speaking of questions you often say, ask a more beautiful question. [00:16:15] I’m interested, what is a beautiful question? What does that mean to you?
[00:16:19] Mark: A beautiful question I would say is very patient. In the sense that it is not in a hurry to find an answer. It’s a question that allows you to actually [00:16:30] probe and develop a kind of intimacy with the problem itself. Our tendency when we ask questions is that they’re only helpful questions if they have, again, very specific answers .
[00:16:41] Mark: What I’ve learned is that if you can ask a more interesting question, a more beautiful [00:16:45] question, that you actually start to cultivate clarity and understanding the problem because the problem actually is holding the solution. So it’s cultivating a kind of patience. A reflective stance so that you can see more [00:17:00] directly into the nature of the problem itself.
[00:17:02] Mark: So a beautiful question just opens a world to you, but again, you have to have, I think the constitution and the patience to be inside of that question, to rest inside of that question. I think of a glaring [00:17:15] example would be. Like a zenko, like a question that has no explicit answer that you might spend 10 years meditating on.
[00:17:22] Mark: That’s probably a very extreme example, but it’s the patience to be with a question that holds a kind of [00:17:30] richness that’s different than asked and answered.
[00:17:32] Anne Marie: It, in essence opens up more possibility. Right?
[00:17:36] Mark: Yeah. And it Also steeps you more in what is not yet known. It steeps, a great question allows you to marinate inside of [00:17:45] it to be experience of it differently.
[00:17:47] Mark: I think we’ve become very accustomed in healthcare to asking a lot of the same questions and then to coming up with a lot of the same answers. I would contend that those answers aren’t moving the needle anymore. I feel like we’ve hit the [00:18:00] threshold on these same questions.
[00:18:01] Mark: Right.
[00:18:02] Ursula: Fair. Especially if we’re asking the same questions and getting the same answers. That’s tricky to make changes.
[00:18:06] Mark: Yeah. It’s also not the terrain of the new, if you’re asking a lot of the same questions and they’re begging the same answers you’re on repeat.
[00:18:12] Ursula: Definitely
[00:18:13] Mark: the difficulty of asking [00:18:15] a great question is that if you’re trying to really step into the creative and step into the new, you actually have to spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the question because the question is pointing to what’s new. What we tend to do is we rely on old questions, and then obviously [00:18:30] they begged just old answers.
[00:18:31] Anne Marie: I’d like to maybe go back to one of our earlier topics and then maybe make a segue into what might be possible. We opened up the conversation talking about, the power of data in health in today’s world [00:18:45] and technology being, really moving us forward in your view.
[00:18:51] Anne Marie: Is there space for data technology and humanness to coexist? And if so, how might that help us [00:19:00] orient to this sort of healthcare and service of life? Is there a connection there?
[00:19:05] Mark: yeah, for sure. I think the conversation around data for me is easier to understand around the metaphor of the map and the territory.
[00:19:13] Mark: So I think the data, the [00:19:15] kind of discreet. What we could maybe call cold data that we’re used to in healthcare points to something. It illustrates something. It suggests something. So in that sense, it’s important, right? It’s important like when you’re using [00:19:30] ways to understand where you’ve started and where you’re going, and to see those data points mapped along a trajectory.
[00:19:36] Mark: What we’ve done is we’ve supplanted those data points with the experience itself. That’s, that I would describe as the error in our [00:19:45] misunderstanding of how we overly rely on data, particularly on cold data, to understand the territory of someone’s experience, right? Go home tomorrow and try to map your relationship with your partner and map how you love that person.
[00:19:58] Mark: And tell me how [00:20:00] successful you are at doing that. You could probably find some data points that would describe your relationship with that person, but it would be vastly different than the experience itself. What we talk a lot about is not undermining the importance [00:20:15] of data collection and data sharing.
[00:20:17] Mark: It’s the kind of, the danger of misunderstanding that. As being a surrogate for someone’s actual experience and of their experience , which doesn’t express itself in data [00:20:30] points, right? So there we’re talking more about what someone like Nora Bateson would call warm data, right? This experience of the living vivid experience of someone’s life.
[00:20:42] Mark: So I can measure your pain on a scale, [00:20:45] but it can never really describe your pain. Or for example, you might tell me that you’re four on a scale of 10, and I may say I’m a seven. And from a cold data perspective, we would understand those as qualitatively differently. I still Don’t really tell you how the person’s experiencing that [00:21:00] because my four might be your nine and you’re nine might be me, my four.
[00:21:04] Mark: So again, it’s like the limitations of how we use instruments or technology to capture something . That is constantly seeping out of [00:21:15] the edges of that capture, but we’re constantly trying to enclose it, like we’re trying to plug up the holes of a sieve with data. And I think that’s the misunderstanding is that again, you can see cancer on a scan, you can measure it in [00:21:30] a cold way.
[00:21:30] Mark: Now try to understand it in a warm way. Try to really become intimate with the experience of living with cancer. It extends so far beyond the chart, so what we’re trying to say is how do we restore a sense [00:21:45] of finding the balance between drawing great maps, which is wonderful exercise and helpful.
[00:21:51] Mark: Now steeping ourselves more fully in the terrain of the experience. What would healthcare look like if we were doing that better? For example, you design a waiting room, [00:22:00] like that’s a cold calculated operation, right? A procedural way of moving people through an experience.
[00:22:06] Mark: But of course, at a very intimate personal. From the perspective of the train of that experience, it’s terrible.
[00:22:13] Mark: It’s
[00:22:13] Mark: awful, and no one likes [00:22:15] it. So it helps from a cold calculated operation, right? It harvests and moves people through a queue, quote unquote, efficiently and effectively from the perspective of the train of experience, everyone detest.
[00:22:26] Ursula: Especially if nobody was asked about their experience in the [00:22:30] ultimate design. If this is a new design, that’s certainly a sad way to go.
[00:22:33] Mark: That’s the difference between an engineering mindset and a kind of design mindset. A design mindset is highly inclusive, highly participatory. It’s really interested in the terrain.
[00:22:43] Mark: It looks at [00:22:45] textures. There’s a kind of richness and a depth, and from an engineering perspective, the mindset is. Before you enter X room, you create y room. That’s like a simple example of where we again, misunderstand the real deep terrain [00:23:00] of what it’s like to be in experience of health and care.
[00:23:02] Anne Marie: It’s interesting as as we sat down to have this conversation today, I started thinking myself about what humanizing healthcare means. It’s a question I’ve been ruminating for some time, but I feel like [00:23:15] having spent the last, 20, 30 minutes with you, it’s, it might be as simple as just bringing that space for.
[00:23:23] Anne Marie: All of us to be more human in our interactions and in those moments that, that might be a good [00:23:30] starting place. Technology’s great, data’s great, but it only speaks to part of the story. And if we allow ourselves those moments to be human with one another in all of our interactions, maybe we start to get somewhere.
[00:23:44] Anne Marie: It’s [00:23:45] hard in this very fast-paced, efficient model that we move into. Do you have advice for people who want to be more human in healthcare? How do we start to think about it differently? How do we start to move into that or [00:24:00] reorient to that?
[00:24:00] Mark: Yeah that’s a good question. I feel like we have to create space for us to like sense and feel and this kind of coming back home to what it is that we truly want. I think we have to suspend the urge [00:24:15] to solve the problem until we’ve reconnected to the problem. Really allowed ourselves to be in the problem.
[00:24:22] Mark: There’s that quote from Bio Lafe. The times are urgent. We must slow down. How do you live inside of the paradox that [00:24:30] healthcare feels a little bit like it’s on fire, right? All of these struggles in terms of like people living longer with chronic health conditions outcomes flattening, costs and economics of healthcare, that kind of, if you look at it, looks pretty disastrous. There’s [00:24:45] obvious reasons to wanna solve this problem. I would say there’s more obvious reasons to wanna understand this problem. We’ve said this historically a number of times in different contexts, but, we don’t believe that healthcare is broken.
[00:24:56] Mark: It was just designed this way. So we need to have the insight and [00:25:00] the emotional fortitude to ask ourselves, why did we design it this way? And is there a more beautiful design
[00:25:07] Ursula: and is it time for a redesign?
[00:25:09] Mark: So it works the way it was designed to work. And so if we don’t like the way it’s working, we have to look at the [00:25:15] design.
[00:25:16] Mark: There’s a structure here that. I use the metaphor sometimes of the chess board. We can continue moving around the pieces on the board, which seems to be the kind of chronic tendency, right? Decentralized recentralize more of this, less of that. What we’re [00:25:30] saying is actually the board is the confinement.
[00:25:32] Mark: We are thinking about the game is what’s confining us to playing it this way. And we’ve hit the threshold. The quality of play. But the mindset is if we just add more of the play, if [00:25:45] we add more of the pieces, the game will get better. No. The game, the rules and the confinement of the rules is what’s making the game play.
[00:25:54] Mark: What it is, what if we enlarge the game? What if we shifted how we think about the game? What if we [00:26:00] started pushing out the boundaries? That starts to become a more interesting conversation that starts to open to a world of possibility. But of course, as we all know, even in our personal experience, it’s easier to move inside of the frame.
[00:26:14] Mark: It’s [00:26:15] much more difficult to do the work of enlarging. The frame, that’s a much, much more complex long-term process. So what I would say is, like developing the [00:26:30] instinct and the aptitude to start to think about how we’re thinking about our experience. So what we’re trying to do with people before patients is to create spaces where people can think more about how they’re thinking.
[00:26:43] Mark: Creating those spaces to slow [00:26:45] down so that we’re not in a rush to fix the rules of a game that are overly constraining us.
[00:26:52] Anne Marie: Always very interesting having conversations with you, Mark. I particularly love the way you create [00:27:00] analogies. I always find it very visually easier to understand these esoteric, sometimes these questions can seem a little esoteric, but I actually start to visualize them differently when we have conversations.
[00:27:12] Anne Marie: And I guess the final question I’d like to [00:27:15] ask in that area is, do you think we lack the will? Or the skill or both?
[00:27:21] Mark: Yeah, I don’t think there’s a lack of will or a lack of skill. There’s a lot of things that bind how we’re [00:27:30] doing things right. We have these very longstanding existing structures in place. Ways of thinking in place, ways of learning and training in place ways of being together. So there’s this long industrial legacy. It goes back many decades.
[00:27:44] Mark: And I think [00:27:45] we see the same legacy in education and other spheres. I think we’re like under the spell of our own historical way of thinking. We’re hypnotized by. The depth and breadth of science and, and these are all [00:28:00] wonderful ways of thinking about and being in the world.
[00:28:03] Mark: But what we’ve done is we’ve taken them as fuller and complete truth. So I don’t think it’s so much a question of will or skill. I think it’s a question of the quality of our looking. [00:28:15] Yeah, now what induces a different way of looking is what we’re trying to understand.
[00:28:19] Mark: What would invite us to enlarge the way we’re playing the game? I think What’s happening now is that we’ve hit the threshold as another metaphor [00:28:30] analogy. It’s like the Truman Show metaphor, right? It’s like there’s a moment in the movie where he realizes that his life is being confined by living inside of a certain way of being in the world.
[00:28:40] Mark: And then that world can only invite certain things like to be Truman, Burbank [00:28:45] in that dome. It only invites a certain way that he can be alive. There’s this something inside of him that senses that there’s a world beyond this world. That there’s a kind of staircase and an exit that opens into a whole other way of [00:29:00] being in the world.
[00:29:01] Mark: So I think the question is are we noticing or are we alive to the fact that healthcare has created this kind of dome around its experience? What would it take for us to notice actually that there is a [00:29:15] staircase and there is an exit and there is a much larger world that we can open to that would create all of these more beautiful things that we all collectively want.
[00:29:25] Mark: Like a deeper sense of care, a deeper sense of connection, a quality of [00:29:30] healing, more community engagement. Patients who are alive in the experience of care, healthcare professionals who feel a deeper sense of fulfillment in their practice. The current dome is struggling to hold that.
[00:29:42] Mark: So the question is, what’s [00:29:45] beyond the dome?
[00:29:46] Anne Marie: What’s beyond the dome?
[00:29:47] Mark: Yeah. What’s beyond the dome? So I don’t think there’s a lack of desire. It’s just I think we have to resist the urge to continue. Indulging ourselves inside of this overly [00:30:00] confined world that we’ve created, and to start notice that we’re in that state of confinement.
[00:30:04] Mark: I think that’s the first mover in this process.
[00:30:08] Anne Marie: Thank you so much, mark, for spending time with us this morning and for challenging the way we [00:30:15] think and the way we hold things. One final question. What are you reading these days and is it recommend worthy?
[00:30:21] Mark: Yeah, it’s funny , I was talking to a friend recently, and I was saying to him, I’m not reading a ton these days.
[00:30:26] Mark: I spent so many, so much of my life reading and reading [00:30:30] I don’t know if it’s gonna help the listeners, but I’ve actually been reading a lot about the practice of Bonsai. So most of what I’m reading these days is the art and practice of bonsai, which is the art and practice of being with things that are alive and grow and change with [00:30:45] time.
[00:30:45] Mark: So I don’t know if I could recommend a specific book on Bonsai, but I’m certainly interested in reading things that kind of reattune us to the sense that something is never really quite done and that any art worth practicing is an art that’s [00:31:00] alive.
[00:31:00] Ursula: That’s fantastic. Thank you. What a lot to think about.
[00:31:04] Ursula: I feel like I would like to go make a cup of tea, sit on the couch, put my feet up and sit and think and reflect because I don’t know that I am ever going to forget this [00:31:15] conversation. It’s made me think of some things a little bit differently. I wanna say thank you for sharing the concepts around humanizing healthcare.
[00:31:22] Ursula: I am forever gonna be thinking about understanding how the forests. So thank you for sharing all of that as well as our [00:31:30] conversation on Ask a more beautiful question. That’s very interesting. So thank you very much, mark and Anne Marie. Thanks for sharing somebody that you’ve known for such a long time.
[00:31:38] Ursula: I’ve really appreciated this conversation.
[00:31:44] Ursula: Thanks for [00:31:45] tuning into Amplify. A podcast powered by Patient Voice Partners. If today’s story moved, you share it, leave a review and help us amplify more voices.
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[00:32:27] Ursula: Until next time, stay connected. [00:32:30] Your voice matters.