Perhaps healthcare’s future is the place where we fix the past.
I got to thinking about the role of the past in understanding the present and the future earlier this last week after listening to a segment of “This American Life.” If you are interested you can read the transcript or listen to the program as it was broadcast at:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/539/transcript
The middle segment of the program, entitled “Act Two. Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads,” captured my attention. It was based on a study about future technologies done earlier this year by the Pew Research Center and the Smithsonian Magazine.
About a thousand people were asked about the future. There was one very unusual question which asked the respondents to describe a machine from the future that they would like to own. It surprised me that the most popular answer of all the possibilities, at almost 10%, was a time machine. My understanding was that most people did not want the machine so that they could go forward to a world where they would be lacking in knowledge, since it would be no fun if they arrived in 2114 equipped with a fund of knowledge that was not even up to date in 2014. It would also be pretty terrible to arrive in 2114 and discover a world that had destroyed its environment and was a bleak and hopeless recreation of a scene out of the darkest moments of the Middle Ages.
No, most people wanted a time machine because they wanted to go back in time. Remember how cool it was for a while to imagine being the visitor from the future to the past in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? The respondents wanted to use a machine like that old DeLorean that Doc Brown built for Michael J. Fox so that he could go back thirty years and fix the problems between the young lovers who would become his parents. Some wanted to redo major flaws of history, like finding some way to stop Hitler even while he was a child, but most just wanted to fix mistakes they had made or correct the oversights or errors of judgment from their youth.
One interesting thing the Pew study uncovered and that the producers of the show spent a lot of time exploring was that older people were less interested in traveling back in time to fix things. The show’s producers heard a variety of explanations for why this was true, but one insightful person did recognize the learning benefit of accepting the past experiences of failure and the segment did end with the very Lean-like philosophy that perhaps the future is the place where we fix the past, since the future is “coming at us at sixty minutes an hour”. That gets us to box three on an A3 where we use our knowledge of the present and past to imagine improvement. What would an ideal solution look like, based on our reflections about our reasons for action and our understanding of the past and the present?
I am putting my hopes on the future.
