February 26, 2019
Tackling the Grand Challenges…. Are We Up to it?
Please help me welcome the Program Leader Coordinators (Robin Reid, Trudy Rice, Gayle Price and Wade Weber) to their new part time roles. One of the reasons they were hired was to help us address the Grand Challenges in a bigger way.
I would guess that each of you know what KSRE and our partners have identified as the grand challenges facing Kansas… maybe not the exact words, but for sure the concepts. And, if you have forgotten, they are: global food systems, health, water, community vitality and developing tomorrow’s leaders. Each one of these is a complex issue that needs complex solutions.
Have we defined what we mean by complex issues? Maybe not. I really like the description that is used by many that breaks up issues into simple, complicated and complex. (For a great discussion of this, check out KU’s Community Tool Box, the chapter on Collective Impact. (https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/overview/models-for-community-health-and-development/collective-impact/main)
Simple issues are those that can be solved by sharing (and then using) knowledge. An example of this is hand washing. It is well known that many infectious diseases are spread from person to person, from person to food, from touching something contaminated and then touching one’s own eye, etc. Washing our hands with soap and clean, running water is one of the most important steps to avoid getting sick. We teach people how to do this and if they do it, the incidence of those diseases goes down. It is a pretty easy connection from an issue to a solution, right?
Complicated issues are harder to solve. The development and use of technology needed to manage precise delivery of nutrients and moisture to a crop is complicated, yet solutions have been developed. Drones and remote sensors and many other technologies are helping producers be more efficient in providing food for our growing world population.
Complex issues are those that have no protocol that works in every situation. Many factors influence the health of a community, for example, such as economic opportunities, culture, diversity, politics, and leadership. Each community is different with regard to these things and a multitude of other things that influence its vitality. How we address the complexity also has to be complex and involve the energies of many of us and a variety of other entities and individuals within that community.
Whether we call our approaches to complex issues PSE (policy, system and environment, as Gregg pointed out in last week’s Tuesday Letter) or collaborative action or collective impact or any other phrase… we ought to be thinking in these broader terms if we are serious about solving the complex Grand Challenges.
So, with all of that in mind, are we up to finding solutions toward the Grand Challenges? It will take working together within KSRE as well as working with others in communities. The Program Leader Coordinators (PLCs) will help us facilitate this work. And, they have already started! A couple of great examples of this are the multidisciplinary approaches we are using to address the Culture of Health and the Farm Bill discussions.
I hope you will reflect on ways that you can work with the PLCs in multidisciplinary approaches to address the Grand Challenges. We have a much greater chance of solving these tough issues and we will be much more impactful if we do. With the help of the PLCs, I think we are up to it!!