From facilitating in healthcare to producing photographic art

My photographic art website: www.robertgoodlad.com

It is time to summarize my career and acknowledge that the main thing I’ve been doing for years is now switching places with my new main thing: the art of photography. My lifelong hobby is now my main activity.

My career in a few words: learn to listen and discover listening if far more revealing than your own pontifications.

My career is understood easiest by simply saying: “the most challenging and important thing is working with people to get ideas into reality”. My career matured from technologist to facilitator, a consultant, converting ideas into something useful with groups of people. Facilitation is still more art and craft than science although some scientific progress has been made in the field of psychology which is helpful. Facilitation is the art of preparation, listening, more listening, exploring, and opening up a trusted environment in which people collaborate together so a series of epiphanies magically appear. Not really magic, just realization of a way forward influenced by good facilitation and this is not easy or obvious. During facilitated meetings, persons will discover for themselves epiphanies while working on a project and while simultaneously fitting their work into the main idea, a mission. Together this results in deliberate actions towards a common goal and maybe an experiment that turns into something useful.

This career summary is best simplified into one highlight, an example that reveals the art and craft of facilitation. Healthcare in Canada is centralizing and in Alberta, a contrarian initiative was conceived to find a way to centralize seven health regional information services. This idea proposed a common, shared, and integrated system to benefit patients and healthcare providers while keeping the participating regions autonomous, decentralized, and managing their own domains. The idea was to find a way to get an agreement between seven separately administered health authorities with 108 hospitals and health clinics to work together. This posed considerable constraints and obstacles. I was drafted to find a way to help realize this idea. Governance and working teams formed with specific purposes and through facilitated meetings and workshops a common mission and set of goals unfolded and specific actions were taken. The initiative became known at the time as one of the largest healthcare information systems projects in Canada and the USA. The initiative became reality and it grew in function and was rebranded several times in twenty years. An argument could be made that this initiative would not have become reality without the foundation being put in place through good facilitation. The players were diverse, autonomous, protectionist, competitive, yet willing to try and we did realize success: a centralized and integrated health information system while retaining the autonomous nature of each region.

I took a template of the initiative, adjusted and replicated the main attributes of the initiative, and implemented it in several large health authorities across Canada. Colleagues of mine took the template into the USA and implemented it in several large health networks. The intriguing part of the effort revealed how effective facilitation can be amplified by reducing personal egos, defining terms, and focussing on results towards one mission. These initiatives made considerable improvements that increased the reliability and trust of healthcare information systems without a lot of pomp and circumstance. Personally it became very rewarding and equipped me with life long skills which I am putting to use in my efforts developing a network of influence solidifying photography as a liberal art. Moreover, and seemingly unrelated, I am learning all things crypto and looking for a way to get involved in this space using some of my career skills. Creativity is scarce and therefore good art is not only valuable it is open for new opportunities for the artist through crypto concepts such as NFT’s and perhaps DAO’s (non fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations).