becoming better

this semester, i'm taking "practitioner inquiry." the course is being taught by susan lytle and matt hartley and being TA-ed by molly buckley. for our first meeting, we were asked to read "better" by atul gawande. the book was an amazing and inspiring way to start the semester, but it was also a surprisingly easy read. gawande writes really beautifully and uses an artful narrative style that plants the reader deep into the stories he tells.

my favorite part of the book was the afterword. in it, gawande encourages his readers to become positive deviants in their practice. this could be any practice, whether you're a student or cashier or scrub nurse or designer. he makes five recommendations to positive deviance:

1. ask an unscripted question -- he explains that this is a great way to get to really know people, including people you work closely with. it makes me think of the idea of "making the familiar strange," the idea that so much of what we know is shaped by our experience. gawande suggests that once you get a person responding to an unscripted question, you should try to keep that conversation going. he writes, "if you ask a question, the machine begins to feel less like a machine" (252). this is especially true when it comes to practice; working in a comfortable space, we sometimes forget that we don't know everything.

2. don't complain -- it's easy to complain about work, about school, about family and it's true that complaining can sometimes bring people together, but why dig ourselves deeper into angry, unhappy feelings? gawande writes, "you don't have to be sunny about everything. just be prepared with something else to discuss..." (253). in other words, try to put life back into work interactions.

3. count something -- according to gawande, "if you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting." i have recently adapted this to my own practice as a transcriptionist and i have to say that counting my work has put a completely new spin on it. it's funny sometimes how we do things without really having a sense of the impact and scope of the things we do. and beginning to learn the scope and breadth of my practice is strangely eye-opening; it's a new way of knowing the work i know so well.

4. write something -- blogs are actually a great way to practice this because we aren't being forced to write something interesting necessarily, but only to write what is interesting to us. writing can be therapeutic. it can also be a way to gain insight on ourselves, our practice, and our lives.

5. change -- as gawande suggests, it's always important to find opportunities to change, to talk to people about what they're doing, and to get new ideas about the things we're doing.

i can't wait to talk more this semester about my own practitioner inquiry work and about how i'm applying gawande's suggestions for positive deviance to my work and also to my life.