Dorrier Underwood

Living my life this week inside the question of innovation—what does it take? What environment allows for it? What ways of being argue for it? What is it correlated with? My last question is: Why isn’t everyone interested in it? There’s a medical group in which a dozen or so of the 300 doctors have committed to innovation that produces better and cheaper patient outcomes. All I can wonder is:  Those 288 not committed--What is life like for them that they do what they do without caring about doing it better?  It comes down to I find that hard to believe. That doesn’t mean it’s not so. I think of an engineer at a software company who’s been doing his job for 25 years and does it to the best of his ability as a matter of pride and a paycheck. He clearly states that he has no desire to invent anything new or even learn new skills. He’s satisfied. The 288 may be satisfied in the same way. I say it’s not my way, but hold on a minute, cowgirl. There are whole realms in wh...

I am so used to looking at life as a mechanistic process, that the notion of life as “a complex adaptive system” requires me to give up thinking my usual way. It’s not that I find complex adaptive systems hard to understand or even illogical. I just notice that, left to my own automatic devices, I can be counted on to regard phenomena of all kinds in a linear, mechanistic fashion, whether or not the phenomenon in question is living or inert. Most of what we care about is in the realm of life (family, social systems, stock market) rather than the realm of machines (bridges, levers and dials).   We all went to college for levers and dials—even me, in the College of Education. As a student teacher in a classroom with 25 college-track seniors who just wanted the formula for getting A’s in English and were quite peeved I didn’t provide it, I was on my own when Miss Mallory, my supervising teacher, was out sick the last day of school. I had graded their compositions, and one...