Value Choices: A series of value choices becomes the complex systemic path to one person's symptoms

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” 

– H. L. Mencken

 I have been working on a mental health project for a large non-profit organization that owns the space for one major health problem. Leadership recognizes the importance of stress and mental ill health as a contributor to the onset and course of their illness and wants to tackle the various mental health contributors. They have been engaged with major corporations throught a wellness scorecard examining corporate wellness initiatives which could impact the incidence of their disease. 

I was engaged as a subject matter expert to provide context, update research knowledge with a critical eye toward the quality of that research, and contribute to a plan for this major NPO to affect MH policy, training, and service delivery of educational, marketing, preventive and treatment services. A colleague and friend who is a marketing guru helped me take a broader, even global, view of the issues and the result was eye-opening. I have come to recognize the complex systemic connections between economics, corporate business strategy and values, leadership and management decisions, and pandemic disruption of business and social networks on physical and mental health and well being. 

As I was pondering how to communicate the complex interactions I was recognizing, it became clear that one person's mental health challenges (and sometimes the resulting or concomitant physical symptoms) could not be traced to one single "bad guy", individual, corporate, or government. Rather, one individual's symptoms were the result of innumerable seemingly harmless decisions by a whole social system composed of millions of people, including our fictitious patient.  Ok what decisions? I started a list of value choices that my education, research and unusually diverse professional experience highlighted as contributing factors.  

“Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we’ve solved the problem.”

– Margaret J. Wheatley

Here is my initial and tentative list of value choices made by millions of well meaning people that seem to me to be in operation, all of which contribute, eventually to the stress symptoms in our fictitious patient:

1. Excessive profits over people.
2. Profits over principle
3. Profits over planet
4. Consumption over conservation
5. Management over leadership
6. Control over choice
7. Fear over faith (positivity)
8. Party over patriotism
9. Greed over generosity
10. Position over progresss
11. Noise over nature
12. Stress over serenity
13. Pointing fingers over finding patterns
14. Symptoms over causes
15. Propaganda over education
16. Confidence over competence
17. Legal over ethical
18. Entitlement over accomplishment
19. Mediocrity over excellence
20. Immediate results over future consequences

I am certain that there are many more, and I hope this list prompts some serious introspection about other influential value choices that led to the depression and anxiety of our fictitious patient.

I will explain what I mean by each of these value choices in action over the next series of posts. 

Comments welcome and encouraged.