Health Tech Leaders & Designers - Narrative Medicine Podcast
What's the sentence in your own life you've never read closely enough?
A few years ago, I sat in a room at Columbia with a sentence in front of me. Not a chart, not a deck, a sentence. The assignment was to read it as closely as I'd ever read anything. What is this story actually saying underneath what it says on the surface?
That is Narrative Medicine, the discipline Dr. Rita Charon built to teach physicians how to hear a patient before they diagnose one truly. I came to it sideways, as an executive who'd spent a career launching products and revenue, and I left changed. Around the same time, I helped start a poetry salon at Grace Cathedral, Grace Poetry Sorts, where a room of strangers would sit with a poem that refused to resolve itself neatly. Neither experience had an obvious return on investment. Both rewired how I see a problem.
I wanted that rigor of attention in how I lead and practice in my field of work. Not empathy as a soft skill bolted onto strategy, but empathy as the instrument that tells you which strategy is even worth building, whose voice is missing from the room, what the data isn't saying, where the frame is too narrow to see the whole picture. That shift, of widening the aperture before deciding what's in focus, made me a better human being long before it made me a better executive/leader. I'm honestly not sure those two things are separable.
So today I'm sharing something I've been building quietly: Aperture: Widen the Frame, a podcast for people whose work sits at the collision of health, technology, and the human beings in the middle of both. Each episode brings together voices medicine alone doesn't usually put in the same room, with clinicians, scientists, poets, technologists, and designers, for conversations about what health and illness actually mean, not just how to build or sell around them. If you lead a team, sit on a board, or are trying to build the right thing in this space, my hope is you leave each episode with a sharper, fuller way of reading the people and problems in front of you, not just another data point.
Episode 1, with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, the renowned Health economist and Trend Weaver, is live now. https://lnkd.in/gg5ra_fM
What's the sentence in your own life you've never read closely enough?
And if you're building or governing at this same intersection of health, technology, and the humans in the middle of both, I'd love to hear from you. Whether that's an idea for the show or a conversation, the door's open.
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