Facts don’t change people’s minds. Here’s what does.
The mind doesn’t follow the facts. Facts, as John Adams put it, are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn. Doubt isn’t always resolved in the face of facts for even the most enlightened among us, however credible and convincing those facts might be.
Everyone knows and accepts that the Health Care system is broken, not only in the US but also around the world. The facts show why it is broken, what should change, or how the recent technological development could help for providing better and decent health care to everyone.
How can we change peoples’ minds, especially the ones that have the power to change regulations, to support the change in the health care system?
Give the mind an out
We’re reluctant to acknowledge mistakes. To avoid admitting we were wrong, we’ll twist ourselves into positions that even seasoned yogis can’t hold.
The key is to trick the mind by giving it an excuse. Convince your own mind (or your friend) that your prior decision or prior belief was the right one given what you knew, but now that the underlying facts have changed, so should the mind.
Let’s give an example that is exactly explaining how minds can be changed without pushing the facts and trying to prove the right way.
Colombians adopted a similar strategy in the 1950s when the Rojas dictatorship collapsed. Although the Colombian military was complicit in the abuses of the Rojas regime, civilians deftly avoided pointing any fingers at the military. Instead, they managed to march the military back to the barracks with its dignity intact. They recognized that they would need the military’s cooperation both during the transition process and in its aftermath. So they offered an alternative narrative for public consumption that uncoupled the armed forces from the Rojas regime. In this narrative, which the military leaders found much easier to swallow, it was the “presidential family” and a few corrupt civilians close to Rojas — not military officers — who were responsible for the regime’s excesses. Were they to take a different approach, a military dictatorship — not democracy — may have resulted.
Without having the big players in the game, the change in the health care system will be slow and painful. Our focus should be to play the narrative so that everyone will be the hero in the game.
Today, we need to democratize and decentralize the diagnostics ecosystem in health care. Pre-hospital diagnostics/monitoring of critical health conditions should be done anytime, anywhere, instantly, and should be accessible by everyone in order to prevent overcrowding hospitals and save time.
