I believe there was one point in my life where I labored under a false assumption that I had hidden powers or capabilities that had yet to be discovered. I don’t think my feeling was unique. Many of us dream of being special in some way.
Like many kids growing up in the 80s, I occupied a lot of my time reading and trading comic books. I never really liked Superman. In a land of unrealistic characters, he seemed the most unrealistic. Being able to fly, shoot laser beams out of his eyes, possess superhuman strength, and deflect bullets seemed over the top. While he did have his vulnerabilities, it was hard to imagine stopping him with a small amount of rare kryptonite. Sounds more like a cryptocurrency than a chemical substance.
I gravitated toward Spider-Man. While I would not buy into the whole radioactive spider bite imparting supernatural powers now, it had a sense of plausibility to my 10-year-old self. In addition, the fact that he developed the substance to make his spider webs and the “web” shooters himself made his supernatural abilities seem attainable to me. Even the most recent version of Spider-Man retains a sense of “reality” powered by the tech of Stark Industries.
While I never quiet gave up hope, each passing year has dimmed the possibility of me identifying some hidden supernatural talent. What really appealed to me about Spider-Man was his real-life. The fact that he was a good student, interested in science, and was a photographer for the Daily Bugle somehow made his “real” life seem interesting as well. I guess I only figured out now that Superman and Spider-Man were connected to journalism so they could be close to information that would allow them to fight crime.
As I grew up, my attention turned to identifying “real” powers that would allow me to make the world a better place. Medicine was actually not my first choice. In 7th grade, I took a journalism elective and wrote for the middle school paper. My parents never discouraged me from pursuing my dreams but I am a child of immigrants and having a practical career that would allow me to earn a good living was never far from my mind. But the one thing that journalism satisfied was my interest in asking questions. I never lost that inquisitive nature that drives every parent of a 5-year-old crazy. In elementary and middle school, I would always ask “why?”. I never accepted any piece of information at face value. This did not endear me to some of my teachers and friends. In 9th grade English, we spent a semester reading the Odyssey and other Greek mythology where my teacher heavily relied on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces to direct our thinking and discussion. If you are not familiar with this, Campbell studied countless hero myths and identified five common stages that run through these stories. To my teacher, this was gospel. For me, this was an opportunity to challenge commonly held knowledge. My argument was that this archetype was a product of Western culture and there were plenty of scenarios outside of this where heroes did not follow the five stages outlined by Campbell. I still have the paper I wrote challenging this with at least several examples. While I got a good grade on this (and was probably wrong), she wrote comments that were equally as long as my paper disproving my argument. She taught me for two years and we stayed in touch long after high school.
But I didn’t only drive teachers crazy. I spent four years in speech and debate in high school. In our weekly meetings, people would bring arguments they developed to the group. They served as a library that all of us could use based on the topic we were required to debate during competitions. I would always be the one who would try to challenge assumptions and ask “why?”. Even when the answer was obvious to everyone else, I had a great need to understand what drove people to think certain ways and believe certain things.
When I went to college, I made a decision to pursue medicine but I also decided that I would not take the same route to get there as everyone else. Sure, I took all my pre-requisite classes and even flirted with the idea of majoring in chemistry. But what appealed to me most was studying history. What I liked most about my history classes is that there were often multiple sources to explain events and various interpretations. There was a “truth” out there to be found; but it could only be found by going to source information and wading through various expert interpretations to try and get close to what actually happened. My favorite classes were the small seminars where we would debate various interpretations of historical arch’s and try to uncover the biases in the sources and authors.
More than anything, I have carried this inquisitive nature with me as I have progressed in my career. In medical school, I would often question why we chose to treat something one way versus another. I would want to see the evidence and randomized controlled trials. I have always been uncomfortable with expert opinions and when reviewing research articles, I spend a great deal of time identifying the biases in the study that may impact the generalizability of the findings.
In some ways, I believe that this aspect of my nature has always been my “superpower”. In college, one of my fraternity brothers used to call me Captain Obvious because I would always point out something that everyone knew but no one was willing to talk about. When I was president of my fraternity, we had several brothers running a small marijuana business out of their rooms. Everyone knew this but looked away because, in their minds, it wasn’t really hurting anyone and it was none of their business. What I knew from attending national meetings of the fraternity as well as University meetings was that chapters were being shut down for activities like this. In my four years in the fraternity, we had grown the membership from 17 to 55 and I had invested a lot of time and effort in making this a viable group on campus. Early on in my tenure, at one of our weekly meetings, I asked whether anyone was selling drugs in fraternity space. There was silence in the room. Everyone looked uncomfortable. Eventually one brother spoke up and asked what the big deal was. I said that I didn’t care who was smoking it but selling it in our shared space had to stop. I pulled out our bylaws that specifically prohibited illegal activity in fraternity space not to mention campus rules that covered us. We even took a vote in which 65% of the brothers supported stopping this business venture in fraternity space. Next, one of the brothers added an amendment to set a date in one month to discontinue the activity. Another brother then added a friendly amendment that this would be enforced by removing membership if there was not compliance.
I don’t know if they stopped selling but they did stop selling out of their rooms. One month later, another Chapter of our fraternity on another campus was kicked out for similar activities and I felt vindicated. It was then that my title as Captain Obvious stuck.
I don’t have a fancy costume. I don’t have cool gadgets. I don’t even have a sidekick. But what I do have is a willingness to ask questions when something does not make sense even when it is not in my political interest. But this is a superpower we all need to wield. I’m reading a book right now called The Voltage Effect by John List. The book is about why many good ideas fail to scale and how to avoid trying to scale ideas that are doomed to failure. In the book, he gives the example of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. Again, as a child of the 80s, we were all exposed to this program. It started with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs and evolved into the DARE program which was rolled out nationally as a strategy to prevent kids from experimenting with drugs in the first place. The program was based on a pilot in Hawaii and Los Angeles that showed promising results. A significant amount of tax payers dollars were spent ramping up the program only to find out that in some cases, the program actually increased experimentation amongst certain groups. The failure here was that no one examined the biases in the original data to understand that the pilot groups were not representative of the overall target population. Asking the tough questions up front could have saved millions of dollars. More importantly, programs that might have worked better never got the resources they needed.
But asking tough questions is not only about preventing costly mistakes. It’s also important for us to question and examine things that we take for granted. Whenever I hear something like, “because that’s the way we have always done this,” it seems like a prime opportunity to try and understand why. Maybe it is the best way to do something but maybe culture and history are preventing us from doing something better. Having a questioning attitude is a fundamental aspect of high reliability and a key to making health care safer. Breaking down hierarchy by allowing everyone to ask questions when they do not understand or something seems wrong gives all of us the opportunity to prevent patients from suffering bad outcomes. We have to be willing to challenge authority and ask tough questions if we really believe that protecting patients is our top priority.
I’ve been in a lot of meetings where I ask the painful questions that everyone is thinking but not willing to point out. It has not scored me a lot of points in some arenas where leaders are looking for confirmation and not critique. Sometimes I am met with dead air and realize that I cannot influence the trajectory of a decision but other times, I help open the flood gates of a meaningful conversation that help leaders and the group make better decisions. In another book I recently read called The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle (when I say read I mean audiobook driving back and forth to work or Up North to visit my daughter), he describes the creative process at Pixar. Every day, all of Pixar gets together to review the footage created the day before on various projects. Anyone in the group is allowed to ask questions and provide commentary. According to Coyle, most Pixar projects start off bad- bad stories with flat characters. But the process of open dialogue and critique is what helps refine the creative process and is what has resulted in countless box office successes and academy awards.
While not everyone needs to be Captain Obvious, we all need to channel some of this superpower to challenge the assumptions of the world around us and make it a little better each day by seeking to understand better. This may be obvious as well but if we are going to ask more questions, we need to listen to the answers. I didn’t do that in high school when I was questioning the hero archetype (which is actually pretty universal) and I still have to work hard to do that now. If your superpower is listening, maybe we can team up?
While real superheroes don’t exist, we all can develop our super powers. Having an inquisitive nature may be mine but there are other equally important powers that support a healthy, open, transparent, and innovative culture that values not only the people we serve, but the people who show up to work every day and provide their experience and expertise that allows us all to accomplish our goals. Take the time to recognize your super power and if you can’t think of one, don’t be afraid to go out and develop it. You don’t have to be bitten by a radioactive spider to make a difference.
You Are Not Alon (But I Am) 