THE LITTLEST VICTIMS
Visiting a particularly hard-hit area of Guinea in April 2015, Aylward talks with children orphaned by Ebola. Many of them had lost both parents to the disease, and some had lost all of the adult caregivers in the family. Local authorities took on the responsibility to provide for their basic needs, with support from nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies. (Photo by Katherine DeLand, WHO)
good friends who was part of my manage- ment team would sometimes come to my office about 8 o’clock at night, close the door and ask, “Will you remind me again why are we still doing this?” “Because we haven’t reached all the kids.” It’s as simple as that. I have one kid. He’s got all his vaccina- tions. He’s got all of everything. And, you know, a lot more kids could get a lot more of everything if we had the deter- mination and smart, committed people working to ensure that were the case. It’s just getting the enlightened, hardwork- ing [people] in the positions to be able to lead that way.
Army AL&T: Tis is a sort of a more cosmic question: Is there anything to be learned from epidemiology and its mis- sion about organizational change, about how ideas and practices can be made contagious?
Aylward: I thought your last question was the most difficult one. It’s probably this one. When you think about epide- miology, it’s really about looking at the drivers that make a disease behave the way it does in a population. What are the
causes and the drivers and other factors? And how can you influence those factors to [obtain] better outcomes?
When you look at big change processes, people often think it’s about making insti- tutional changes and structural changes, but it’s not. It’s about people, right? You need to get a group of people moving in a different direction. To do this you have to understand the drivers behind their behaviors, and then you’ve got to figure out what levers you can pull, just like the different [disease] control measures you could pull to be able to effect a very dif- ferent outcome in a particular population.
It’s a funny way to look at change, and probably something I do without even realizing it. Too often when we think about changing organizations, we think about what kind of business does it do? How do we restructure it to deliver that business? How do we change its processes, etc.? Tat’s all important, but the real change comes when the people change and they say, we want to achieve those kinds of results and we want to change the way we work to achieve those results. Tat means changing the direction of a
population and being able to effect the right drivers to do it.
So I guess there are things to be learned from epidemiology and its focus on data and a systematic and scientific approach. With organizational change you’ve got to be systematic, data-driven, etc. But, at the same time, the one thing that isn’t there in epidemiology that’s got to be there in any kind of a change process is a very clear vision of a better future for an organization and its population. Tat really is at the heart of change; that’s the big driver, right? And that’s got to be there.
MS. MARGARET C. ROTH is an editor of Army AL&T magazine. She has more than a decade of experience in writing about the Army and more than three decades’ experience in
journalism and
public relations. Roth is a MG Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Award winner and a co-author of the book “Operation Just Cause: Te Storming of Panama.” She holds a B.A. in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Virginia.
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CRITICAL THINKING
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