From Questions

Posts about “Better Questions”

May 15, 2015

What if?

Dr Bill Thomas
Age of disruption

Can we learn to live without nursing homes? How?

What if an entire city adopted a community-based approach to supporting mature people and their families, could this community live without nursing homes? What would such a community look like? Is it possible? Why isn’t this sort of conversation happening more widely?

Dr Bill Thomas is a leader in advocating for a new approach to maturing. He has excellent ideas, and is now challenging entire cities to envision a future where nursing homes are no longer needed. We love his thinking and believe that technology, like LivBetter, can make this dream come true. Follow Dr Thomas on www.DrBill Thomas.com or his blog on www.changingaging.org

http://changingaging.org/blog/the-age-of-disruption-is-here/

April 29, 2015

On donations

“Money makes the world go round”. That seems true when it comes to providing support for older folk, and with service provider organisations in the aged care sector. The competition for limited dollars extends into the donations area, where organisation compete for scarce dollars available. Many organisations ask: “How do we attract donations to our organisation rather than the competition?”

From a donor perspective, questions that might make an organisation more interesting might be:

What do people have besides money that they would happily share with our organisation?
What would be possible if we collaborated with our competition instead? What could that generosity help both of us accomplish?

April 29, 2015

On policies

Organisations and governments spend a lot of time formulating and applying policy. Does this create value for our future? Maybe we could think differently about using policies that will help us in living better?

Instead of using policies to:

“Hold employees and service providers accountable and to safeguard organisations and care recipients”

Maybe we could consider:

In our community how do we want to treat each other?
How could the our organisations and providers systems reflect those values?

April 29, 2015

On volunteering

The implicit question is:

How can we use volunteers to stretch our resources?

What if we asked this question differently:

“If we could engage people to a common purpose, what would be possible, not just for us, but for them?”
“Who else cares about what we care about?”
“What can we do together that none of us could do on our own?”

November 25, 2014

The living better question

If we ask: “What kind of nursing home is best for mum?”, we are guaranteed to go down the path of getting mum into a nursing home!

Maybe a more useful question might be: “How does mum want to live as she grows older?” That might open up a whole new range of possibilities for mum. This is a living better question.

What are the right living better questions for you as we grow older?