I am a software engineer and I have been working on Simple and related systems to improve hypertension management for the last few years. This is my final week with the team. I wanted to reflect on what I consider to be the core essence of this challenging and unique project which has taught me so much.
What has working on Simple as a software engineer taught me? A technologists’ skill set of crafting scalable solutions works well on notoriously hard problems like public health. The way to make it approachable is to adopt ‘systems thinking’.
Systems thinking is the heart of our work for everyone who is involved in saving lives from hypertension — epidemiologists, public health experts, designers, or engineers. We get the beat of an existing public health system, expose our mental models to the real world, and make use of leverage points such as feedback loops and information flows. Saving lives from hypertension is inherently a systems problem.
Systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows frames our challenge well:
“Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”