Collaboration brings its own communication challenges. Hear Samantha Cinnick tell the story of the launch of a new Innovation Lab, and what was learned about communication in that collaborative space.
In part 2 of our 4 part series on communication in public health, Samantha Cinnick from Health Resources and Services Administration tells the story about communication challenges of setting up a new collaborative space. In her case, people had complex tasks to address and were working together for the first time. Oh and they’re volunteers, and this is not their regular job. The organizers wanted this group to function collaboratively and be truly participatory. So, supporting equitable participation and forward action bring its own kinds of communication challenges. What Sam learned may help you the next time you’re gathering a new group of folks together to get work done.
Hi everybody, I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel. This is “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. I’m a consultant, educator, and researcher, and yes–your organization can work with me. Courses + Action is a flipped classroom model where you and your colleagues learn what you need to know, on your own time. Then we get to work putting it into practice. Start with our Foundations of Equitable Communication course. Don’t just take courses, take Courses + Action. Visit h-cpartners.com
Anne Marie: I’m live via zoom with Samantha Cinnick. And Samantha I’m so glad to have you back on the show, and I’m thrilled that you’re doing this miniseries with me. So welcome back!
Samantha: Thanks Anne Marie, glad to be back!
AM: I’m delighted that you’re telling us some of the communication problems that you’re facing as an early career public health professional. And you’re letting us learn from your learnings.
Sam: Yeah I’m always glad to come on the show talk a little bit about problem solving in public health, how to bring diverse voices together. Communication is always involved in my work, especially because I’m helping to develop public health workforce, and I have such a focus on leadership. You need to have good communication skills to be a good leader, right?
This is absolutely true! Absolutely true. So last time I introduced you, you’re working at the Health Resources and Services Administration and last time you told us you’d recently been a chapter author for interpersonal leadership in the book Leading Systems Change in Public Health: A Field Guide for Practitioners. So what else do you do?
Thanks for the question Anne Marie. In addition to all the things you just listed, I’m also very involved in the American Public Health Association. In 2021 and 2022, I was the chair of the Public Health Education and Health Promotion section also known as PHEHP and it’s the home base for APHA members who identify as health educators. And in addition to being section chair, I also co-chaired our PHEHP’S first ever innovation lab, which was piloted in 2021.
An innovation lab okay. And it was piloted, so it’s brand new, in 2021.
Yes. The topic of the first innovation lab was very relevant to our members. We started trying to figure out what this would look like at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. And our first topic area was inspired by the fact that health educators were worried that their skills weren’t being used in the covid-19 emergency response and recovery. They were nervous that those unique skills and knowledge that they had in human behavior theory, needs assessment, public health program planning–that that was all being overlooked. And so members were coming to us, our leadership, and saying, “hey my professional skills aren’t being used as a health educator. I feel like I’m being sidelined. I feel like I’m being asked to do kind of admin type of work.” And so they wanted an outlet for finding solutions, and we decided that this would be the first topic of our innovation lab.
Wow, so you have this significant topic that’s put in front of you, an innovation lab that’s brand new. So I can’t wait to hear: what’s the what’s the communication issue that you want to talk about here? Because last time, you talked to us about communicating for systems change. But what communication are you facing here that you want to talk about today?
The communication issue that bubbled up was this idea that we need to be able to communicate the new idea, which included communicating about strategic direction, what we’re volunteers in the lab going to be doing, what were their roles and responsibilities, and also what was the scope and timeline for what we were doing. Which we had never done before! It was brand new! So to add that not only were we communicating the what but we had to communicate the how. We wanted to be really collaborative. We wanted volunteers to come back to us and say, “hey this is how we want this to be run.” And that’s not an opportunity that a lot of us find ourselves in, unless we’re in a very top-level leadership position.
AM: I’m so glad that you brought this topic to us today, because I think this is something that people are going to relate to. We’re bringing folks together, for the first time potentially, and we’re going to work together on a complex issue, but we don’t want it to be top-down. This isn’t command-and-control, this is participatory. This is collaborative. So I think a lot of people face these kinds of situations. So I’m super glad that you chose this as a topic. So how did you all face this issue?
Sam: So I leaned on a team of seasoned health educators, academics, and leaders, who helped me to structure the pilot, figure out what our problem solving method would be in the pilot, and leverage knowledge from the volunteers that we recruited. You know they gave me — leaders gave me ideas about how we could crowdsource that information. And ultimately by working in that team-based way and communicating in that team-based way, we were able to create two work groups and worked on two very different solutions to our original problem around integrating health educators in covid-19 response.
So you know I’m going to have to ask you what–like because I want to know now–what were the two working groups? What did they work on?
So the first work group was working to educate other members of our field, other public health professionals, about what health educators do. In public health there are so many specialties and sometimes students, all the way to career professionals, might not be aware of what a health educator can help them do. So we wanted to make that really apparent so that other people could imagine what our role, health educator role, would be in covid-19 response and recovery. The second work group was working on developing a policy statement for employers and other organizations about how they could utilize health educators in future emergency preparedness. And to write that policy statement, that work group realized that there wasn’t a lot of research being done on how health educators were or were not being included in emergency response. So they ended up doing a multi-method, qualitative quantitative study, to figure out the barriers and facilitators to help educators being included in covid-19 response. And they’re going to use that evidence to justify why our profession should be included in in those activities.
Well it sounds like the innovation lab pilot really unleashed a lot of potential. Like unleashed a lot of energy, right? People got things done. Those working groups sound remarkable. What did you learn from the way that you faced it, this pilot season of the innovation lab?
I really like how you said that “unleashed potential.” And that’s what we were trying to do. I do think that from what I’ve heard from volunteers who were involved, they said, “yes potential was unleashed. I felt creative. I felt like I got to be innovative.” However, they also mentioned to me that sometimes there were some stumbling blocks around keeping momentum. I think that happened for two reasons: one was that it was brand new. People weren’t sure exactly where to step next, where to go next, they wanted a little bit more direction. And second APHA is full of volunteer members. You know this isn’t somebody’s full-time job. And it’s hard to put your all into something even if you’re really motivated by it, to keep going. Personally, what I learned from implementing this pilot was the important balance between gathering stakeholder feedback, right, the other part of communicating–listening to your stakeholders to figure out what you need to incorporate into this new initiative. But then also, when to make and communicate a final decision. When do you crowdsource those ideas, versus when do you make the call about what you’re going to do next? But, ultimately Anne Marie, I’m really proud of what our work groups did. They made something. They made something new.
And it’s so exciting, and I want to know what happens next. What are the next steps for you all?
That is a great question. And I’m really enthusiastic about where this could go next. This was our pilot. So this was the first time we did this. Our leadership group wants to take the lessons learned, and improve the process for a second innovation lab. We’re hoping to implement the best parts of what we learned in the process, such as unleashing the creative potential of our volunteers, making sure that people felt like their voice was heard, in addition to adding those new improvements.
Samantha Cinnick, thank you so much for spending this time with us today and telling us about what you’ve learned about bringing together people to collaborate for the first time, and really trying to make it a collaborative, flat, organization–and the communication challenges involved with that. We’re so grateful that you’re spending this time with us, Sam!
Thank you so much Anne Marie.
I’m so grateful to Sam. I appreciate especially how she’s inviting us to consider how we navigate communication as leaders in groups that have a participatory approach to problem solving. Thanks again to Samantha Cinnick from Health Resources and Services Administration. Audio engineering and music by Joe Liebel. Music by Joe Liebel and Alexis R.
