Basic Civic Biodesign Approach to Problems

Are you well? Is your family well? How about your city or country? Most people don’t think in those terms. The closest we get usually is when we complain, “Man this country is really going to hell in a hand basket.” You know, those broad-sweeping wellness diagnoses.

Let’s worry about the world later. Are you well? How would you decide that? You might say, “I don’t feel well this morning.” But what does that mean? Do you have a headache? Sore from your workout? Still tired? More often than not, most people are talking about their physical wellness when they talk about “wellness.” But that is too simple. You know you can be physically well but not well overall.

At the Beverly Ann Miller Institute of Civic Biodesign, BAM for short, we study wellness at scale. “Wellness at scale” means that we research everything from a person’s holistic wellness to a community’s holistic wellness.

Are we talking about health? Not really. “Health refers to a state where the physical body is free from disease, while wellness refers to an overall balance of a person’s physical, social, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, environmental and occupational well-being,” says Stephanie Murdock, Executive Director of Occupational Medicine and Employee Health at Sanford Health.

At BAM, we illustrate a person’s wellness as a circle broken into eight parts, like a pizza. Each “slice” refers to one dimension of wellness. Now there might be an infinite number of dimensions of wellness, but we break it into eight main areas.

• Intellectual wellness — recognizing one’s creative abilities and finding ways to expand knowledge and skills.
• Physical wellness — recognizing the need for physical activity, healthy foods, and sleep, as well as preventing illness and injury or managing chronic health conditions.
• Environmental wellness — occupying pleasant, stimulating environments that support well-being.
• Emotional wellness — coping effectively with life and creating satisfying relationships.
• Social wellness — developing a sense of connection, belonging, and a well-developed support system.
• Spiritual wellness — expanding a sense of purpose and meaning in life, including one’s morals and ethics. It may or may not involve religious activities.
• Financial wellness — satisfaction with current and future financial situations.
• Occupational wellness — gaining personal satisfaction and enrichment from one’s work.

No system considers all human experience factors, but we find this one a great place to start the discussions and discovery.

With these eight dimensions, we can ask better questions and start to decouple some of the areas of our life that might be more or less well.

Another key concept to understand in BAMland or in the practice of Civic Biodesign is condition creation. Let’s unpack this concept.

What conditions are you in right now? As I write this article, I am sitting in a conference center in Hunstville, AL. I drove 1000 miles yesterday to get here so my child could compete in athletics. I am sitting in the air conditioning. I have a cold brew ice coffee. That is one way to look at conditions.

Look again at the dimensions of wellness above. Pick one. I’ll pick Social for my example. What are the conditions of my social wellness? I often imagine the dimension as a garden. My social garden in this example. Just like every garden has its unique conditions, more or less sun, more or less water, each dimension of wellness for you has its own conditions. Things that contribute to the condition of my social wellness include:

• my family
• my kids
• my neighbors
• my online connections
• my coworkers
• my place in all of those groups

So are those conditions good? The conditions with my immediate family, my four kids, are excellent. It gets a little iffier if I zoom out to include extended family. I might give my social wellness an 8/10 rating. It could be better, but I don’t have complaints. I always feel like I belong and feel supported. I am fortunate. I have good social wellness.

What area of wellness did you think about? What are some of the things that contribute to that area? How are those areas doing? Do you need to have a composite score because some factors aren’t well, and others are? For instance, I could have a complicated family but great friends.

Now, look at the other seven areas. Can you begin to see how you can evaluate the conditions that contribute to your overall wellness? And here is the thing about conditions, they can change and do. If you got sick, those are conditional changes. If you move to a home with better lighting and more windows, that’s also new conditions. Let’s say your partner moves out; again, more conditions change. At BAM, we usually default to the concept that most of what we observe are people acting in given conditions. This prevents us from blaming a person for their situation. We are always asking about the conditions and the things that contribute to those conditions.

So why do we care about wellness, scales, and conditions? Because we are trying to understand and improve systemic issues. Nearly every conversation around Civic Biodesign is around systemic issues. Civic Biodesigners find themselves in the middle of regional discussions about things like food insecurity, land use, ecological restoration, etc. Each one of these issues requires a rubric to break down the challenges and even approach the discussion. The rubric we developed is the BAM Wellness at Scale model. Our approach starts with tons of questions that usually go something like this.

1. What problem do we think we are exploring?
2. At what scale are we focusing on this problem?
3. What visible symptoms or outcomes can we observe?
4. What conditions might be contributing to those outcomes?
5. How is the system designed to support or create those conditions?
6. Would breaking this problem down to one of the eight dimensions of wellness further clarify the problem, is so, which ones?
7. What clarity do we now have about the problem we are exploring?

So what problem do you want to address? How can a Civic Biodesign approach increase your understanding of the problem and potential solutions?

We want to hear from you. Please join the discussion at https://www.civicbiodesign.org.