Lately in my talks I’ve been pointing out that progress in communication isn’t linear. Like learning to ski, developing more expertise requires that you let go of some old habits (that trusty snowplow) and master new ones (the parallel turn). The bottom line: growth entails disruption.
In that spirit, we’re disrupting Oncotalk for the sake of VITALtalk. Why? The most important reason is this: as we look at the leverage points for catalyzing a shift medical culture towards healthier patient-physician relationships, we see that we need to move beyond our existing model. We love teaching, but we can’t teach everyone. We love f2f, but we can’t travel everywhere. And how people learn is changing—most excitingly, learning is going mobile, it’s just-in-time, it’s video-on-demand, and maybe—it’s engaging because it’s game-ified.
Our new identity is meant to capture our emerging remix of the best of oncotalk and the cutting edge of the new. We want to be in the space at the intersection of life-threatening illness, communication, education, design, and social media. The reason we’re starting the social media stream now? We need you. We can’t do this alone, and we’ve long wanted to make more of the incredible talent, inventiveness, and passion that we’ve seen, talked to emailed and tweeted. There is an emerging community of practice out there—you’re in it just for reading this far—and we want to highlight you, curate the best of the new stuff people (clinicians, researchers, teachers, patients, and families) are putting out there.
So let’s remix the future: join us—
Tony, Kelly, James, Bob
