Complexity Invites Collaboration
OR: The Story about how the Empowered Sleep Apnea project gets a Rock-N-Roll Birthday
By David E McCarty, MD FAASM (But you can call me Dave)
Happy Birthday, Empowered Sleep Apnea
“Empowered Sleep Apnea” has a birthday coming up. The project officially “began” when our first episode of Empowered Sleep Apnea: THE PODCAST went live on September 6th, 2022. Our Beautiful Blue Book was published shortly thereafter.
If all that was the harvest, the seeds of the project were sewn earlier—Ellen and I started scratching our way into a PODCAST about a year earlier, me having just about given up trying to write my magnum opus text that explained everything I’d learnt as a clinician. That was my first lesson with complexity. It’s easy to present it in a way that alienates everybody. It’s hard to present complexity in a way that makes sense. I recruited Ellen, because I knew that for this project to survive, it had to be humane. It had to first be explored as a conversation.
When Ellen and I hit the ground running, neither of us knew exactly what the result would be. Both of us knew that we were working with important concepts combining elements of learning theory, social engineering, and medicine, yet we intuited that our approach wouldn’t work if we tried to leverage our message into a standard resource like a textbook, or a standard informational podcast.
We decided early on, that for the message to carry past the recording studio, the project had to be fun. We embraced the zany. We followed the light. And in the process, we created a Beautiful Blue Book that manages to communicate the seemingly overwhelming complexity of the entity known as Sleep Apnea, without becoming dense and unreadable.
Complexity invites COLLABORATION
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with folks from all over the planet. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s broken about our healthcare delivery system, trying to see it from multiple perspectives. I’ve imagined that our Blue Book is a Beautiful Blue Balloon, a lighter-than-air craft that allows me to stop in at different silos within our industry, find out what makes them tick, and figure out which parts hurt.
When a project like this moves forward, you have a thousand little choices that you make, so it helps to listen carefully to what the Universe is trying to tell you. Some messages are faint, some are hard to miss. The message I’ve been getting has been so loud, it’s almost deafening.
The message is this: COMPLEXITY INVITES COLLABORATION.
It’s a simple phrase, but broken down, it makes you ask a fundamental question, which is what it actually means to collaborate. In my view, this word’s special. It’s different from cooperate, which to me is the same as parallel-play. Collaboration is more than just working alongside each other and staying out of each other’s way. Collaboration denotes a fundamental mutual understanding between parties that all bring something to the table, with the idea that something new is being created as a result of our fusion.
Collaboration is a system of problem-solving that requires a coming together, a communion, a shared consciousness of a greater whole…all with a trust in one another’s strengths and an implicit reluctance to force the result. With collaboration comes a gentleness of seeing what develops.
Perhaps this is what drew many of us into the field of Sleep Medicine in the first place: the intuition that with complexity brings collaboration. It’s the expectation that the process of problem-solving draws all of us back, providers and patients alike, towards a focal point that’s humane.
Pulmonauts: The Music of Collaboration
One of my favorite collaborative efforts this year has been a musical project called the Pulmonauts. The idea for a rock band of airway enthusiasts was born a couple of years ago, at a meeting in New York called PAANNY. The name of the group comes from James Nestor, whose book Breath has been a runaway train of a bestseller that has brought the importance of functional breathing to a larger audience. It was Nestor who was a founding member of the original lineup, lending his skills to the drumkit and crooning like an angel.
One year ago, whilst attending Collaboration Cures 2022 in Phoenix, I met Barry Raphael and Jen Kirkham, both of whom were keen to revive the music project for the 2023 meeting in Orlando. I was recruited to the group as a guitarist & vocalist, and have since fallen into the role of garage-band rock-n-roll mojo organizer, laying out all our chord sheets and demo tracks so that musicians and vocalists living all over the country can somehow hope to practice as a unified BAND. Since its inception, the concept of bringing together this project has become a symbol of creative collaboration. Somehow, even though we all live in different time zones, we are still managing to come together to create something beautiful. On a purely logistical scale, it’s a small musical miracle. Which is sort of the point.
Complexity invites collaboration.
This weekend, we meet for our second group practice in St. Louis, in the Willy Wonka music room maintained by our own Renaissance Man, Dr. Reza Movahed, now signed on as Pulmonauts’ lead guitarist. All of this is in preparation for our big show at Collaboration Cures 2023, where we’ll play an hour-long performance to a crowd of 300-400 screaming airway health professionals. It’s going to be a blast :)
The music project has been about more than Rock n Roll. As I’ve mentioned in prior essays, music is a universal language. Those bitten by the bug can attest: once you’ve played with a group where everything grooves, the rhythm tight, the harmonies perfectly blended, it’s difficult to want to do anything else. It’s Dopamine with a backbeat, a good mood in 4:4 time.
The group itself is deliberately diverse: we’ve got a whole bunch of dentists, an orthodontist, a myofunctional therapist, an airway advocate, a neurologist, an Airway Dental Practice marketing expert, a maxillofacial surgeon… and me. The magic is what happens when the walls come down. The magic is what happens when the dopamine kicks in.
I’m here to tell you, Life Fans…that when it comes to talking about sleep and airways, this ragtag gang makes for some creamy conversation. Complexity invites collaboration.
Tonight, we will be celebrating the Grand Premiere of the third episode in the second season of Empowered Sleep Apnea: THE PODCAST.
For Episode 3: ADELAIDE, we’ll be taking our Blue Balloon all the way to Australia, to visit with acclaimed author, educator, speaker, and myofunctional therapy expert Sharon Moore, as she shares her true tale of a complexity that could not be unseen. No spoilers, but know this: Sharon’s journey also includes a tale of cross-pollination, collaboration, and transformation.
Collaboration Cures! (2023)
I’m thrilled and humbled to be giving the Closing Keynote this year at Collaboration Cures 2023. The material I’ll be delivering draws from the work I’ve published over the last year, in my blog and in lay-press and peer-reviewed journals, all of which has been informed by the countless conversations I’ve had over the last year with friends and colleagues from all over the planet
(complexity invites collaboration).
Not surprisingly, some of the most important of these conversations have been with my fellow ‘Nauts. Without Pulmonauts, it struck me that this project might have run aground long ago, collapsing under its own weight. I can’t unsee that it’s the power of music that’s given our project flight.
So I hope everyone will join me, in celebrating (early) the birthday of the Empowered Sleep Apnea project. May we all continue the exploration, in our Beautiful Blue Balloon!
For the party, we’ll supply the Rock n Roll.
Kind mojo, y’all.
Dave
David E McCarty, MD, FAASM
Boulder Colorado, August 10, 2023