Regina speaks and draws eloquently about the movement: The growing number of us who are taking charge of our health, our family’s health, our community’s health, and ultimately our country’s health. At the Health 2.0 conference, I met an engineer who also is an MD, an MD who is a geek, a geek who is a healer, and a healer who is a patient.

Alexandra Drane proclaimed: “We signed up to help people be healthy,” which I found remarkable coming from the founder of Eliza, which I thought of only as a robo-call company but now appreciate as a company committed to using technology to promote healthy behavior.

Michel Nadeau confided that his years as a telecomm engineer were nowhere near as fulfilling his new gig as head of a startup that makes an obesity app. “A teenager sent me an email. She was writing at midnight on a Sunday, asking for help because she couldn’t bear to go to school the next morning and face the teasing because of her weight. How can that not affect you? I know what we’re doing has real impact on people.”

Ob/gyn Jeff Livingston is motivating teen girls to take care of themselves by engaging them on FaceBook. Chris Cartter is trying to make health challenges go viral through his Change Reaction program. Physician Richard Wexler was talking to video game designers for insights on patient/doctor communication.

A few days later I was with my brethren at Kaiser Permanente for our annual gathering of communicators and marketers. We saw research that shows the marketplace is ripe for a health movement. Americans know that the health care system is broken, and they don’t trust the industry or the government to fix it. They know that ultimately the solution starts with them.

They just need a nudge.

The Cabin was a tiny A-frame that sheltered six adults and 10 kids at a time. No running water, refrigeration or flush toilets. An amusement park of stinging nettles, tamed chipmunks, rainbow trout, mud chutes, abandoned kittens and rusty nails.

My cousin Jerry is trying to create a similar amusement park for our kids, in the badlands of western Colorado, almost to Utah. No running water, refrigeration or flush toilets (yet). An ATV endurance course, scorpions,  coyotes and rusty nails. The kids already love it and we don’t have the shooting range in yet.

Last weekend Jerry took me on a quad tour of his property, a high-desert oasis broken by washes that are either dry or torrents. Jerry pointed to lots of attractions — nearly all of them started. Here’s the party area, there’s the “sacred teepee,” over yonder the pee-pee teepee, and the secret tunnel he dug with a rental tractor (taking the precaution to carry a 15-foot bamboo pole to breathe through in case of cave-in). It was like Dr. John Hammond revealing his cloned dinosaurs through the windows of the Jurassic Park tourist van.

So all of us who once packed into the attic of the A-frame got together last weekend to pack desert dirt into old tires, helping Jerry build his Earth Ship, an off-the-grid, rainwater recycling, earthen insulated house. After the sun goes down, it’s story time. Jerry was getting lots of laughs about the time he drove his truck so far up Leon Creek that even the local sheepherders were impressed. I remembered I had a topper.

Grandpa had an old Willys Jeep (grandpa had lots of toys, but they were strictly blue collar brands). He once packed the adults and half a dozen kids into the Jeep for a fishing trip up Leon Creek. He bogged down in a muddy field, miles from the nearest AAA and beyond winch-cable reach of the closest tree. He and Dad wrapped the winch cable around huge boulders, but succeeded only in ripping them out of the ground. Grandpa made us all get out and walk while he gunned the lightened Jeep through the mud track. The car bounced and fishtailed through the muck, and in the rear window we saw the blonde bouncing head of my forgotten 2-year-old brother, Ken. Our parents were as bad at counting kids as they were at counting days.

Telling the story 40 years later, I could still see the bouncing blonde head and I had to help my cousins (and Ken) see it too. So I bobbed up and down, backed over a bench and tumbled into the dust that is Jerry’s future front yard. I could see “did he break his hip?” concern in my family’s faces, so I popped back up and did an “I’m-OK-just-need-to-walk-it-off” thing. The back of my knee hurt like hell, though.

So since I tell stories for a living, should I report this to OSHA?

My aunt plans to live in a teepee in the badlands on the Colorado-Utah border, so of course the family got together to build it. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we had an instruction book and lots  of opinions. The canvas fit the tangle of poles about as well as a size 8 pair of jeans on a size 12 butt. With my aunt and her sister — my mom — beating drums, cousin Jerry shimmied to the top of the poles to survey the problem. It was sturdy enough to hold him, though it would later collapse.

Teepee project: Too many chiefs; not enough Indians from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

With a day full of dust and beer behind us, we called it a night. Next day, we resolved to chuck the instruction manual and instead listen to the only Indian in the family, Leona, the partner of my cousin’s daughter.  We’re a diverse family.

There was an essential first step involving the proper arrangement and lashing of the first three poles. Then Leona carefully directed placement of supporting poles. A graceful apex emerged, eagle feathers fluttering. She showed us how to neatly fold the canvas and tie it to the main pole. All hands hoisted it into Leona’s chosen position. The canvass unfurled, Leona showed us how to use the vent flaps.

The teepee looked solid and sturdy. It better be: it’s windier than hell out there. I think my aunt will do fine there in the winter. Jerry sunk the living area into the ground, which should keep inside temperatures within a comfortable range. A small stove will serve for cooking and heating.

The land could be described accurately as desolate or stunning. Desolate if you crave lushness; stunning if you are partial to magnificent sunsets on multi-hued bluffs. The neighbors are armed but friendly if you don’t trespass.

I look forward to visiting — and helping Jerry build his earth ship on a nearby ridge.

A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

In town only four days, she serendipitously had met the hostess of the Yoga Day USA open house just hours before. Now she stood in the suburban basement, surrounded by strangers sitting cross-legged on mats, and talked about her lineage.

She is a descendant of ancient Jewish high priests and of Dakota Sioux. She told us she could tell we had peace in our hearts and that we sought healing and happiness. A Kabbalist Shaman, she said she possessed energy given to the high priests and conserved over the centuries through her lineage. We will need it. The earth is unsettled, and 2012 is only two years away.

John’s story

A child of the ’60s, silver-haired John talks about the brilliance of Bob Dylan during a break between yoga sessions. “How many times must the cannon balls fly?” he asks. “It took just one war to move us to action back then. Now, we send our children to war after war and we’re proud when they’re killed.”

Things are getting bad. “We’re the frogs in the boiling water, not noticing the gradual increase in heat until it’s too late.” Architects and engineers know that jet fuel alone could not have brought the towers down. Cash for clunkers is likely a plot to get the old cars off the road so electronics-jamming attacks are made more effective. And how can we allow all the cell phone waves to go passing through our heads?

My story

This Yoga Day open house attracted people who sense something is wrong. We’re nervous rabbits before an earthquake; frogs who have noticed  it’s getting a bit hot. Some of us have created elaborate narratives to make sense of how we got here and to map a way out.

I don’t think the narrative need be complicated at all. The bus has no brakes and it’s barreling down the hill. The passengers who are partying have to stop and look ahead; the passengers who are sleeping have to wake up. And if that takes a Kabbalist Shaman, I’m OK with that.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

Jared Diamond excels at putting human flesh on the archaeological bones left behind at the scene of ancient societal collapses — things like trash heaps and fossilized pooh. His book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, lists several factors at play in the typical societal implosion. But the common denominators to all were resource depletion and slow-footed decision-making. I couldn’t help but think of today’s global warming deniers and drill-baby-drill chanters when reading of society after society that methodically drove themselves off cliffs.

Diamond notes that in nearly all the collapsed societies, the end came quickly — within a few decades of the point where consumption outstripped the environment’s capacity. He doesn’t put an expiration date on our civilization, but he worries about the future of his children. These things worry him: global warming, fossil fuel depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, and hunger. This week the official tally of the world’s hunger exceeded 1 billion for the first time. When the people in Third World giants of China and India reach First World consumption levels, will more go hungry elsewhere or will First World consumption fall? If the latter, will that be voluntary or the result of strife and boycotts?

A modern collapse may unfold country by country. It may already have begun with the collapse of Afghanistan, Somalia and the Solomon Islands. Are North Korea and Pakistan next? We could sit back and hope it doesn’t overtake us. That’s what the last rich Greenland Viking did.

(NOT advisable for Kindle users — lots of maps and photos you can’t see).

UPDATE 10/24/09

Watch Yale Environment 360 video on West Virginia coal mining. We haven’t leveled the last Apalachian mountaintop, but the moral/value questions are being raised. A  government   says it isn’t the government’s job to decide what people do on their land. Isn’t it?

As a white guy committed to social justice, the best thing I can do is help other white guys see they have a role in erasing inequality. I firmly believe that the moment I was born a white male in the U.S., I started down a path much different than the one followed by Barack Obama or by my sisters. “Normal” always lo0ked pretty much like me , my life, my style, my tastes. My sisters didn’t have the sports choices I had, nor the array of things to be when they grew up. I didn’t stick out in a crowd, wasn’t watched with suspicion, and had a middle-class upbringing. I am the product of Austrian ancestors who came to this country freely to work the Leadville mines and who raised families in accordance with the dominant Euro/Christian tradition.

The GI Bill helped my dad buy his first house — as it had for many other, mostly white GIs.  Though we were not rich, the middle-class platform helped me become a first-generation college graduate. Throughout my career, I have mingled well in a society where most decisions still are made by other white males. I do not pretend to know what it is like for people who are not white and male to navigate this tilted playing field, but I acknowledge the tilt and do what I can to even things out.

I’m trying to figure out the language I can use to help my fellow white guys perceive the tilt without being defensive. I know from personal experience that words like “racist” and “white privilege” put us white guys in that fight or flight place.

People hear different things when Jimmy Carter talks of “racism” in the health care debate and when a white cop in Cambridge, Mass., is called a “racist” for arresting a black professor who mouthed off to him. I think most white guys think of white hoods when they hear the R word. I also think they hear people being overly sensitive.

So I suggest the people who are fighting for social justice quit throwing those words around. They carry heavy baggage and they don’t give us white guys anywhere to go but on defense. Rather than name-calling, consider talking about feelings. There’s no reason for a white guy to go into the familiar defensive mode when he hears something like:  ”when I see parents yanking kids out of school to avoid a speech from our President, I take it personally because he is the first president of my race and I’m reminded of all the times people wouldn’t listen to me because of the color of my skin.”

And I suggest my fellow white guys stop telling others that they are being overly sensitive. We cannot know the feelings that are sparked in others nor can we simply tell another to swallow them. I know this is a hard one, guys, but open up to others’ feelings. Nearly all of us have friends who aren’t white and male. Wouldn’t you learn something from them if they shared their feelings?