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?

I’ve been using Julia Child’s recipe for pie dough for a couple of years now, but I have yet to get it just right. The end results are fabulous, but up to now it has been a struggle to roll out a disk that would hold together as I lay it into the dish. While people complimented me on my pies, they didn’t know that at the bottom was a stitched-together FrankenCrust.

I took bold moves today. I used the stand-up mixer for only the second time in my pie-making career. I mixed the dough a lot longer, incorporated the butter slowly and the shortening quickly, and added a lot more ice water than usual. The dough was much more batter-y than biscuit-y. I had my doubts, but after a few hours in the fridge it rolled out well (though soft) and held together as I folded it into the dish. The top covered perfectly and is puffing nicely in the oven.

I worry that it might be too soft — maybe soggy. But if so, I already know what I’ll do next time to correct it. Which got me to thinking grandpa-like thoughts. Pie-making is something I have been trying to master for 40 years. While I know I’ll never completely master it, I will be able to pass the technique on to my grandkids.

I smiled as I thought I heard a little voice say, “let’s ask Grandpa Steve to bake a pie!”

Then I thought: Is that what they’re going to call me?

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.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

This video by Maya Lin (creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) helped me grasp the enormity of the statistic. The haunting melody by Brian Eno also transfixed me. Others who have blogged/tweeted about this also mention the tune. About the 20th time today that I’ve been reminded that the key to a good video is good sound.

Maya Lin – Unchopping A Tree from Unchop A Tree on Vimeo.

Dan Meyer told the story chronologically, so we come to learn that this arrangement had a drawback: no homecoming football game for Arickaree High. But the Liberty team decided to play one of their home games on the Arickaree field — “I teach the boys to be selfless,” the coach says. We hear the Arickaree cheers when their lone senior boy breaks for a long touchdown run. We hear the halftime ceremony as he is crowned homecoming king. We hear the public address announcer congratulate the losing visitors, a team of precisely six players who had played every down and now faced the four-hour bus ride home.

Colorado Public Radio produced the story as part of a series on the issues faced by small towns. Homecoming is a rite of passage that many of us experience. Putting it into a rural context is an excellent way to give city-dwellers an appreciation for the difference of rural life.

It was easy to see why Jonathan Browser was chosen by the 39 graduates of the Child Health Associate / Physician Assistant program to speak at their University of Colorado Denver convocation last week. Young, witty, and a good storyteller, he no doubt was their favorite professor.

“Even though the father was himself a clinician, he could not suppress the dread as he saw his girl struggling.” The graduates smiled through tears. They knew this story.

“Don’t worry, this has a happy ending,” he said. “Some inhaled steroids and she was sent home the next morning, diagnosed with the croup. If you haven’t guessed already, I was the frantic father of the croupy kid.

“The nurse that night at Children’s did not treat me as just another frantic dad. She was soothing and reassuring, even though she didn’t know the whole story. She didn’t know that my son, my daughter’s twin, had recently died of a sudden illness and that I was reliving that horror once again.

“I tell you this story today, on your graduation, to remind you that the care you give is given in a context – a context you may not know. Try as we might, we cannot possibly know everyone’s context, but we cannot let that stop us from caring as if we did.

“Every patient has a story. It is rich and meaningful even if you don’t know it. Strip away all the technology and what you are left with, fundamentally, is you, your patient, and their story.”