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Testosterone Blindness

By Peter Lloyd

Both Mohammad Shahbazi and Mississippi can be abbreviated MS. How appropriate. Shahbazi has worked with Dr. Aaron Shirley—a pediatrician, McArthur Foundation genius, and former 60s civil rights activist—to reform Mississippi’s care of its rural poor.

Shahbazi helped Shirley establish HealthConnect, a holistic health care agency modeled after the way rural health care works in his country of origin, Iran. But as you might imagine, convincing some Americans to adopt a system from Iran took a bit of careful and determined convincing.

I like to call this particular impediment to creativity, testosterone blindness.

“Make that 27 and thirteen sixteenths,” I remember a carpenter call to his assistant. They were installing a new door in my apartment back when the US considered converting to the fraction-less metric system.

“Measurements will be a lot simpler when we go metric, won’t they?” I commented.

“We’ll never go metric,” the carpenter snapped back. “We’re bigger than they are. They can do it our way.”

The carpenter was certainly big on testosterone, if not on brains. There’s a part of everyone that breeds preference and loyalty to our own tribe and to the ways of our own kind. It shows up in school spirit, avid fandom, and patriotism. It’s a guy thing. It builds camaraderie. But it gets in the way of learning from our rivals, which stifles creativity, innovation, and invention.

As I read What Can Mississippi’s Health Care System Learn from Iran? I asked myself if we’ll ever get over testosterone blindness.

In Mississippi, where 69 percent of adults are obese and 25 percent of families have no access to healthful food, why would anyone care where a better health care system comes from? Similar systems work around the world. Following Iran’s lead, Mississippi has reduced the country’s birth rate and reduced infant mortality by 75 percent.

Okay, so we’re getting over it. Why does it have to take so long?

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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