3 Policies & Projects Undergoing Change

Policies and decisions are created and made by people. Those people represent a brand, system, or constituents.

The Economist surveyed Americans in May 2025 to better understand the issues that we the people are prioritizing. Note that my only issue with this list is that it doesn't include Technology. AI, in particular, is poised to be at least as impactful as the Industrial Revolution and the Internet so I'm including Technology as part of Economy in this analysis.

Where I'm from, we try to prioritize the issues that could have the most impact for the most people. Additionally, if you helped create the problem, you participate in finding and implementing a solution to that problem.

We are the wealthiest country in the world with some of the biggest brands, systems, and organizations. The issues that stem from a lack of creating policy and projects that support the largest number of people are growing. .

We invest time and money in systems and brands, but we don't always understand the decisions about those investments in improving the systems we use and depend on. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m using system to capture brands, organizations, and other businesses or groups.

The issues defined in this Economist poll and other similar surveys are intertwined and interdependent. Here are some examples of policies or projects that have undergone change and would benefit from change that is defined by the people using the system

1) Economy: Transportation

Where I live in Portland, Oregon we have the TriMet MAX (Metropolitan Area Express) Light Rail and Bus system that connects Portland City Center with local areas and suburbs including Beaverton, Clackamas, Gresham, Hillsboro, Milwaukie, North/Northeast Portland and Portland International Airport. We also have streetcar. The system is color-coded to specific areas and if the MAX Rail doesn't get you to where you need to go, a nearby bus will get you there. It is a fairly easy to understand and dependable system with riders exceeding 208,000 daily. The city of Portland has more than 635,000 people and the larger Portland metro areas has a population of over 2.5 million people.

Many of us have experienced rail systems in different states, like the NY subway or different countries, like the rail system in Japan. I've queried research at TriMet to learn more about the demographics of riders, but here I’m just using my personal experience as a rider. I find the cost, ease of use, and dependability creates a positive experience for me with one notable and important exception.

The TriMet Transit Centers and many stops have cleanliness issues. Garbage overflows at many Transit Centers and stops, the homeless and others set up pan handling areas, and the smell of urine and feces can be overwhelming. This makes otherwise enjoyable trips, pretty unpleasant. I rode the MAX light rail to the Union Station to catch an Amtrak train to Seattle for a conference. When I got off the MAX and walked to the train station I encountered all of the aforementioned issues. Now when I go to take the train, I walk three blocks out of my way so I can avoid the worst of it. What is the cost of not addressing these issues? The City of Portland may continue to struggle to get wider adoption of the MAX System which is necessary to tackling some of our transportation issues. People like me, who are in a one vehicle household, will use the system out of ease of use and necessity and be grateful the system is dependable and also disgusted at the lack of cleanliness desired by ALL who use it.

2) Economy: Technology & Media

The cost of AI from a time and money resource perspective, is unknowable for the foreseeable future. We know the investment in and resources being applied to AI are astronomical and, at this moment, far outweighing the value. As the helpfulness of Google (whose mission it is to organize the world's information) is waning, more people are using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI technology for research, asking questions, and gathering information for decision-making on everything from recipes and travel plans, to important life and death questions. As these tools are evolving, we're already seeing subscription costs being applied to their use. I currently pay only for Claude, $20 per month. I am loving Substack and learn a great deal from the community there. However, out of necessity, writers there have Paid Subscriptions for their good work. In the absence of funding for exceptional journalism, consumers are expected to pay for their own. This is neither a sustainable option, nor a solution to the lack of reporting for a monoculture.

We no longer have a Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, or Diane Sawyer to deliver the news to a large monoculture of people. We are all gathering our information from partisan news sources or social media and increasingly being asked to pay for it out of pocket.

3 Healthcare: Wayfinding

When I started working in healthcare in August of 2015, the first project teed up from my analysis as a new digital leader of the system was for local search and Wayfinding (a term I had never heard until I began in the vertical). We called it PILS (project to inform local search) because we love acronyms and we wanted to keep the scope of marketing focused to search even though we knew the project would likely expand to include operational, technical. clinical, and executive leaders. What we didn’t know was that the project would also include our ontologists in our library and the PBOT and the City of Portland to literally add new addresses to the large Oregon Health & Science University, 100+ year old campus to be effective.

The day we pushed our new, agreed upon data to support all campus locations, the City of Portland had cranes on campus to place new addressees on our buildings so we could move from a single address, 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road to the many new addresses that gave each building a unique address to improve Wayfinding and reduce friction for our patients trying to locate their appointments.

At the close of our PILS project, our vendor and exceptional local search specialist, David Mihm, presented our outcomes to our project committee. Far fewer people were at the table for that conversation than showed up at the beginning of the work nearly two years prior.

What we learned was that making our system locations accurate and consistent greatly increased reach and accuracy in the systems that people use (Google, Bing, Apple Maps as well as systems like Uber and Lyft) for Wayfinding.

One committee leader asked if we could define ROI (return on investment) of the project aligned to operational metrics, such as no shows. We shared that, unfortunately, we didn’t have access to. That data. Then we asked the question, what’s the ROI of patients not getting lost?

Healthcare marketers have a lot on their plates: service-line campaigns, brand redesigns, organic, local, AI and other search experiences to improve and expand reach, better aligning patient experience surveys with non-clinical surveys.

Cities and policy makers have more work and need than their budgets can ever achieve.

Journalists and media platforms are siloed and made worse by our own complicated and personal preferences in ways that make it nearly impossible for us to align on the facts.

What policies or projects are you working on that could improve people’s lives? How is your leadership paving the way for that work? What are your biggest concerns for the implementation or launching of those policies or projects?