The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, the rise of teenage smoking, the phenomena of "word of mouth" or the effect of one yawning person in a group is to think of them as epidemics.
·Contagiousness
·Little causes can have big effects
·Change happens not gradually, but at one dramatic moment
 In Wholistic Research's world we are preparing the way for a social epidemic. It includes the domains of
·Alternative/Complementary medicine
·Wholesome lifestyles, eating habits and livelihoods
·Environment, both internal and external, especially environmental pollution
Awareness of all 3 of these domains has been developing slowly for a long time and yet there is no epidemic yet. Although it seems that we and our customers, patients, clients and colleagues are quite clued in to the important issues we are only creeping towards the Tipping Point for the epidemic that we see on the horizon. 2000 years ago in China, every peasant had a working knowledge of over 300 local herbs and plants for both everyday eating and for medicine. We are looking for the equivalent in 2000AD in the West. Tipping the Social Epidemic will then be possible.
Epidemics are a function of
·the people who transmit infectious agents
·the Infectious agent itself, and
·the environment in which the infectious agent is operating
An epidemic tips because some change has occurred in one, two or all three of those factors
In a social epidemic we are talking about:
·Key people who have a much bigger proportional impact than the average person, and are often invisible to the "general public"
·The Stickiness factor, meaning that there are ways of making a contagious message more memorable and of making a big difference in its impact, e.g. the change in the nature of HIV
·The Power of Context, meaning that the key to getting people to change their behaviour sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate environment, e.g. New York Subway crime
We have 2 teams of people, the Kimpton Team and the Health Team, both of which contain all the personal qualifications needed to meet all 3 criteria for an epidemic: key people, ways of making a memorable impact, small details.
Most Health Professionals do not think of their work being about tipping an epidemic ~ to tip each individual into a personal epidemic so that they permanently change their way of thinking and therefore behaving, and to tip enough individuals so that a social epidemic is tipped. This is what wholistic health professionals do every day.
Some mail order workers are also care workers, for example the Wholistic Team in Kimpton, but even they do not usually think about tipping epidemics either ~ to tip each enquiry into a sale , to tip each customer into a repeat , to attend to small details for each customer .
John Morley October 12th 2000
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