How It All Started

Robert Downey, Jr. made a comment in 2007 that led our Co-Founder, Glenna Crooks, to explore what he called a “pit crew” of people helping him. It launched her on a new journey, with important lessons-learned along the way and a new way of seeing life, one that fits today’s complicated world.

He was right; people need support from others and lots of it, especially when they lead busy lives and have competing responsibilities in families, careers, and communities. Support helps each of us individually and, in turn, helps all of us collectively. Know that, and you'll think about life differently, and your way of life will get better.  

In more than a decade of research with people ages 7-87, we've seen that “pit crews” are “networks.” That's how they function. We've shown how they impact every part of life and why it's important to manage them well. When people, families and businesses do that, their lives get better and they become more successful. 

Sometimes, dramatically so.

In all, there are eight networks that shape our lives. In each one are people who care about us and who can help us with our intentions to create a great life, a loving family, and a successful career. When times are good, these are the people we want to celebrate with us. When times are not good, these are the people we need to turn to for support.  

The first five of the eight networks are called birthright networks because you were born into them. Your parents created them to meet your basic needs for family ties, physical care, educational opportunity, spiritual support, and social interaction. You could not have thrived without them and, in fact, would not have survived. This was obvious when you were an infant, but it remains true throughout your life. These networks change as you grow up and develop, but you never outgrow the needs for what they provide.

• Family Network. This network includes your family of origin and other families that you have been a part of, including the one you created for your children and any former families from past relationships. 
• Health and Vitality Network. This network includes those who help you to be healthy and fit. It also includes those who help you look good since appearance is important to the way you feel about yourself and to how others react to you.
• Education and Enrichment Network. This network includes those involved in your formal years of education and as you prepare for a job. It also includes those who provide enrichment experiences outside of formal educational settings.
• Spiritual Network. This network includes those in congregations and houses of worship and connections with others outside of those formal settings with whom you develop your sense of what is spiritual and meaningful in life.
• Social and Community Network. This network includes your neighbors and friends as well as those in your community, clubs, or civic organizations and your virtual connections through social media.Having a big sale, on-site celebrity, or other event? Be sure to announce it so everybody knows and gets excited about it.

As you enter adulthood, you progress through milestones considered to be markers of maturity: leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, finding a mate, and having a child. As you do, you mature into three additional networks called coming-of-age networks. Coming-of-age networks do not replace your birthright networks; they build upon them.

• Career Network. This network includes people in your workplace: your boss, direct reports, colleagues, and cross-functional or support teams. It also includes clients and customers outside your workplace and others in your chosen field. Even at retirement, this network supports you with retiree benefits and enduring connections created during your years in the workforce.
• Home and Personal Affairs Network. This network includes those who help you protect, maintain, and improve your household and personal property and who support your need for legal and financial advice.
• Ghost Network. This network includes people who are not currently physically present in your life because they have passed away, moved away, or drifted away as your life changed. You’ve been gathering ghosts from the beginning of your life, but as you come of age, you gain greater awareness of who they are and how they have shaped you. 

Seniors, themselves, or their adult children use our approach and digital tool in a few simple steps. 

• They identify everyone a Senior interacts with in daily life. Our proprietary, comprehensive network information architecture helps make that easy and accurate because it aids recall. It also alerts them if someone who is important seems to be missing, so they can be added later. 
• They decide who - from among those people - are important to maintaining a senior's quality of life and independent living. To make that easy, we provide a network-by-network ideas of why those people matter. For example, some are important for the social support they offer to avoid loneliness. Others are important because it helps seniors get household or lawn-care help to maintain their home. 
• They rate their connections based on how confident they are those people will deliver needed support services. That assessment will point to changes to make to prevent unmet needs. 
• They share the information with family member or close friend who needs to know, so they can intervene to help if necessary. 
• At regular intervals, the tool prompts them to update information.  
• If seniors wish, they can link their anonymized data to patient advocacy group research registries to contribute to the development, coverage and reimbursement of products and services to support seniors.  

 A number of current solutions help navigate longevity challenges: 

• Financial Planners and Investment Advisors; 
• Primary Care and Specialist Physicians; 
• Healthcare navigators, disease coaches, educators and counselors; 
• Senior-living community experts and coaches;
• Government and volunteer agencies and programs; 
• Local peer support groups; 
• Web-based support groups; and
• Digital tools to track symptoms and locate services. 

Each of these is good but none is designed to accommodate the complexity of life today. 

Ours is designed for the reality that today's seniors are longevity pioneers, aging without the help of large, close-by family and deep ties to social institutions to help. It is well suited to help everyone's needs but especially those 14 million "elder orphans" who are aging without any family at all and the 25 million Boomers who never had children.  

Our tool is strategic, as we guide seniors - or those helping them - through a simple, systematic process to build and engage the support they need from others and tactical, as we help them manage that support.  

The CogentSageQI data ecosystem provides new information on the quantity and quality of connections that support seniors.  This provides new perspective that can lead to new, actionable strategies to help them age well and improve the quality of their life and those of their family and friends. 

It will help predict the number and types of people needed to support them, the quality of support they receive, and the features of their networks that create risks to future independent living and quality of life.   

Demographic information (e.g., home zip code), will support: 

• Geolocation analyses for legislation, e.g., requiring first responders to carry auto-injectors in rural areas lacking close-by hospitals or free-standing ERs; 
• Government service- and disaster-planning; and 
• As IoT products emerge, (e.g., drone delivery of auto-injectors or asthma inhalers during disasters, when additional supplies are required in emergencies when urban traffic shows  first-responder arrival on the scene. 

The data supports trend analyses, trend spotting, planning, simulations, scenario planning, risk mitigation and management, decision-making, predictive analytics, resource optimization and outlier analyses. 

It supports policy-related activities such as providing better burden-of-illness calculations to support increased federal research funding, changes in state laws and regulation to help seniors age in place and ease burden and economic harm from caregiving.  

Our research has revealed proprietary patterns in data that allow us to run scenarios based on various characteristics of seniors: (e.g., age, health status, marital status, family size, proximity of relatives, co-morbid conditions, and participation in religious congregations). 

CogentSageQI has the capability to create complexity, risk and support indices and contribute to  independent-living metrics.  That data can be used to create better information for seniors and those who support them, but also to promote public policies to protect seniors as they age.