Living, Learning, and Leading in a Pandemic: How to Invent Our Way Through This
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson
This quote by the famed science fiction writer is often used as a shorthand description for the implications of emerging technologies.
Does it also describe the onset of the Covid-19 virus?
We are now facing a very different future than most of us expected. And it’s come at us far faster than we imagined — much less prepared for. And while it may be unfolding differently around the world, no place seems completely immune from its potential public health and economic consequences.
So what happens when the future becomes distributed too quickly?
Having worked in futures and design for nearly two decades, I’m no stranger to ambiguity, but I’ve never experienced it at this scale, let alone at this speed.
While we don’t — and can’t — know what the future will bring, what is clear is that we must learn how to get comfortable operating in constant, if not extreme, ambiguity while also navigating an acute and frightening crisis. We need to build and flex new skills that will not only help us get through this moment, but will also serve us well for shaping the future yet to come.
I’ve been blown away by the creative, collaborative, and generous responses to this crisis, especially the actions of personal and collective agency to help ourselves and each other. Neighbors shopping for those who can’t, friends sewing masks to make up for the shortage, parents sharing resources to help their children stay occupied coupled with humorous memes to help each other laugh. This time requires us to shift our mindset from relying on what is known to doing something with what we do have. We have to invent and learn our way through this.
While I wish I had a magic wand to accelerate the development of antiviral treatments, a preventative vaccine, at-home testing kits, or massively available medical supplies, I’m trying to do my part. Next week, I’ll be partnering with my Stanford colleague Tina Seelig to teach a free pop-up version of our course Inventing the Future to college students who find themselves unexpectedly home on an extended spring break without much structure.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed or helpless, is there something you can do at the micro-scale to make a positive difference for yourselves and others, both in this present moment and for our shared future? Something that will not only serve the immediate needs presented in this acute crisis, but also help model a new way of working and showing up for others.
I wanted to share three observations that I hope help will amplify your hope and energy for productive action.
Reorient around what IS available
There are no facts about the future, but we can learn from patterns of the past.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Mark Twain has been quoted as saying (although not confirmed.) Many experts and policy makers have been evoking lessons from the 1918 “Spanish Flu,” which ultimately affected more than 500 million people and killed almost 50 million worldwide. In analyzing the actions taken by different communities, the data shows that the decisive and dramatic action taken by the city of St. Louis was far more effective at reducing the spread and illness than the delayed response of Philadelphia (my beloved hometown), which decided to proceed with a high density, and ultimately exponentially deadly, parade for the WWI soldiers. This tragedy from a century ago revolutionized public health, ultimately leading to such practices as the extreme social distancing and quarantining that some governments have now wisely imposed.
In our rapidly distributing future, we can also learn from other geographic regions that seem to be just a few weeks ahead of our potential future in the U.S. After an initial period of denial, China’s swift and centralized response to the virus focused on intensive testing and extreme containment and isolation. This is proving more effective in slowing the spread than Europe’s slower and more decentralized actions. By studying what’s around already us, we can, in essence, get “cliff notes” of potential futures — good and bad.
When trying to evaluate what might happen in an uncertain landscape, it’s helpful to identify the elements that are scientifically sound based on the best data we have and orient future possibilities based on what’s known. While many of us fixate on projected statistics and numbers of the latest news update, Marco Annunziata, former chief economist at GE, reminds us in this compelling post that the data fueling most of what we hear about sits within a larger context that needs to be better understood. Pandemic expert Dr. Larry Brilliant shares some of his insights on this current crisis in Wired magazine: This virus is novel to humans; it’s highly contagious; it can get transmitted in the air and lives on surfaces for longer than other similar viruses; it has a higher fatality rate than the typical flu; we need both a vaccine and antivirals to fully contain the danger; social distancing helps slow the spread and buys the system of medical care, researchers, and responders more time.
Bottom line: Regardless of what’s mandated or not in your area, we can choose to stay away from others as much as possible as we get through this initial surge. That is within our control.
Make the future more visual and accessible
With the exception of folks who had first-hand experience with SARS, swine flu, or Ebola, the acute and highly contagious nature of this virus makes it both more dangerous and more abstract. Software entrepreneur and engineer Tomas Pueyo wrote a powerful Medium post called “Act today or People will Die” on March 10 explaining the foundational mechanics behind the epidemic with step by step clarity and accompanying visuals. Pueyo updates the post regularly, which now has over 40 million views and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The Washington Post Corona simulator published last week also helped simplify the math behind exponential spreads and the importance of social distancing. Even an old scene from the “retired” medical comedy ”Scrubs” called “How Disease Spreads” has gone viral. And, painfully, health care workers everywhere are posting urgent pictures on Twitter wearing full protective gear with the plea, ”We stay here for you so please stay home for us.”
Learning to communicate with clarity and compassion in ways that spur action is vital.
Amplify our uniquely human traits for humanity
The traits that make us humans include envisioning the future, storytelling, collaboration, and the use of tools. These have been described brilliantly in the global bestseller Sapiens by Yuval Harari, and in studies like Humanizing Learning in a Digital World by my colleagues Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr at RedThread Consulting.
Amid all of the chaos and fear, we can see these four traits coming together in magnificent and unexpected ways. The app Next Door launched a new feature to identify and serve needs in micro-local street zones. Zoom lunches, happy hours, family reunions, and friend gatherings started popping up on multiple platforms. Authors, professors, and companies are hosting open office hours for anyone to drop in or reach out for help. Conveners and connectors, like the National Conversation Project, Aspen Institute’s Weave the People, and TED, are making existing platforms open and inclusive.
Industries are coming together to pool and share what they know. Leaders in the nonprofit community quickly banded together to create this growing list of resources. The scientific, engineering, coding, and design communities have come together across industry and geographic boundaries to post open source and hacking challenges on acute health and medical needs such as 3D printed ventilators and homemade protective face masks.
Celebrities are using their influence to change social behavior at the human level, ranging from legendary comedian Mel Brooks’ son posting this serious but on-brand message on Twitter to Kevin Bacon invoking a new Covid action plan using his famous Six Degrees of Separation game on Instagram, #IStayHomeFor…
Content is proliferating like crazy on how best to use our technology and tools in a more humane way, including this post “making virtual more human,” from my colleague Glenn Fajardo, who has been teaching collaboration across distance for over 10 years.
In an ideal world, we have leadership capable of bringing these four elements together to both serve our acute needs while also preparing for what we’ll need next in the medium and longer terms. Many of us remain discouraged and angered by the compounding mistakes, dangerous fallacies, and missteps from some government leaders. However, we’ve also witnessed tremendous bright spots of compassionate, caring, informed, honest, and even optimistic words and actions across all sectors and levels of leadership.
Ann Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America, wrote a compelling New York Times OpEd entitled “Forget the Trump Administration. America will save America.” In it she says, “The future is here, whether we like it or not. Although a future dependent on the current federal government looks bleak, we can vote to change that in November. Right now, we can follow the lead of local and regional leaders and step up ourselves.”
So, yes, it’s uncomfortable and scary. We are out of our comfort zone, and forced to make changes we didn’t fully plan for. And, at the same time, our individual and collective actions have never been more important. We need to continue to be there for each other, inventing our present by learning from history and sharing current context, communicating and connecting in ways that honor our core values, and doubling down on caring for ourselves and each other.
And in doing so, we flex our positive agency, allowing us to live, learn, and lead with a bit more humanity, comfort, and hope.
Originally published on Medium by Lisa Kay Solomon — Mar 24, 2020