CORONAVIRUS:
RISING UP TO THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGE
A proposal for better navigation in the unknown at a time when the global systemic crisis calls for urgent and effective action at scale
Fred Arnoux (1,2), Yael Azoulay, Benjamin Duban(2), Simon Martin
(1)Phd, Management Science, Mines Paristech, (2)Co-founder of Stim
At the time of writing, April 27th, Covid-19 has consigned nearly half of humanity to their homes, in addition to causing 200,000 deaths and inflicting several billion of US$ losses per day on the world’s wealthiest countries. Economically speaking, it is probably the most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
While political decision-makers and medical scientists are working around the clock to limit the virus’ impact, many have criticized their decisions and actions to date. Above all, journalists, citizens’ groups, trade unions and individuals are questioning decision-making processes and the resulting actions. In other words, it is primarily about organization and governance in a radically unknown context.
We posit that in such a context, the right form of organization and governance for managing and monitoring such a crisis, as well as preparing the crisis exit is highly critical. However, it is yet to be invented, designed and trialled.
We propose exploring a new form of organization — still a “work-in-progress”, which we believe could help governments in their decision-making processes and actions. It is a “three-pronged model”, building on and improving the organization we have observed in most countries. The aim is to address decision-making, scientific advice and new path discovery based on a centralized decision-making process and distributed action at scale.
It goes without saying that overcoming such a crisis involves myriad other aspects beyond our field of expertise. In this article we want to share our understanding of the crisis, looking at it through the prism of our expertise in management and organization.
I. Why is this an organizational challenge?
Fractal complexity and unknown at the heart of the crisis
This pandemic simultaneously brings together three characteristics that make it radically different from other crises:
This global, systemic crisis is exhibiting fractal complexity. The pandemic’s impact is being felt worldwide, ranging from global to individual scale. Also, it jeopardizes all aspects of our societies: healthcare, economics, politics, science, geopolitics…
Political decision-making is of utmost urgency. The very high contagion speed and the suddenness of its effects imply that action must be taken immediately and at scale with a very high level of commitment from society at large.
The “unknown” is at the heart of the crisis. Since the virus is “new-to-the-world”, we are actually facing a situation that is not only “uncertain”, but also “unknown”.
These notions may sound similar, but are actually quite different. Without delving into the details of decision-making theories and scientific publications, here is what you need to keep in mind:
- Uncertainty represents 99% (sometimes more) of the decision-making situations we encounter daily. It is a situation in which we know what our goal is and we know that there are several solutions allowing us to achieve it, each one with its own advantages and drawbacks. For example, uncertainty is what we experience when choosing what to wear on a cloudy day: a raincoat? Rubber boots? An umbrella? All of the above? None of the above?
- “Unknown” is less common. It refers to a situation and the consequences thereof, both which are so unexpected that they are difficult for us to imagine and even harder to be prepared for. To get a feel for what this is like, imagine you are told that “something unexpected” is about to happen to you, and that you have to pick an object in your immediate surroundings so that you’re prepared when it happens. What would you choose? Will the object you picked be of use in the impending situation? Moreover, do you have the right “something” in your immediate surroundings? Does the requisite “something” even exist? This is what an “unknown” situation feels like.
Even if political decision-making is now underpinned by scientific advice, organization seems to be lacking effectiveness
We have observed that most western countries reorganized their decision-making processes in response to the impending coronavirus epidemic, and most of them did something very similar: political decision-makers appointed “scientific advisors” to inform their decision-making from a scientific perspective.
In practice, each country collated scientific advice in its own way. Some did so through a scientific council, composed of prominent scientists from various disciplines: immunologists, virologists, anthropologists, sociologists… This is the case in France, Belgium and Italy for example. In other countries the scientific advisory function is embodied by one person, for instance, Dr. Fauci, member of the Coronavirus task force, in the US, or Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, chief executive of the Ministry of Health, in New Zealand.
Under this form of organization, political decision-makers are responsible for making the best possible choices from among the most effective and known solutions available to date. They must then allocate the resources needed to “make it happen” and communicate this to their citizens. As for the scientific advisors, they are responsible for investigating the political decision-makers’ scientific questions as fast as possible, and for providing the latter with recommendations based on their expertise.
We observed that this situation is an uncomfortable one for both political decision-makers and scientific advisors :
- Scientific advisors provide recommendations, priceless for managing the crisis, to the decision-makers. However, since the situation is “unknown”, their experience and expertise tend to reach their limits faster than usual (1).
- Political decision-makers must choose solutions to implement as a matter of urgency, but these solutions are not wholly satisfactory, and may or may not turn out to the best solutions in the end. This will only become clear with time.
This is our understanding of the situation and we concede that is debatable. Nonetheless, on this basis we can assume that the duo made up of political decision-makers and scientific advisors could benefit from taking on a third role. This entails assuming responsibility for “exploring alternatives and fallback new solutions” in parallel with working on what is currently believed to be the most effective solution to date. We believe that this could help to lower the pressure on and the discomfort felt by both politicians and scientists, with the added upside of improving the way we steer and manage the crisis.
(1) The scientific community itself acknowledges that there are still blind spots surrounding the pandemic: as Institut Pasteur says, “International efforts are continuing, […] to clarify the answers to these questions”.
II. Our theoretical model: A three-pronged governance model for dealing with “unknowns”
Learning from management science
Organizing for extreme situations which are both “urgent and unknown” is not new. In management science literature, managing in the unknown has been widely documented (cf. Lost Roots: How Project Management Came to Emphasize Control Over Flexibility and Novelty, 2010). Among these meticulous studies, three cases stand out:
- Building the fastest jet aircraft ever made in less than 150 days — Skunk Works
- Designing and building the first nuclear weapon in several months — The Manhattan Project
- Walking on the moon in a context of “the space race” — Apollo Program
All of these projects pursued different objectives, the merits of which are debatable. They also took place in different contexts and came up with very different results. However, the common denominator is that they all involved nigh-on-unachievable objectives being met in very limited timeframes, which forced their stakeholders to transform established organizational and management practice. For the sake of brevity, we will not go into detail here. Instead, we will learn what lessons we can from their activities and structures.
First of all, these projects teach us that when operating under conditions which are both unknown and urgent, decision-makers need to engage in three activities in parallel so as to increase their chances of success:
- First, focus efforts on “the most probable solution” to date based on the current state of knowledge, taking all the necessary actions to make it happen and communicating about both progress and blind spots.
- Second, enrich the pool of possible solutions and investigate “fallback solutions” for achieving the “strategic goal”, as these could in fact turn out to be more probable than “the most probable solution” in (1) above. Share this “safety net” strategy and the top fallback solution investigated.
- Third, continuously enrich the crisis knowledge base, the current “most probable path” and all of the “fallback solutions”, so that you can review the “strategic goal” or refocus efforts on a new “most probable path”, relying on the knowledge available as well as a wide network of actors.
Second, to increase efficiency, these activities are generally embodied in a three-pronged organisational model made up of decision-making, the scientific advisory function and new path discovery. The model’s details will, of course, vary substantially from one project to another.
Our proposition: a three-pronged governance model with an Open Creative War Room supporting political decision-makers and scientific advisors
We propose to apply this approach to the coronavirus crisis and build a three-pronged governance model as follows: the two first prongs of the model political decision-makers and the scientific advisors are supported by what we call an Open Creative War Room (2).
The Open Creative War Room is built to deal with the creative and discovery activities imposed by the highly unknown nature of the crisis. The roles of the two first prongs remain the same, but they are supported by the new entity focused on one simple objective: increasing the probability of achieving the strategic goal, by opening new creative paths and by discovering and activating unconventional networks of actors.
(2) The term Creative War Room appeared before we began writing this article, during a discussion with Pr A. Hatchuel about the crisis and will be presented in two papers by Hatchuel et al., soon-to-be-published in the scientific literature. We added the term “Open” to embody the 2 principles described below.
Full transparency and very high-frequency learning to manage societal complexity
Compared to the projects studied by management science mentioned above, all characterized by urgency and a high level of the “unknown”, this crisis also has a third inherent feature: systemic complexity with enormous impacts on many aspects of our society and our daily life. Society and civilians are both part of the problem and part of the solution.
In this regard, our organization model has to be completed with two working principles: Full transparency and very high-frequency learning. They concern governments, scientific experts as well as citizens and require:
- a collective commitment to make all of the information available both accessible and understandable to everyone, without delay
- a common framework for sharing information and data that is both safe and user-friendly
- a shared learning loop between government and citizens progressing: government needs citizens to feed the model, which citizens need the government’s infrastructure, access to expertise and decisions
We expect that the model proposed in this article would bring 3 concrete benefits for crisis stakeholders.
- For political decision-makers and scientific advisors: it enables them to openly acknowledge the unknown and, above all, to demonstrate a real managerial and organizational capacity to deal with it
- They will also get a broader and probabilized vision about possible creative solutions beyond the “currently most probable one”, allowing for more serene decision-making and communication
- As for civilians and society at large, there’s more transparency, higher levels of trust and a higher degree of responsibility for all actors involved. This will in turn stimulate information and data sharing, leading to faster comprehension of the crisis, thus sharper decision-making and swifter implementation
III. Our experimental proposition: test driving our governance model during Covid-19
The purpose of this section is to propose some insights into how to set up this “three-pronged model” for any government entity wishing to experiment with it, whether at a local or national level.
Since most governments have already set up a “political decision-makers” and “scientific advisors” dyad, we will focus on proposing insights into the Open Creative War Room component. This isn’t a step-by-step-recipe, but rather a preliminary set of clues, which we — the authors and reviewers of this article — came up with through our discussions about how to build and describe this model. It is, by definition, incomplete and must be tailored to every specific situation, but we hope it could serve as a starting point.
Lastly, to make things more concrete we will also illustrate the interplay between the 3 prongs using a fictional example.
How to set up this “three-pronged model”?
Main accountabilities of the Open Creative War Room
- Exploring to increase the probability of success: The Open Creative War Room is constantly enriching the pool of solutions for every critical issue. In this instance, enriching means scouting for existing solutions (from other countries, from the field…), generating new solutions ex-nihilo (creativity), assessing their potential and the “probability that we will need them at some point”. On that basis it is also responsible for piloting minimal investigation into “fallback solutions” with the highest potential and probability, with a view to preparing possible shifts in strategy and operations.
- Managing field action and reporting: The Open Creative War Room relies on information and actions coming from massive distributed networks of actors on the field, whose role is three-fold: sensors/scouts, designers, actuators. The network is needed to investigate “fallback solutions” and collect information about the crisis directly from the field. The actors in question might be individuals, small groups, a team within a given company…
- Centralized monitoring of crisis and solution developments for decision-makers in real-time: This Open Creative War Room is responsible for feeding back information about the status of the fallback solutions and about the status of the global crisis more generally to political decision-makers. This is based on high frequency information input from the field.
Governance and management principles
- The Open Creative War Room should be designed to wield the highest level of autonomy. This is required to not only protect its team from the rigidity of business as usual processes, but also to shield decision-makers from the discomfort of working with unconventional solutions or modes of action.
- It should operate outside of the critical path in order to ensure that political decision-makers remain focused on the deployment at scale of the most probable solution to day without being distracted & delayed by parallel solutions.
- It should be led by one — and only one — leader wielding full authority. There should be an absence of hierarchy within the Open Creative War Room to avoid useless reporting.
- Management routines should be highly flexible in order to keep pace with incoming information and to allow for directional shifts to be enacted as fast as necessary.
Preliminary reporting and decision-making tool
The Open Creative War Room should be equipped with dashboards synthesizing both general data about the development of the crisis, real-time data about solutions and action taken in the field. Each solution and action should be measured and compared, for example, using this 4-parameter framework:
- Solution impact: given our goal and what we know at this stage, what is the quantified impact that implementing this solution will garner (e.g. impact on R0 — virus reproduction number).
- Impact uncertainty: given the robustness of the information, what are the uncertainties surrounding this solution.
- Solution cost: what is the expected cost of developing and implementing the solution at scale.
Solution readiness level: on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest, what is the likelihood of this solution being implemented on time and meeting the stated goal.
A decision-making process applied to a fictional example
Here is a fictional example of a decision-making process, for illustrative purposes only. PDM stands for political decision-makers, SA for scientific advisors and OCWR for the Open Creative War Room.
Strategic Goal. What is your strategic goal? For instance, PDM could state that the strategic goal is “relaunching the economy as fast as possible whilst reducing the number of casualties as much as possible”.
Major measures. PDM are aware of the major measures and associated solutions available for managing the crisis, as proposed and updated by SA:
- Limiting contact with contaminated people/objects:
contact tracing, isolation, decontamination… - Limiting contamination probability when contact does occur:
precautionary measures, masks, physical distancing,… - Increasing medical system capacity:
ICUs, setting up military field hospitals, producing ventilators… - Efficient treatment and immunization development:
medicines and a vaccine.
For each measure, what is their projected impact and how ready is the country in question to implement this measure ie. readiness level?
Decision-making. For any given measure there are several questions to be answered and related actions to be taken (remember, this is a “fictional example”). For instance, let’s look at “Limiting contact with contaminated people/objects”:
- PDM: What specific KPI is this measure aimed at achieving? E.g. 70% of contaminated persons are identified and isolated.
- PDM: Which solution has the highest probability of achieving this KPI? Let’s say solution #1 is implementing a large-scale digital testing solution implemented by health professionals e.g. teleconsultation (impact level = 8/10; readiness level = 6/10)
- PDM directly appoint a task force to develop solution #1.
- PDM: What are the other solutions we have? OCWR: No other solutions are investigated.
- PDM ask SA what is the risk of not having any other solutions? Answer: very high.
- OCWR explores other potential solutions (“fallback solutions”), collaborating closely with SA.
- OCWR discovers one original solution and detects an interesting study conducted by a team of researchers. OCWR activates a network of experts and manufacturers to explore the potential of these two new paths: let’s say these are self-diagnosis (solution #2) and random statistical testing (solution #3).
- PDM receives a task force report informing them that an event has occurred e.g. teleconsultation technologies will be impossible to deploy in time. Solution #1 has hit a dead end.
- PDM asks OCWR what other solutions are on the table. OCWR proposes solution #3, whose development is well underway (impact level= 7/10; readiness level = 8/10).
- PDM decide to accelerate implementation of solution #3 and to test it at scale.
- The task force is now in charge of this new solution.
- OCWR continues investigating other solutions in case solution #3 falls apart.
- And so on, until either the objective is reached or the impact of the crisis has decreased to a level where parallel exploration is no longer worth it.
Conclusion
We are intimately convinced that this kind of model can be helpful not just at the “peak” of the coronavirus pandemic, which you will have already experienced, are experiencing right now, or are about to, depending on which country you’re in. It could also be highly useful during the lengthy period until the public health and economic recoveries take hold. After all, this period will probably also be “unknown”, “systemic” and will require “urgent” decision-making.
Clearly, this model is still a “work in progress’” with a lot to dig into, fine-tune, as well as details to be fleshed out. But we sincerely hope that we have managed to pique your curiosity enough to spur you into experimenting with both the model and the new entity whether you are a citizen willing to be part of a massive distributed network of actors in the field, a manager in a local or national government agency or a scientific advisor. Because it is also our firm conviction that now is the right moment to test drive the model and the new entity.
We will indeed be spoilt for choice in selecting our first venture:
- assisting various vulnerable groups in both rural and urban India during lockdown,
- solving the impossible equation of privacy-by-design and effective contact tracing using voluntary isolation of infected people in order to safely restart the economy,
- preparing, including in countries which have been successful in managing the crisis so far, for a probable second wave, which is a consequence of some countries being unable to contain the pandemic at the very beginning…
Who’s in? We sure are. Watch this space. Or better yet, join us!
This article would have never existed without all of the co-authors, contributors, discussants and reviewers. This has been a team effort.
Special thanks to Armand Hatchuel Pr. Management Sciences — Mines ParisTech; Colette Menard — Chief Scientific Officer — Stim; Sylvain Lenfle Pr. Management Sciences CNAM, Ecole Polytechnique; Thomas Chappuis — Consultant, Emile Sivré Phd — Physics Nanoscience; Daria Gorbounova -, Tomas Pueyo — Stanford MBA & ex-consultant.