#FlattenTheCurve (aka Know What Problem You’re Solving)
This is part of the Class of COVID-19 series. To read more, click here.
On paper, COVID-19 is a fairly uncontentious issue. There’s pretty much universal consensus that the whole thing is a Bad Idea. There have been proactive efforts worldwide to combat it, be that sharing resources to create a vaccine, or simply getting behind government lockdowns. People — with the possible exception of Michiganders — are willing to do what it takes to beat the virus.
But as talk turns to easing lockdowns and restarting economies, one question has become increasingly clear.
What does it actually mean to beat COVID-19?
Clarify the problem
The first step in solving any problem is to figure out what the problem actually is. It is only by defining how you’re measuring success that everyone is able to understand exactly what the priorities are, and in turn to keep things on track.
When it comes to ‘beating coronavirus’, one clear potential meaning is eliminating it entirely, as quickly as possible. But why is it so important that we eliminate this disease? The common cold is far more ubiquitous and we’re perfectly happy to put up with it.
“Yeah, but the common cold doesn’t kill quite as many people.”
So perhaps instead we don’t care about eliminating the virus, as much as reducing the number of people who die or become seriously ill from it. This is the approach that most countries — New Zealand notably excepted — are trying to take.
Flattening the curve is not about stopping the virus in its tracks. It aims to reduce cases — not overall, but simply at any one time. Success is not measured in by how many people have been infected, but whether healthcare systems are able to cope, and therefore whether preventable deaths (due to lack of resource or equipment) are able to be avoided.
Make it measurable
You cannot expect success to arrive by blind luck. Hitting targets comes from focus, from knowing where you are, and from being able to course-correct along the way.
Your success metric has got to be easy to measure. If it’s not, chances are you either won’t measure it, or will invest resource that you could be spending on working towards your goal, on working out instead how to measure it. If you are relying on data that you don’t have easy access to, or which involves setting up complex new equipment or software, it’s time to pick a different metric.
When it comes to COVID-19, we have this mostly right. Data on confirmed cases and deaths is reported in a timely manner, in detail, and is straightforward to understand. Where we don’t have it quite right is the accuracy of the data — there are known issues around lack of testing, and around how we measure ‘death by COVID’. If you know you have issues with your data and you can’t get 100% accuracy, aim at least for consistency. In the case of coronavirus, that would mean avoiding suddenly changing how you classify death due to the virus (say, going from only reporting those occurring in hospitals, to those occurring anywhere). If the calculation does need to be changed, change it historically so you can rebase your targets.
Define your #winning
At some point, you’ve just got to know when to stop. Once you’ve chosen your success metric, identify what level it must reach for you to have achieved success. It might be hitting a certain figure, or it might simply be a test outperforming a control.
It can help to create checkpoints along the way, particularly if you’re trying to measure something that will be ongoing. This is something that will crop up time and time again in the pandemic — from measuring out lockdown in three-week increments, to setting thresholds at which restrictions may be eased or further enforced.
It’s also worth considering other metrics. It’s rare that one objective can be worked towards so singularly and that has no wider impacts. There is a clear example at the moment, as the value of life is weighed up against the value of the economy.
If you know that your attempts to move the dial on your key metric will impact other metrics, then it’s worth considering how that affects your view of success. Is your priority just your main metric, with all others being considered afterwards? Do you want to move the main metric as far as possible, as long as secondary metrics stay within range? Or is your focus keeping them in proportion — say, metric A increasing at least twice as much as metric B decreases?
Spread data, not viruses
Sharing how and why you’re defining your success metrics with your team or constituents doesn’t guarantee complete agreement. What it does do, however, is give people greater ownership in helping you to reach that goal. Not only do they have a better sense of what they need to do as individuals to reach it, but they also have an improved understanding of how near or far you are from the end goal.
Whether you’re running a business or a country, your people are one of your greatest assets.
This is part of the Class of COVID-19 series. To read more, click here.
For other data distractions, visit @thecolourofdata.
