Why This Pandemic Isn’t Over Yet
In America, the word careful is open to interpretation.
Where I live, near San Francisco, pretty much everyone wears a mask in public.
Even the unhoused people living on the street. I saw a man the other morning on the sidewalk with his pants around his ankles, fully exposed, and talking loudly to the voices in his head. He was raving — through a mask.
A woman in a minivan slowed and pulled her own mask down momentarily to call out her window to him in the perfect, caring-mom-voice: Pull up your pants, now. You can do that. Yes, you can. That’s right, good job. Keep those pants up.
I turned back to see him holding them up with one hand, the other arm flailing at the sky, and I nodded my gratitude to the woman in the van. As you picture this scene in your mind’s eye, don’t let your imagination forget because this image is so new: we were all wearing masks.
I get it that not everyone everywhere is wearing masks but, how did it become a political statement to not wear a mask in some places?
Let’s just sidestep the political issue here, and talk about those of us who do believe the science and understand the dangers of airborne contagion, and do want to be careful not to spread the virus. How do we interpret what it means to be careful?
Careful
My sister, a woman of a certain age with 4 cats and known health issues, stays home except to go swimming in a nearby lake every day. She has teenaged friends that she happily pays to get her groceries and do other errands. She no longer goes out for coffee every morning or to see friends or attend events.
My niece in her twenties, on the other hand, flew from Denver to Seattle with her fiancee one weekend in May, to surprise his Dad for his birthday. It's fine, she texted, We’re wearing masks and wiping down everything! We are being careful!
Ok, great —but what is careful?
Mrs. Google says:
Careful: Making sure of avoiding potential danger, mishap, harm; Cautious. — Webster’s Dictionary
We say:
Stay 6 feet apart, avoid big groups and enclosed spaces, wear a mask, and wash your hands. But these strategies aren’t working because partial adherence to guidelines doesn’t work with contagious diseases.
Freedom
We Americans have a powerful myth that we can do whatever we want. It is a pretty limited interpretation of the word “freedom” but it translates easily into we can have anything we want, which works very well in our consumer society to encourage us to buy things.
So it is not shocking that here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave we don’t do what we are told unless we want to. Even when it comes to adhering to basic rules of safety and civic responsibility, we have a mixed reputation. Traffic signals usually work, vaccines against dangerous childhood illnesses, not as much.
Let’s focus again on those of us who are actively saying, I will do this for the good of the collective, and, Together we can get everyone back to normal sooner. Even we struggle mightily to understand what this pandemic means to our lives. Each one of us interprets the word careful in ways that match us in particular: the way we lived before the virus.
Getting It Wrong
I don’t judge my niece. I admire her. Now she has flown off to Mexico to see her mother who just moved from Poland to Cozumel. Did I mention she has a tattoo of an eagle wing that says, Never Be Afraid to Fly?
Ok, I admit it, I am jealous (not of the tattoo, but of the trips!) I used to travel a lot for work and pleasure and I would be fascinated to see what it is like to go somewhere nowadays.
But my partner is adamant that we, meaning I, don’t get on a plane. And my friend who comes from Holland calls me to vent about how irresponsible people are here: no masks, big groups, public sneezing! Even her relatives back east are attending parties and socializing.
She hates being cooped up and sees all this behavior as just prolonging her plight. And she’s right.
We are all stuck because as long as being careful is open to interpretation, some of us are going to get it wrong. Here’s an article that might help, or it might not (it talks about farts.)
What’s essential?
Another key to our inability to end this pandemic quickly is the impossibility of some Americans to adhere to protective guidelines at all. You cannot really blame people for going to work and risking exposure if there is no other way to feed their children, or if they are deemed essential. Nor can you change the fact that some people live together in small spaces.
Between the enormous range of attitudes in this country, and real physical circumstances, finding a way to stop the virus from spreading is proving to be a challenge.
In the face of this, how we are going to get control of this pandemic? Given who we are, what would work?
What would be so easy, so simple and obvious, that everyone, no matter what they believe or who they live with or where they work or don’t work, would find it easier to do it than to not do it?
I don’t know what that is, but I believe it is what we are looking for.
Testing, Testing…
I heard something on the radio about how we should be testing differently; testing for actual contagiousness, not whether the person has had the virus. This makes enormous sense!
But it’s still controversial.
Really?! Why? Why aren’t the researchers collaborating? Why are people disagreeing on which tests to give, treatments to develop, and how to create a vaccine?
Here’s my theory.
We are 8 months into understanding something new. Really new. In these early days of the pandemic, we are exploring and building our knowledge base as quickly as we can. We are in a phase that is analogous to brainstorming.
Some people find brainstorming extremely frustrating and want to hurry up and decide something — anything! But when there is no obvious solution, brainstorming works to broaden the field of thinking and look for novel solutions; it’s powerful. It can be a crucial step in finding solutions to difficult problems.
Design Thinking
In my field of organization consulting, right now Design Thinking is all the rage. Take an idea and prototype it. Experiment. Lose the need to be right and get curious about what’s real and what works.
It’s cool because it helps people reflect on their process, seek feedback from others, and learn as they go. This principle of continuous learning is gaining traction even beyond formal design thinking, and that is what we need right now.
It reminds me of the term fast, cheap, and out of control which comes from an interview with the robot scientist, Rodney Brooks, in Errol Morris’ movie of the same name:
We should develop intelligent robots that can repair themselves and send them out into the universe as our proxies. Instead of a few incredibly expensive manned space missions, why not send up thousands of robots that are fast, cheap and out of control — and trust that some of them will work?
Innovating On Ourselves
Obviously we cannot ethically test a bunch of things on human beings all at once and hope some of them work! What about all the ones that don’t work?! This is why we have things like FDA approval and other standard regulations that protect people’s safety (even if some politicians are currently trying to ignore them.)
But it does make sense to pursue different lines of thought all at once on how to solve a collective problem. Especially in the early days of trying to understand something new.
It may seem like it is taking forever, but 8 months is not that long to vanquish such a formidable foe, which hides among us asymptomatically, confounds us with so many different symptoms, and kills us with little warning.
When we look back on this time from a future vantage point, we hopefully will be able to see that along with the tragedy of so many deaths and the failure of our political leadership, it was also a time when innovation swelled to meet a crisis, and ingenuity saved the day.
Perhaps it’s a dress rehearsal for more changes to come.
Nurturing courage, authenticity, curiosity, and resilience in entrepreneurs, artists, professionals, teams, and systems. sarah@leadingcollaboration.com
