Leadership in a time of COVID

In a recent twitter thread I talked about COVID and our policy response as a certain kind of problem that our existing mental models are not adequate to address. These kinds of problems are not causal systems where you intervene at a single point of entry. These problems are densely entangled multi-polar systems with complex feed loops and threshold events.

I posted this fantastic article on obesity to illustrate this kind of problem. The article details all the inadequate theories that have attempted to address the obesity pandemic that has now infected the entire world, including our pets, lab rats (whose diets are strictly standardized across generations), and wild animals as well. Like COVID, obesity has created a polarized social environment that shames some people are celebrates others. Like COVID, the social default mechanism makes us want to blame and shame someone, because that is easier than blaming everyone or blaming no-one. The primary role of leadership is not to solve a medical or scientific problem — that is the role of citizens! The primary role of leadership is to mediate these social default mechanisms, and to build social trust.

Now I will give my opinion — which is merely an opinion of one, and you might not find this opinion compelling at all. But numerous people have asked for my opinion, and I stuck my neck out on Twitter saying that the increase control-police-state-policy around COVID has gone way too far. This kind of comment is not useful, if you can not also envision an alternative. So here is my vision of what is needed:

We need to design a social sensemaking up-hierarchy.

What do I mean by this?

Currently we analyze health policy from the generalized statistics across entire populations, and then we create rules for everyone based on these generalized statistics. This does not work for these new kinds of problems.

Consider instead an AI platform which is receiving all kinds of data. Think of the role of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election. The data comes in from all directions, but the outgoing message is customized to individuals. Similarly, a national health care platform could collect and update information provided by individuals. There may be a “reward” for participating in this public service. In return you get an easy to use personal interface that can respond to natural language questions like: “How likely am I to die of COVID this year?”

Public officials wouldn’t be faced with the impossible questions of “do the vaccines work or not?” and all the ways these kind of questions entrap officials and lead to double speak. Since public policy would depend on individual consent, more people would actually be willing to be vaccinated, or wear masks, etc. then if they are “told to do so.” Or maybe not. I might be wrong about that. Yet billions of people participate in data-collection social media all the time, despite there being no policy that makes them do so.

This is how a sensemaking up-hierarchy works. It collects local data, digitizes in a way that turns it into useful information for individuals (who have contributed their data) to make informed decisions. If most people represent a general case, then most people will choose the general recommendation. But other people, who are situated in a different set of multi-polar conditions, will receive a set of recommendations that reflect their situation. These recommendations may cover a range of options, and let you know how you drift from the general case (which data points most influenced your outcome). It would be great if you could play around with the data, such that, for example, if you stopped drinking alcohol, how would the recommendations change? Or if you stopped travelling, or started working from home, or moved to another county. There could be notifications when your data points and recommendations were updated.

All of this may seem unreasonable to you. I think it is a great new opportunity to reinvent the health care system. Individuals would not have to make choices on their own. There could be facilitated support groups that come together to share their stories, of the decisions they made, why they chose to do what they did, and how happy were they with their outcomes. This too could be recorded and stored in a data base, like youtube videos of town hall meetings.

Anyway, it is disheartening to see all the wasted energy around vax, no-vax, and all the heavy handed policies being rolled out, the public confusion and the polarization and demonizing that it all entails. There is work to do. We can do this. The question is “where are the leaders?”

What is leadership in the arena of complex multi-polar conditions?

Leadership is the ability to keep information flows moving through the collective system to continuously improve informed decision-making and consent of the individual. Although the decision ultimately is in the hands of the individual, in complex situations of this kind, this approach also optimizes for the whole. This is a systems complexity thing, and a natural outcome of a robust sensemaking up-hierarchy. The individual is making a decision in the local context that is informed by the whole. That is how health care should work. That is a vision for a future.