Leadership Lessons From A Year Of Covid-19

It’s been more than a year, now, and the Covid-19 pandemic, instead of just disappearing, is still very much a part of our lives. We are well over one hundred million total cases having occurred worldwide, and approaching 550,000 American deaths. Five hundred and fifty thousand lost; the numbers are staggering, each one a life interrupted; more than American combat losses in World War II, and soon to approach that total with Vietnam and Korea added on; roughly 185 times the number of people killed in the Nine-Eleven attacks, all in one year. While we may have become numbed to the daily drumbeat of lives lost, there is little doubt that this is what we used to consider to be “the unthinkable.”

And, still it continues. Europe is locked down again, at least for the moment and stories of global vaccine supply-chain failures fill our television screens. It’s certainly not over yet, and may not even be the beginning of the end, with new variants emerging to accentuate that message, but it’s not too early to assess first impressions about what leadership lessons we’ve learned as a result of this global nightmare.

Welcome to the Unknown

The significance of such an unexpected global loss of life, and the sudden suspension of economic activities, is both profound and instructive. It is also a first taste of the unknown, which is sure to be leadership’s biggest challenge in the twenty-first century. We are all masters of uncertainty; we can finesse small changes, which occur constantly, in decision-making arenas that we are familiar with: our firm, our supply chain, our industry. But the unknown is different; we cannot rely upon our expertise, nor prior experiences, as we can in more familiar situations. As a result, the unknown calls for profoundly different decision-making and leadership styles. We now confront a situation where traditional sources of insights are no longer as reliable as was typically the case, where assumptions carry little assurance, and where probabilities are often no more than mere hunches. Even the present state of the pandemic is unknown; epidemiologists admit that, up until now, their forecasts have left much to be desired. While we have seen many epidemics before, we have not seen this one, and this one is sufficiently different to have caught us unprepared to a degree that has led one well-placed observer to refer to this past year’s experience as “an incredible scale of tragedy.”

It is not exaggerating to suggest that in the future we will increasingly have to manage within similar scenarios of not only unforeseen change, but also unthinkable change, as we face: severe climate change, virulent new epidemics, and mass human migrations to seek relief from food and water scarcities, and unstable societal conditions, to mention but a few. Managing in the unknown will increasingly come to characterize leadership in the future, whereas today it is still unusual. Surely, there are lessons to be learned from the present Covid-19 situation, which has been styled by some observers as the “lightening before the thunder” of future global crises, that can help us think better about leadership in the dark? One lens that is useful to discern such lessons is that of innovation, with its advocacy of customer experience, experimentation, openness to new and unusual ideas, fast responses and the value of curiosity as a leadership competency. In fact, the recent Covid-19 experience provides a wealth of insights into effective and ineffective leadership practices in the face of the unknown, including such key lessons as:

Be Curious About The Future

While we may not be able to predict the unknown, it does behoove us to take it seriously and to establish early warning mechanisms to alert us to unforeseen developments. Failures to take those few early warning signals that did exist cost us precious weeks of response time in the present crisis. Early responses were then hobbled by an inability to accurately size-up the nature, size and speed of the challenge, as tracking and testing lagged. Even before that, there was insufficient institutional foresight to monitor already active early warning signals regarding the presence of the threat. The choice of removing an American government-supported medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, in Wuhan, and then leaving this key position unfilled is a key illustration of reducing foresight despite the SARS experience of only a few years earlier.

Once the virus was first identified in late December 2020, it took weeks, at least, for most governments to initiate preparations, and, even then, many of these efforts were lacking in resources and commitment. We failed, as a global community, in identifying cases early, and then contact-tracing of those cases so as to better understand the shape and speed of the emerging crisis. This absence of data has plagued us through out the entire year, and even today there are big arguments over the equity of treatment and the efficacy of responses, all of which stem from a lack of good data regarding the size and patterns of contagion. Foresight must be employed in a rigorous fashion, if only to alert decision-makers to “what if” moments; and organizations must be redesigned to move such information faster. Keeping an eye on the future, while most everyone else is preoccupied with the present, is a hallmark of effective innovation leadership.

Look Upstream First, Fast

One of the reasons for our slow, fumbling, fear-ridden first response to the covid pandemic is that in too many instances we were facing in the wrong direction. While worrying about ventilators and hospital beds, which were certainly important, we lost sight of what we might do upstream to prevent the exhaustion of such scarce resources; prevention was undervalued, often diminished. Dan Heath, in Upstream, puts it this way: “downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening.” In addition, the tangibility of downstream activity, buying ventilators, measuring hospital bed capacity, brings us back to the relative comfort of the familiar, whereas looking upstream is usually considerably less tangible, and flirts with the unknown, the unthinkable. Without testing and tracking, looking upstream was frequently futile, because there was insufficient data to give shape or face to the emerging problems. Helen Bevan, Chief Transformation Officer of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service’s Horizons, thinks so highly of looking upstream that she has included it among her “Seven Simple Rules for Leaders” creating tomorrow.

Be Outside-in

Our failure to look upstream, instinctively, is largely due to leadership’s vestigial instinct to focus inside-out, despite the fact that everything that we know today about successful strategy and innovation argues for the primacy of an outside-in perspective. Most things upstream are outside of our organizations’ ability to control and so they are often not addressed. So much of the early pandemic conversations, as a result, were institutionally focused... our beds, our supplies.... while the patient journey was hardly paid attention to. Adoptability of new processes and new technologies is the essential flip-side of innovation, and while good ideas matter, if no one adopts those good ideas, what’s the point? Focusing on the patient journey, instead of our assets, would have more quickly led us to making it easier, not harder, to get tested, to be vaccinated and to better allocate scarce talent and vaccines. Places where it was made easier for individuals to be tested and tracked, such as South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand, have had a much easier time with the virus than those places where the institutional priorities were placed above those of prospective clients.

Be Experimental: Place Many Bets in Parallel

In the unknown, putting all your bets on one horse, or one square, is to bet the entire enterprise on luck. Small bets, many small bets made in parallel, are a far better approach to addressing the unknown. One of the successes of Operation Warp Speed was that its approach to breaking rules and placing bets, enormous as they were, has resulted in much of the optimism that we have today. Different vaccines, created in parallel, helped us be less linear, and less reliant upon a single company, or a single approach, and we are, today, better off as a result.

Be Daring

As frightening as it can be, the unknown is no place for modest ambitions. The idea that we could produce vaccines so fast and in such large quantities is a tribute to bold thinking, breaking the rules, if you will, and certainly not being bound to linearity or sequentiality that have so long been taken for granted in most regulatory environments.

An important reason to be bolder in articulating and pursuing organizational ambitions is that we have seen, from the Covid-19 experience, how fast even traditionally slow organizations can move, when the need is pressing. Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna admits that “I’m still in disbelief at how quickly the team was able to safely overcome massive technical, logistical and physical barriers,” at her own laboratory. Interestingly, she also observed that the normal conversational trajectories characterizing her group’s research activities at UC Berkeley, changed quickly from “lines going in all directions at once” to “suddenly coalesce[ing] around a single point,” which, in itself, is a good illustration of the power of what Mariana Mazzucato has called mission-oriented research to focus attention and resources even within complex organizations. To be sure, this requires that the mission is articulated in a clear and compelling manner, which was not the case for much of the past year’s Covid-19 experience.

At its most basic level, daring to take risks may have defined those countries who were spared the worst of the pandemic, from those who suffered the most. According to Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “There wasn’t a single path out of this pandemic, but it took being proactive and aggressive and — most of all — taking the virus seriously. A bunch of countries did it, and a bunch of countries just didn’t.” What we have learned from innovation, is now true of other leadership situations, hesitation in the face of the unknown is the worst choice of all.

Be Open: Look to the Edge

Innovators know well that change starts from the edges of an industry, and both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccine success are stories of edge-players emerging when opportunities arise. In Pfizer’s case, it was a partnership with the German firm BioNTech, founded in 2008, which was a leader in research on mRNA-based human therapeutics, that led to Project Lightspeed, and the speedy conception and delivery of an anti-Covid-19 vaccine. It was the first mRNA vaccine ever approved for delivery. Moderna, also an mRNA focused firm, began only in 2010. Neither of these firms would ever be considered among the incumbent market leaders for these sorts of vaccines, yet their emergence changed the nature of the industry going forward, as could China’s Sinopharm, Sinopacific Biotech and CanSino Biologics, as well as Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine maker, Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. Novovax, which had never received a vaccine approval during its first thirty years of organizational life, and which had a six month financial operating horizon at the start of 2020, may be among the most surprising new edge entrant into coronavirus vaccine market.

Never underestimate innovative energies, especially from unexpected places

Maybe the most reassuring lesson of the Covid-19 experience has been the number of alternative approaches to traditional practices that arose from unlikely places. Early-on in the pandemic, there were breathtaking examples, such as the local 3D printing of replacement venturi valves for ventilators in Brescia, Italy; the ability of a Canadian rural hospital general practitioner anesthetist (with a PhD in diaphragmatic mechanics) to increase ventilator capacity nine-fold; so many different approaches to mask fabrication; the repurposing of the ALIMA CUBE, which had been such an important innovation in responding to Ebola, in Guinea, in 2014, and is now reincarnated into a South Korean hospital’s ‘phone booth’ coronavirus tests; to the essentially independent activities of a chief medical officer of an Oklahoma town of 4,200, who on his own initiative appraised the very data that his Governor was denying and formed a citizens' response team to prepare the community for the novel coronavirus's arrival. Innovations, all! Delivered fast, and fit for the local situation and, in many cases, suggesting approaches to the crisis that none of the more established organizations could conceive of.

Eric von Hippel, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has been encouraging what he calls user-led innovation for a long time, but, more often than not, corporate instincts are to go with familiarity, formality, power, brand and credentials, all of which may not be appropriate for the situation at hand. When three friends at Oxford University and King’s College got together and created a new prototype ventilator, OxVent, in a week, their biggest fear was that their idea would be given to a larger, slower, less innovative organization for scaling, and that that would bring the whole process to a halt. According to the spouse of one of the three, they “...worried when he heard that Boris Johnson had asked car manufacturers to make ventilators because "they know sod all about ventilators."” In the end, their fears were prophetic. They did enter into a partnership with a larger, more experienced partner, but, when the UK’s need for ventilators did not materialize into the large numbers feared, that partnership dissolved. Today, OxVent continues, focusing on virus-besieged countries who are in need of affordable and available ventilators.

Be Imaginative

We are presently all hostages to a colossal failure of leadership imagination, worldwide. Entrepreneur Lisa Gansky has asked the question “How would I organize my sphere of influence if my goal was to learn more, faster?”, but most leaders have never thought about even raising such a question. Instead of exploring new organizational formats that might be a better fit for the purpose of understanding and then responding to the virulent Covid-19 virus, we more often saw obfuscation, dismissal, hesitancy and, even in some cases, dereliction of duty. The Covid-19 pandemic has not been leadership’s finest moment; we were insufficiently curious, and insufficiently daring, and, as a result, we learned poorly. Nora Bateson, who is a research designer for the study of complex living systems, and a poet, argues that “learning is moving to a scope from which there is no return to past limited vistas.... Nostalgia has no place here....” We did not learn well. Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller, of BCG’s Henderson Institute have recognized, “Imagination.... is one of the hardest things to keep alive under pressure,” and much of the Covid-19 experience is vivid testimony to this.

Be an Explorer, Not A Discoverer

Our societal failures in the face of the COVID pandemic also provide a stunning reminder of how powerful an “explorer” leadership mindset is, when compared with a “discoverer” mindset. Explorers open-up conversations, ask questions, create whole new possibilities, learn more; discovers “solve” things, they close down conversations, ask fewer and less daring questions, learn less.

The American historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who coined this distinction, also observed that “For much of Western history interpretation has far outrun data,” and this applies to much of the Covid-19 journey as well. While “discoverer leaders,” who desperately wanted the problem to just go away, promoted hydroxychloroquine and the allure of other “silver bullets,” “explorer leaders” begged for data, by which to better understand what in fact was happening. But more data takes more time, and might produce undesired insights, which is what led some locales to stop reporting ICU capacity after that index became uncomfortable, and, on a national level, led to suggestions that stopping further testing would reduce the reported incidence level.

We gain no ground by hoping for a silver-bullets or shutting down exploration of unknown phenomena; we only reduce our ability to learn. We still need to get ahead of the virus; as Vernon Lee, the director of the communicable diseases division at Singapore’s Ministry of Health puts it, “If you chase the virus, you will always be behind the curve,” or as one Italian observer put it, “The virus is faster than our bureaucracy.”

This has a leadership moment of Churchillian proportions, but, as of yet, there have been few Churchills, if any, to emerge. While this may be the beginning of the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, it may only be the end of the very beginning in the emergence of future, globally catastrophic, challenges. As we head into this unknown landscape, we would do well to heed these early lessons of the Covid-19 experience.