3. #CopeWithCovid: learn, lead, innovate and thrive in addressing the injustices of inequities

Blog series (07/11/2020). My open peer-reviewed, sense-making learning journal is updated regularly based after discussions with others. Happy to chat with you if curious. This iterative work-in-progress invites you to join a learning journey about addressing the Covid crisis and the 21st century mega-problems from a long term perspective. If inspired, make a comment and share.

Blog warning: Allow time for slow thinking and deep self-reflective learning. Book mark blog to read and re-read the sections. This blog series will stretch your imagination in what you can learn, explore and discover together in communion with others in addressing complex problems. Click on hyperlinks to learn more about key concepts. Make notes in response to any questions that you feel called to discuss.

Read the covid revelations, netinar, network power, leadership failures, journey journal, macro-level perspectives and blogs 1-2 Sense-making netinars prepare and enable learners to understand the vulnerabilities, volatilities, uncertainties, complexities and ambiguities (V2UCA) of addressing mega-problems.

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This blog outlines a series of strategies to learn, innovate, lead and thrive with V2UCA.

1. Cultivate cultural entanglements to thrive
2. Prepare for the long game of the psychosocial pandemic
3. Generate heroic 7.0 network power
4. Create a new vision and purpose for servant leadership
5. Use metaphorical thinking to expand leadership mindsets
6. Foster mindfulness, equanimity and polarity management
7. Learn from past mistakes
8. Understand the limitations of scientific predictive modeling
9. Use simple rules to manage complexity
10. Adopt the worldview of long-termism
11. Enhance organizational agility, creativity and innovation
12. Adopt sustainable meta-strategies to thrive
13. Develop high-functioning complex adaptive learning platforms

Cultivate cultural entanglements to thrive

This blog described a dozen domains (listed below) that affect how we respond to the V2UCA over the long-term in addressing injustices revealed by the Covid Crisis. Each domain is like a dot. What matters is not the particular dots (systems and networks), but how the dots link up, interconnect and interact with each other over time to create cultural entanglements that determine how well or poorly systems and networks function.

Systems and networks are only the maps. Entanglements are the territory.

Self-reflective learning question.

• How can we cultivate cultural entanglements to enhance how well our dynamic agile learning systems, organizations, communities and networks function in addressing the Covid pandemic and the complex mega-problems of 21st century?

Hold on responding to this question until you are thought about or responded to the questions posed in each of the dozen domains.

1. Prepare for the psychosocial pandemic

On the frontlines of healthcare, weariness, cabin fever, information overload, declining resilience and feelings of burnout are common Covid experiences in coping with the acute stresses of V2UCA. What can we do differently that will help us to revive our resourcefulness in running the long game of the Covid marathon? How can servant leaders help people prepare and train for the psychosocial pandemic for years to come?

Regrettably, the combined covid effects of acute and chronic V2UCA stresses can evoke fear and anxiety reactions (conscious and unconscious) that inhibit equanimity and open-minded responsiveness and limit the creativity of our neocortical brains. The tyranny of the urgent renders us more susceptible to the short-sightedness and closed-mindedness of our limbic and reptilian brains that heighten the rejection of new ideas and approaches. Understandably, frontline leaders and teams are unable to operate at their full innovative capabilities and capacities.

Will the wicked (complex) problems of the Covid crisis inform leaders about the premature presumptuous shortcomings of illusionary pride in managing this pandemic? Complex problems challenge the limitations of the American superhero myth of rugged individualism. Dispelling this antiquated myth goes to the very foundation of challenging leadership mindsets about relying on solo heroism. To work for the greater good, we need to coordinate how kindred organizations and systems can deliver ongoing learning opportunities about how to develop complex adaptive learning networks who are trained to be agile, dynamic and innovative in managing V2UCA stresses.

Why use the word, heroic? It will take a herculean collective effort to address the complex inter-connected mega-problems (listed below) of the 21st century. The challenge of launching this Hercules project to address these complex problems is 100 times greater than the proposed Manhattan project for developing pharmacological and vaccine solutions to cure and prevent Covid infections. These problems interact and collide into a reckless downward spiral into the amoral abyss.

• Systemic complex interconnected wicked problems: the climate emergency, rising sea levels, mass migration of people, immigration challenges, environmental pollution, the demise of planetary, population and personal health, socio-economic and educational inequities, neoliberalism, devastating declines in biodiversity, the sixth extinction, food and water insecurities, over-population issues and the failure to achieve the WHO sustainable development goals.

What we have failed to address adequately are our personal and professional flaws and the associated inter-personal politics (described below) needed to facilitate holistic transformation.

• Personal/professional flaws and inter-personal politics: short-termism, reductionism, political and religious fundamentalism, self-righteousness, paralyzing dysfunctional polarizations, the cults of disinformation, fake news addictions, political corruption and dysfunction, the mal-alignment of leadership mindset, fake patriotism (megalomania, narcissism and sociopathy) and the leadership lack of true patriotism (empowerment, altruism and transparent accountability).

To overcome these challenges, we need to open, transform and align leadership mindsets for addressing the interconnected systemic problems (described above). After all, health is about ethics and politics. Without addressing the political ethics of patriotism, it is not possible to unrig the system of corruption and develop effective public policies to fix healthcare and prepare for the next pandemic.

Patriotism is a double-edge sword with positive and negative connotations, depending on who defines it. On the one hand, amoral politicians manipulate fake patriotism for their own political power and cult purposes. Fake patriotism (minus 7.0) is based on intolerance, insularity, closed-mindedness, self-serving protectionism, tribalism, nativism and nationalist pride. Fake patriotism is based on blind unconditional loyalty to a false prophet of short-termism without any accountability.

On the other hand, ethical politicians espouse the virtues of true patriotism for heroic service. True patriotism (plus 7.0) is based on inclusiveness, diversity, open-mindedness, service, interconnectivity, interdependence and cultural humility. True patriotism is based on discerning conditional loyalty to a servant leader of long-termism with transparent accountability.

But whoever best defines and frames patriotism, whether based on truth or alt-facts, gains the most political power and wins elections.

The hero's journey is to elevate true patriotism and vet out fake patriotism with compassion. The reframing and repatriation of true patriotism is driven by truth, justice, freedom and the restoration of the American dream of equity: giving everyone fair opportunities to achieve their highest level of human potential. The calls for swallowing national pride and recognizing that the American dream is diminishing for the middle classes, and the working people are living in an American nightmare.

How can leaders cultivate agility, adaptability and cultural humility to respond more effectively to these complex problems? We need a new inspirational story to revive the American Dream of hope, fairness, innovation and opportunities. Heroic network power is about designing "whole-system" frameworks of creating complex adaptive learning organizations and networks to address these interconnected wicked problems.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we move beyond the limitations of biomedical pandemic and address the much more complex challenges of addressing the deep roots causes for the psychosocial pandemic?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

2. Generate heroic 7.0 network power

Heroic 7.0 network power creates a better future for all by concurrently facilitating transformations at these levels.

1. Personal transformation
2. Ethical stewardship based on truth, justice, equity and freedom
3. Transitioning from the information to the purpose economy
4. Systemic re-design for sustainable development
5. Good political governance of the state, the private sector and civil society
6. Technological innovation and entrepreneurship
7. Professional development and up-skilling

Heroic network power is about generating mutually enriching collaborations at all levels. It activates virtuous actions for long-termism and sustainable development.

The nemesis of 7.0 heroic network power is neo-liberalism, fake patriotism, corrupt political systems and corporatocracies. The misguided corporate values of market share, win/lose competition and the zero-sum games is short-termism. The lack of pandemic preparedness also arises from the divisiveness of dysfunctional political polarizations between left and right-wing politics.

Why is public health seen as left-wing? What underlines the political association between the right-wing and the undermining of public health and pandemic preparedness? A failure of polarity management between individual and social values, political fundamentalism and short-sightedness are short-hand answers for this short-termism.

Network power for heroic impact is generated by aligning servant leadership mindsets empowered by social innovation, social entrepreneurship, social enterprises, conscious capitalism and philanthropy. We need synergistic transformations to reverse the downward spiral into the amoral abyss of short-termism driven by fake patriotism and ascend the upward spiral toward the long-termism of virtuous actions inspired by true patriotism.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we embark of the hero's journey to assure that the virtues of true patriotism triumph over the cults of fake patriotism?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

3. Create a new vision and purpose for servant leadership

These extraordinary circumstances call for aligning leadership mindsets, from local to global levels, to deliver value-based and equity-based proactive care, based on integrating the principles of advanced primary care, population health and public health. This calls for developing 3-5 simple rules at different levels of the system to manage V2UCA stresses effectively by working together with purpose, focus and aligned action. The process of developing simple rules (guiding principles) is a complex process.

To do this well, we need true servant leadership to enable cultures, systems, organizations and communities to enhance their agility and adaptability in order to transform how we manage Covid V2UCA stresses and other wicked problems in health care.

Self-reflective learning question. How will you learn about and develop servant leadership and seek out servant leaders to develop your leadership skills?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

4. Use metaphorical thinking to expand leadership mindsets

What metaphors can we use to build a digital leadership group of weak and strong ties and a coalition of organizations to launch a #CopeWithCovid movement designed to amplify impacts for the greater good?

The Anti-terrorist metaphor, using modern strategies of distributive leadership to defeat the insurgent Covid virus, is essential for winning the war against the biomedical pandemic. A moonshot or Manhattan project (note technological and war metaphors) to find viral cures and vaccines to reduce hospital admissions, ICU admissions and days on ventilation are a game changer for reducing stresses on healthcare systems and for recovering the economy. We also need clear leadership and management strategies on how to recover after the peak of Covid has passed.

Even with effective viral treatments, this metaphor will not address the challenges of addressing the secondary psychosocial pandemic. We also need garden and nature metaphors to cultivate ecological and long-term solutions for treating the psychosocial pandemic and for preparing us better for the next pandemic.

Self-reflective learning question. How can do metaphors help you understand your mindset and the mindsets of others? And what are limits of using metaphors?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

5. Foster mindfulness, equanimity and polarity management

Self-awareness skills are essential for overcoming self-deceptions that impair leadership performance and for developing servant leadership capabilities and service capacities needed to manage complex overwhelming problems.

This blog invites you to reflect with mindfulness and equanimity as a means to expand mindsets about how to navigate polarities, such as between short-termism and long-termism and between individual and social values (see blog 1).

Polarity management involves understanding our mindsets and biases, making sense of "give and take" and exploring meta-thinking: how you think about your fast and slow thinking.

Personal, population and planetary health are the canaries in the coal mine.

Covid is a terrorist trying to kill canaries. This war metaphor sets up a re-frame to re-define our innovation challenge. These questions below aim to move us beyond "i/we" win/lose mindsets of the ego and tribalism to the "I,We" win/win/win mindsets of transcendence and global unity.

How can we:

• Transition from fighting a common enemy to working collaboratively together to prepare for the psychosocial Covid pandemic, improve personal, population and planetary health (IP3H), and address the mega-problems of the 21st century for the greater good of all?
• Create new structures, systems, organizations, communities and health-promoting entanglements to open, expand and align our mindsets in addressing the above question?

These questions call for learning from our past mistakes of short termism and our sins of misusing reductionism.

Self-reflective learning question. What are the upsides and downsides of using the Covid terrorist metaphor in terms of aligning mindsets?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

6. Learn from past mistakes

The USA death rate per million is currently among the top leading developed countries who have failed the most in containing the Covid crisis, as compared to Taiwan, Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea (see graph and data below). Back in 2005, Dr. Bill Frist, Republican Senate Majority Leader (2003-2007) advocated for comprehensive pandemic preparedness. The short-termism of the Federal government has failed the American people.

The current self-inflicted adversities of the Covid and economic crises have arisen from political incompetence and the lack of pandemic preparedness. But the USA is also one of the most resilient and resourceful countries to bounce back from its mistakes, judgment errors and mishaps.

Death rates per 1,000,000

Self-reflective learning question. What can we do to learn from the best and worse countries? What can we learn from the best practices and worst mistakes?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

7. Learn from the limitations of scientific predictive modeling

There are many more unknown unknowns that knowable unknowns to make reliable predictions about the course of Covid pandemic. Scientific predictive modeling has many limitations in understanding the course of uncertainty and dynamic emergence. Covid is much more complex that solving a complicated scientific puzzle with a definitive answer. It is more like predicting the course of an early stage hurricane.

Watch Professor Levitt critiquing the macro-level "lock-down" miscalculation and espousing the benefits of smart or micro-level lock-downs (focusing on at-risk groups, such as the elderly but not closing businesses and schools like Sweden ), in terms of the cost-benefit impacts over the short-term. The unanswered question is: in what ways will we judge this purported miscalculation as a huge mistake in a year's time?

The upside of this possible miscalculation (whether correct or not) is that it has given us pause to reflect about how the economic depression is benefiting planetary health and to enhance our awareness of how much the Baby boomers have screwed up the future of humankind. The macro-level lockdowns will create a psychosocial pandemic for years to come, but will this adversity have the long-term benefit of developing a new civilization and economy for sustainable development.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we understand the limitations of predictive modeling to anticipate and prepare for a range of future scenarios?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

8. Use simple rules to manage complexity

To transition beyond the orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, we need heuristics or simple rules to evolve beyond the 2.0 free market economy into the 7.0 purpose economy for local, national and global transformation.

The neoliberal information economy is based on reductionism, and the purpose economy is based on holism.

Here are three paraphrased simple rules adopted from Dr. Johannes Meier for facilitating this transition.

1. Be inclusive of diverse voices
2. Enhance systemic agility (reduce fragility and increase anti-fragility)
3. Navigate polarities for long-termism

The fourth heuristic is the most complex challenge in making paradigm shifts: transforming fixed leaderships mindsets that are based on dogma, fundamentalism and political ideology. This challenge involves letting go of the downsides of the old paradigm (the neoliberal 2.0 free market economy based on hyper-consumerism, unsustainable growth and catastrophic development) and redirecting its upside (innovation and entrepreneurship) into the new paradigm: the purpose economy based on pursuing virtues to serve the greater good and achieve the WHO sustainable development goals.

The Covid crisis has put the brakes on the neoliberal economy and given our planet a healthy break to think about the ethical injustices of wealth inequalities, the demise of planetary health and the climate emergency.

Enlightened conservatives have developed a Bipartisan Climate Roadmap and a carbon tax policy to pay back people $2000 per year that would more than compensate for the increased cost of gas.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we adopt simple rules to unite the political divides?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

9. Adopt the worldview of long-termism

Long-termism 12.0 is about the values of truth, justice, equity, freedom, diversity, inclusion, open innovation, entrepreneurship, healthy well-being, globalism and planetary health. Such long-termism is about sharing and working for the greater good. The win/win/win/win of open-mindedness, collaboration, cooperation and coopetition, and not the closed mindedness of win/lose competition, are the evolutionary paths to higher levels of human consciousness and civilizations.

This worldview shift from the short-termism of 2.0 free market economy to the 12.0 long-termism of the purpose economy will enable the altruistic, transcendent "I/We" mindsets and cultures of true patriotism to flourish and thereby subvert the narcissist, tribalistic "i/we" mindsets and cults of fake patriotism. This is the new era of the 12.0 awakening of long-termism and the 7.0 heroic leadership network power. The enemy against this transformation is our own reductionist mindsets. The antidote is the tough love of transcendence. As described below, this calls for overcoming the shortcomings of our mindset metaphors (such wars and sports) in developing scalable leadership development systems.

How can we regain our resilience to thrive with V2UCA stresses and take collective leadership opportunities to re-design healthcare? To address this question, it is critically important to set up interdisciplinary innovation "backline" teams who can take a step back from the hustle and bustle of V2UCA stresses. These teams can take a meta-position about navigating through troubled waters and beyond, and work in close collaboration with frontline leaders and teams battling the Covid crisis.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we design systems, networks and entanglements to sustain the worldview of long-termism?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

10. Enhance organizational agility, creativity and innovation

In the USA, the Covid crisis is our 9/11 moment in healthcare. This unprecedented event has cracked open the fragility of our political and healthcare systems in adapting to the precipitous challenge of managing V2UCA stresses. Fragile systems and organizations with top-down hierarchies, siloed structures and transactional cultures fail to optimize whole-system synergies needed to optimize our aligned responses and actions to overcome adversity more effectively and efficiently. All healthcare organizations have varying degrees of fragility. How can we enhance organizational agility (anti-fragility)?

We can deploy "liberating structures" to unleash the latent agility, creativity and innovation lying dormant within and across systems, organizations and communities. Leaders can manage V2UCA stresses adeptly by:

• Aligning our new vision, clarifying our purpose and implementing our values to navigate volatility
• Enhancing our understanding and abilities in how to respond to uncertainty
• Clarifying how to address the dynamic nature of complexity
• Managing ambiguity with agility by using generalist, complexity, human-centered design, systems, dialectic and metaphorical thinking.

Self-reflective learning question. How can we best counteract the effects of V2UCA, individually and collectively?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

11. Adopt sustainable meta-strategies to thrive

To unleash the wisdom of the crowd and enhance our individual-collective resilience and healthy well-being over time, we need to implement sustainable meta-strategies. Meta-strategies go beyond particular situations. Their enduring qualities help to develop situational strategies needed to thrive for a sustainable future.

• Collaborate for open innovation
• Amplify positive interpersonal and systemic reciprocities with rapid-cycle generative feedback loops
• Synergize interconnectivity within and across organizations, communities and systems
• Optimize the polarities between individual and social values or between short-termism and long-termism (such as the death rate vs economic recovery) by enhancing their upsides and diminishing their downsides
• Generate the network power to overcome the Covid V2UCA stresses more effectively and efficiently.

Using these meta-strategies, we can better prepare ourselves for the secondary psychosocial pandemic (burnout, anxiety, depression, PTSD, domestic violence, suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, etc.,) as the death rate peaks and fades away. Use our collective learning lessons from the creative upside of the Covid downside to improve personal, population and planetary health and work toward achieving the WHO Sustainable Development Goals.

Self-reflective learning question. What can we do to enhance how we use meta-strategies?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

12. Develop high-functioning complex adaptive learning platforms

Spread the #CopeWithCovid #Ideavirus by sharing tips online and offline in systematic and disciplined ways by creating complex adaptive learning networks. #CopeWithCovid tips provide information, preferably with a reference or citation, and encourage multiple-way exchanges, initiated and sustained by interactive webinars. Interactive webinars enable people to advise, counsel, debate, confirm and dispute facts and opinions, so that they can adapt, support each other and learn dynamically in real-time on an ongoing and systematic basis, ideally using an online innovation platform for asynchronous learning, with structured and spontaneous opportunities for synchronous learning.

We need structured approaches to blended learning to enhance our organizational capabilities and capacities to build high-functioning complex adaptive learning networks. Bottom-up approaches are essential for creating synergies and alignments with top-down approaches to overcome the constraints of fragile systems and organizations that are needed to generate amplified impacts.

Self-reflective learning question. What can you do to enhance your V2UCA skills in managing the psychosocial pandemic?

Pause, reflect and make notes about your reactions.

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Read part 1, part 3 and part 4 of #CopeWithCovid blog series

Calls-to-action: If inspired, make a comment below. If so inclined, share this #ideavirus blog series with your connections on social media. Invite them to share this series. Help build a #CopewithCovid infodemic to #FlattenTheCurve and the #DisinformationCurve until we develop new viral covid-19 treatments and vaccines.

Candor and feedback appreciated about #CopewithCovid interactive webinars. Any ideas about leads, connections or organizations to host webinars appreciated. Happy to chat too with kindred spirits. Contact via Linked-in. Pro-bono offer.

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Blog 4 further addresses how to develop heroic 7.0 network power: facilitating ethical, systemic, political, technological, professional and personal transformations.