Compliance, Leadership and the Coronavirus Crisis.

Compliance is a big word, most usually applied in business or the law, to convey actions required of citizens and organizations to follow legal requirements. The purpose of compliance is to ensure that people and institutions behave responsibly. Compliance is also a concept used in physics to describe the way the property of materials changing volume or composition. Compliance can also be used pejoratively to describe the way someone or something acquiesces. Indeed in Italian, the word for compliance is "conformita," which also means to conform.

In the current covid19 context, however, compliance has taken on a broader meaning, one that potentially affects whole communities, nations,  and even the globe. We are all asked to comply with a range of new rules of behavior and social relations that were unthinkable only a few short weeks go. Social or physical distancing requirements are being applied in varying ways in most countries, and as one of the prime means to limit the spread of the coronavirus. We are all asked to comply with these new norms, together with a host of other regulations that have closed down businesses and halted a wide range of "life as we knew it." In Australia, compliance levels are high, up to 85%. In other locations, the figures vary widely.

It is hard to imagine other circumstances in which people willingly (though with reservations) would agree to stay at home, not go to work, avoid visiting an elderly parent in an aged facility or hug their grandchildren. Yet by in large, we are. We comply because not to do so creates enormous risks.

But compliance and conformity have a troubling history. We have witnessed whole societies that complied with what was seen at the time as noble causes. These examples run from accordance with Nazi and Aryan ideology through to the way the children in the Australian cult "the Family" complied or long term deference to clergy in the church. The consequences of these forms of compliance were devastating and had lasting effects.

 We, therefore, need to question what compliance means in the current circumstances. Not to undermine the intention of a government's strategy to protect people but to ensure that such compliance and conformity does not leak over into other parts of our lives. Putting aside for a moment, that so much of our daily lives are governed by smaller micro-compliances, such as adhering to norms of politeness or patterns of everyday behavior, our current wholesale compliance is predicated on a contract between us as individuals, and as a society, and our political authorities.

Our contract says something like this: "in return for agreeing to give up my normal way of life, you will do everything you can to protect me and my country." Reciprocally we are also saying, "We recognize that the losses in freedom and liberties you, the government are asking us to take are, in fact, for our good and collective wellbeing."

The losses are enormous and real, ranging from livelihoods to personal freedoms to behave and congregate as we wish. The casualties include the tangible, i.e., don't go to the park, to the intangible such as the emotional and spiritual confusion that many of us feel.

Just last night, my daughter and two grandchildren came to our front porch, 3 meters from us at the front door, to collect some food I had prepared. They were there in front of me after ten days of not seeing them, and every fiber in me wanted to move to hug them. But I couldn't and didn't. At that moment, my compliance with current required standards of distancing illustrated powerfully the costs of doing so. The cumulative effect of such emotional connection is unknown but feels immense. A loss, no less real than the income that has stopped flowing to our business.

At the moment, I, like most people, are willing to make this terrible trade-off. To comply and experience profound loss, moment-by-moment, day-by-day in the service to a powerful motivation: to stay safe and alive. On the surface, it is a worthwhile contract. But what questions do we need to ask about ourselves as a society when levels of compliance have increased so dramatically? Do we know what the boundaries are? Would we recognize ahead of time the loss of freedoms experienced in the past under authoritarian regimes so that we could do something about them? So we could simultaneously partner with our political leaders in meeting the challenges of the pandemic but also always be vigilant about what we are asked to give up?

These seem to me to be questions of personal and collective leadership. We recognize, even intuitively, that change involves giving something up and sustaining losses to the way things were done before. But for most change and adaptation over my lifetime, we haven't been asked to maintain such physical, emotional, or spiritual losses. Yes, I can hug my grandchildren in six months! But how will I be after being disconnected for so long? What parts of our relationship will need reconfiguring? How do we collectively think about the impact of such loss on freedoms on those less fortunate than we are? 

There are many things in which we all can feel fortunate. Here in Australia, most of us have plenty of food, we are and can remain connected virtually, our governments are doing a good job overall in managing the crisis. So I don't feel pessimistic. But I do feel caution about what we are so willing to give up and what it means.

What losses are you grappling with? Which seems hard to sustain? Is the cost too high, or does it have long-lasting implications for how it will live in the future?