Beyond Covid: cultivate equity thought leadership to learn, innovate, lead and thrive in addressing the injustices of isms

Aim of Reflexive Blog

• Cultivate equity leadership mindsets to redress isms, reduce inequities and create an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future for the greater good of all.
• Stretch our imaginations on how we can learn, innovate, lead and thrive in communion with others on how to generate the network power needed to solve the mega-problems of the 21st century
• Collaborate with educational, academic, research and leadership enterprises to launch an online experiental learning platform for aligning equity thought leadership development needed to unite people in maximize positive socio-political impacts.

Updated blog (08/30/2020). My peer-reviewed, sense-making and iterative blog series is an open learning journal that is updated on a regular based on feedback and discussions with others. Feel free to connect for a chat.

Ask: Looking for allies, collaborators, social entrepreneurs, funders and philanthropists to test and scale up this prototype netinar series. Ideas and connections to leaders and organizations appreciated.

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Definition of ism

Isms (classism, racism, sexism, etc.,) are negative oppressive biases (implicit and explicit) and prejudices embedded in our attitudes, beliefs, everyday language, behaviors and actions that discriminate, hurt, stigmatize and/or traumatize others. The synergy of isms create toxic politics and cultures that are detrimental to improving personal, population and planetary health.

Isms tilt the uneven playing of advantages disproportionally in favor of the powerful. This is the inverse care law: the people who need the least get the most, and the people who need the most get the least, especially when healthcare is more exposed to market forces. Isms create political, social, economic, educational, gender, racial and housing inequities.

Definition of equity

Isms are antithetical to the cultural humility and inspirational vision of equity: giving everyone a fair opportunity to reach their highest level of human potential and healthy well-being for the greater good of all.

Equity goes beyond equality to treat people individually, each according to their particular needs and potential.

Equity is about using solution-focused, eco-systemic meta-strategies to addressing fairness holistically, whereas redressing isms is about using reductionist problem-solving strategies to treat injustices individually. We need to use meta-strategies and strategies synergistically.

Definition of cultural humility

Cultural humility is a mindful and transpersonal stance of contextual non-judgmentalism, genuine acceptance and unconditional positive regard for people (modified Rogerian tenets of humanistic psychology).

This stance of self-awareness involves taking the "non-knowing" and "one-down" position to learn from, and better understand people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences.

The therapeutic and healing power of cultural humility is enhanced by virtues: such as transcendence, equanimity, civility, compassion, courage, vulnerability, creativity and curiosity.

1-sentence-1-question abstract

To address the political and social determinants of health, we must use the ethics of equity to address the injustices of all isms that were revealed, triggered and exacerbated by the Covid crisis.

• How can we create a reflexive age that enables us to learn from the colossal Covid failure and address the complex mega-problems of the 21st century?

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Winston Churchill

Educational Purpose of Reflexive Blog

Reflexivity is the exploratory process of impartially reflecting about, and becoming more aware of how our mindsets, virtues, moral priorities in values, biases and beliefs shape our assumptions, perceptions, attributions and interpretations. A collaborative learning process helps us to understand how we process complex problems differently and generate solutions that determine the outcomes, for better or worse.

Take your time for to understand the meaning of the evocative questions (in bold) before engaging in deep self-reflective learning and slow thinking about how to respond to them. Just select those questions that you feel called to write and talk about.

Your notes about those questions will prepare you for group discussions. The outcome of these discussions will help you explore whether to create learning networks, organizations and/or communities for embarking on a lifelong learning journey about how to manage complex problems.

You are invited to share your notes publicly as a blog and pose your own evocative questions. Create chain reactions to build reflexive blog networks for equity thought leadership development.

Create a reflexive age

We need an educational revolution to create new kinds of self-reflective, interactive and collaborative learning processes and platforms for exponential ethical, political and social transformations.

The central purpose of the book, Abundance, is to address this evocative question.

• How can we amplify the optimistic, positive biases of our slow-thinking neocortical abundance mindsets to ellipse the pessimistic, negative biases of our fasting-thinking, limbic-reptilian scarcity mindsets?

This challenging question calls for designing scalable innovative platforms to build and align learning networks, organizations and communities. This is prerequisite for generating the network power, capabilities and capacities to address the mega-problems of the 21st century.

We have to dream big to align small actions together that scale up and amplify impacts for the greater good. The vision for the equity leadership development movement is to develop a higher level of human consciousness for solving mega-problems collaboratively. The mission is to cultivate the civility, compassion and courage to redress the injustices of isms and inequities.

Equity leadership development is unconstrained by corporate groupthink, top-down leadership, administrative command-and-control management, organizational silos and rigid boundaries. This learning journey is about cultivating free-thinkers and distributed equity leadership development based on fostering open innovation, cultivating cultural humility and generating exponential network power.

In contrast, domineering charismatic leaders with their hierarchies of loyal follower-ship create inherent constraints of inside-outside power dynamics of inclusion-exclusion that diminishes the diversity of thought leadership, open-mindedness, engagement and collaboration.

Reflect-act-learn-improve how to develop equity leadership

The Covid tyranny of the pandemic urgency monopolizes our attention in developing short-term survival strategies with little or no time to consider long-term preparedness for addressing complex problems. The colossal failures of mishandling this pandemic in many Western countries give us ample opportunities to discover innovative ways of addressing the vulnerabilities, volatilities, uncertainties, complexities and ambiguities (V2UCA) of the 21st century mega-problems that build on the lessons learned from the Covid crisis.

How can we:

• Learn, innovate, lead and thrive in addressing the injustices of inequities revealed by the Covid crisis?
• Create an inclusive, sustainable and equitable future for the greater good of all?

These equity leadership questions call for building learning organizations, communities and networks to improve personal, population and planetary health (#IP3H) and to work toward achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

To address these mega-problems, we need effective collaboration between the three sectors: the government, the market and civil society. These broken inter-relationships are mired down in dysfunctional polarizations. We need all three sectors uniting together to build an inclusive, sustainable and equitable future.

• How can we initiate the healing process of fostering tri-polarity collaboration and synergy where the upsides of each sector are maximized and the downsides of each sector are minimized?

The systemic development of equity leadership takes a holistic approach of unifying disconnected civil society organizations, foundations, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists and government agencies to generate the network power for large-scale transformation. This Moonshot project calls for scaling up how to engage, activate and mobilize people to take collective actions for the greater good, like wearing masks.

An inclusive, sustainable and equitable vision of the future is jeopardized by the limitations of our own mindsets. To varying degrees, we are all indoctrinated with enslaved mind by propaganda machines and culture. If we are unaware of our own biases of closed-mindedness and exclusion, we will remain prisoners of our own egos. We will not be able to unite and work together on this vision.

We have to liberate ourselves from our own mindsets to be free, unite and work together.

This is about liberating people from the fundamentalism of political and religious ideologies, cult trances, blind unconditional loyalties, the prejudices, biases and discriminations of isms, the dogmas of identity politics and the quagmire of dysfunctional polarizations. Such liberation is essential if we can work together for the greater good in solving the mega-problems of the 21st century.

However, liberty and freedom are double-edged swords for good and evil. They are values and not virtues. Liberty assures freedom opportunities to people, but people can use liberty to threaten the freedom of others. The individual value of freedom elevates individual autonomy above the social values of public accountability. This priority legitimates the behaviors of anti-maskers. The countries where the people trust their government and endorse the social value of public accountability over individual autonomy have higher compliance rates of wearing masks.

• How can we design scalable learning innovative platforms to build a unifying movement of free-thinkers, true patriots and global universalists for truth, justice, equity and freedom?

This educational challenge calls on learning organizations, conscious capitalist corporations and kindred spirits to build an equity thought leadership development movement for transformational change. We need to reinvent our organizations (watch leadership video series) that shift beyond the constraining hierarchical leadership models of top-down management, where frontline workers run in hamster mills.

To what extent:

• Are you led by equity leaders who are open to organizational evolution to higher degrees of autonomy and transparent accountability?
• Does your organization have distributed equity leadership development for co-creating bottom-up improvement and innovation initiatives?

Reflect-act-learn-improve how to control the pandemic

The public health goals for the acute Covid crisis are to build a #CopewithCovid infodemic, #FlattenTheCurve and counteract #DisinformationCurve until we develop new viral covid-19 treatments and vaccines.

#FlattenTheCurve is a suppression strategy and not an elimination strategy. Elimination uses the same strategies as suppression but to a higher level in terms of strictness, timing and duration of application, especially travel restrictions.

• Wear face masks to reduce transmission
• Practice social distancing (lockdown, banning mass gatherings, keeping 6 feet apart)
• Rapidly isolate identified cases
• Do timely and comprehensive contact tracing
• Test and quarantine contacts
• Control border controls, restrict entry through travel bans and quarantine returning international travelers for 14 days

The option of an elimination strategy are only possible if the suppression strategies are highly effective. New Zealand and Taiwan adopted the elimination strategy. The current surge in community transmission of COVID-19 in Victoria has raised the issue about whether Australia should adopt an elimination strategy, as advocated by frontline doctors. Elimination does not mean total eradication.

What are your reflections about:

• the suppression versus elimination strategy?
• making Covid strategies mandatory?

Reflect-act-learn-improve by comparing countries

The USA and Brazil are both countries that are led by presidents who are anti-science, Covid-minimizing demagogues who both refuse to wear masks in public. The USA and Brazil are catching up with the leading countries with highest death rates per million. Their death rates are not declining like they are in Europe and Asia.

Death rate per million

Death rate per million. The African continent is on the upswing.

Sweden adopted a voluntary and minimalist Covid public policy and suffered a heavy death rate in nursing homes. The Dutch government with the leadership of their public health department is adamant that there is a lack of scientific evidence about the efficacy of non-medical masks in limiting the spread of Covid-19 virus. In contrast, the Czechs adopted the early use of masks and other measures.

The USA has the greatest resources in the world to develop pandemic preparedness and manage acute pandemics. As compared to exemplar countries such as Taiwan, China, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Singapore, the US federal government is in a failed state of public health, because it abdicated its constitutional responsibility to respond early and decisively in protecting its citizens in comprehensive and coordinated ways. Based on comparing international data, the Covid crisis has been a colossal political failure for the US government.

Based on 21 countries around the world (13 led by men and eight by women), the male-led and female-led countries suffered an average of 214 and 36 coronavirus-related deaths per million inhabitants, respectively. If the USA had the death rate of the average female-led country, 102,000 American lives would have been saved out of the 114,000 lost.

What are your reflections in comparing:

• the death rate per million across different countries?
• the differences in the death rates between male and female leaders?

Reflect-act-learn-improve from political failures

This political failure has arisen from the Trump's leadership incompetence and the right-wing and alt-right propaganda machines and think tanks (such as Fox News, alt-right videos on You-tube, webzine, Breitbart News and National Policy Institute). These machines have effectively used leftism to create asymmetrical dysfunctional polarizations over the past 40 years to regressively move USA toward alt-right extremism.

Leftism is self-righteous fundamentalist, either/or, "us versus them" right-wing authoritarian thinking. It triggers the anti-socialist reflex indiscriminately to anything that is outside of their groupthink. Alt-right trolls are anti-experts who manufacture zealous opposition to the slightest challenge against their talking points.

What is the most difference between authoritarianism and authoritativeness? Authoritarians are unable or unwilling to be reflexive about their mindsets, beliefs, assumptions, opinions and points of view. Being reflexive is a prerequisite quality of authoritative experts. They are open-minded free-thinkers who are able to change based on conflicting evidence and the emergences of new truths.

Leftism is the alt-right central core strategy of the fake patriotic playbook. The fake patriot propaganda machines are master manipulators that legitimate, normalize and promote authoritarianism, neofascism, white supremacy, the wealth inequalities of neoliberalism and the intersectionality of isms: economism, classism, reverse wealthism (prejudice against the poor), racism, sexism, LGBTQQIAAP-ism, agism, sizism and public healthism/primary care-ism (marginalization and underfunding of public health and primary care). Together, these isms have assured educational, social, housing, environmental, legal, gender and humanitarian injustices and inequities.

Alt-right extremists use leftism to sustain and exacerbate the uneven playing field of unfair advantages to favor the powerful and the elites. The structural and systemic discriminations and the cultural entanglements of leftism work against the American Dream of assuring equal rights (voting, equal justice and protection of rights under the law) and promoting equity (giving everyone a fair chance of achieving their highest potential of human flourishing and healthy well-being).

Leftism is a fear-based cult movement based on fears of losing power, prestige, pride and status that are fueled by the distrust and the hate of the other. Both conscious and unconscious fears drive the collective groupthink of perceived victimization. This loss reaction and perceived victimization have given rise to unrelenting hate and the animus that drives leftism.

Fears and the anxieties of threats are the social super glue that create the blind unconditional loyalty of political cults. In terms of explaining this brain dysfunction, the reactive emotionality of threats activates the reptilian and limbic brains to disable the guiding virtues, rationality and equanimity of the neocortical brain involve in critical free-thinking. This default setting sets the stage for inducing the Trump trance: closed-minded fundamentalism, rigid stereotypes, dogmas, erroneous beliefs and fiction to empower fake patriotism and the rule of the mob.

The Trump trance has divided and conquered the middle majority and scapegoated minorities. To heal the Divided States of America, we have to address this question.

• What will it take for the middle majority and minorities to unite in conquering the divisiveness of fake patriotism?

Leftism is the paranoid driver of conspiracy theories that the USA is under threat from Marxist and socialist extremists: an anti-communist legacy of the McCarthy era. These extremists pejoratively and reflexly label anything that are not considered to be alt-right-wing as Marxism and socialism.

Alt-right fundamentalist extremists are self-righteous anti-leftists.

These alt-right extremists have split the GOP from its historical roots of republican conservatism and legitimated the rise of white nationalism. Leftism is an extension of white supremacism and racism. The Lincoln project and Vote Vets are republican counter-movements against Trumpism and alt-right extremism. And liberalism is naive about defeating Trump.

Alt-right extremists are also the anti-scientific drivers of public health-ism: the explicit and implicit biases that discredit and marginalize the implementation of comprehensive and coordinated pandemic preparedness.

The identity politics of fake patriotism trumps the truth of science.

The interpersonal power dynamics between President Trump and Anthony Fauci are exemplar manifestations of leftism that are re-enacted at federal, state and local levels with micro and macro-aggressions.

The political biases of leftism and the alt-right have divided the nation along party lines about whether to wear masks or not. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are about twice as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to say that masks should be worn always (63% vs. 29%). Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that masks should rarely or never be worn (23% vs. 4%). Metaphorically, the USA is shooting itself in the foot. This injury has not yet given rise to rejecting other anti-public health measures, such as refusing to wear car safety belts, smoking indoors and disregarding the drinking and driving laws.

Leftism helps to explain why 38% of the US population approve of what Trump's performance in handling the Covid Crisis. This lack of public accountability in political governance and performance has allowed leadership incompetence to go unchecked. This calls for developing explicit public policies and corrective actions to prevent reoccurrences of such ineptitude. We need to be better prepared for the next national security and/or public health risk.

What are your reflections about:

• Trump's performance in handling the Covid pandemic?
• The effects of leftism on the Covid crisis?

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Join equit thought leadership development movement

We need to build this movement to cultivate open-mindedness, anti-fragility and agile learning for transformational change. Netinars invite people to embark on exploratory, interactive and collaborative online learning journeys together, in the spirit of inclusion, diversity, open innovation and social entrepreneurship. Everyone has a different starting point on their learning journey.

This blog will help you initiate a learning journey to understand what stands in (y)our way and explore why and how to move forward together in the right directions. This journey will help you discover what the blog topics below means to you in relationship to others.

Prepare for self-reflective learning

To initiate your learning journey, you are invited to write a self-reflective journal about exploring a wide-range of bolded questions (see above and in blog links ) at your own pace and in your own time. Click on the hyperlinks in these blogs to read additional resources to learn, discover and understand more about key ideas and concepts.

• What do you feel called to speak about in response to the bolded questions? Write about what is most meaningful to you.
• What top of mind topics (new learning, a desire to learn more, an issue, a concern or unanswered question) would like to address in your discussion groups?

Write an opinion piece of 300-500 words to the bolded questions in the blogs. Make a title and summary (less of than 100 words) of what you want to talk about. Conduct a search and share an educational resource (article, podcast or video, movie, etc.,) using the key words from the title of your summary.

Three sequential sessions (15-25 minutes each) over 60-90 minutes with 3-4 people (in person or online) will set discussion groups with different people.

Prepare for interactive learning

Share your notes and summary before or at the group discussion or netinar (online event). Use your notes to guide your small group dialogues:

Set the agenda of the group discussion by letting each person give a one-minute summary of their topic (new learning, an issue, a concern or an unanswered question) and then have an open session to discuss your agendas. Share the url of your resource online as part of your one-minute presentation.

Use the last three minutes for each person to describe what was their take-home message from the group discussion. This message may be about new learning, a desire to learn more, an issue or concern and/or an unanswered question.

Additional online or in-person discussion groups

The netinar topics below explore the challenges of overcoming the intersectionality of isms. To deconstruct structural and systemic isms, we need to design scalable solutions that create an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future for the greater good of all.

Session 1: Understand old problems anew (60- 90 minute session)

We need to see our old problems of isms anew in order to envision an inclusive, equitable and sustainable solutions.

a. Understand isms

b. Use the antidote to isms

c. Address the injustices of inequities

Session 2: Create an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future (60- 90 minute session)

An inclusive future calls for creating distributed equity leadership development programs to address the injustices of isms and inequities. This goes beyond the either/or, "us versus them" polarization mindsets to both/and, "us and them" polarity management mindsets. This mindset shift sets the stage for envisioning an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future and the dawn of a new civilization about how we can learn, innovate, lead and thrive in addressing the mega-problems of the 21st century.

a. Envision an equitable dawn of a new civilization

b. Take global and national perspectives together

c. Create equity leadership development programs

Session 3: Deconstruct structural and systemic isms (60- 90 minute session)

We need to de-construct the structural and systemic isms that create the cultural deterrents to making transformational change. This calls for designing scalable learning platforms to accelerate our innovative capabilities and capacities to address the mega-problems of the 21st century.

a. Redress wealth inequalities

b. Address gender inequities

c. Overcome structural racism and systemic discrimination

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Share your learning experience online

• Share a brief summary of what you learned from this blog (a new learning, a desire to learn more, an issue, a concern or an unanswered question)
• Share a url resource (article, blog, podcast, video) related to the topic of your interest.
• Summarize your important take-home message from your group discussion.

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If you sample an online or in-person group discussion based on any of these blog, it will help you decide whether to extend your learning journey about how to address the injustices of inequities revealed by this pandemic.

The next major blog section describes what the Covid crisis has revealed: the injustices of inequities.

Read blog series: Covid revelations, netinar, leadership failures, journey journal, macro-perspective blogs 1, 2, 3 and 4.

A related blog: How well does the language of white fragility and privilege help to promote anti-racism?

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

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