The Disservice Theory of Constraints Did to Itself and to Covid-19

Introduction

The title graphic reads stop the pandemic at work. I miss-read that as; "stop, there is a pandemic at work on us," rather than the intended "stop the pandemic in the work-place." That misreading however appealed to me as containing a double meaning; not only to stop from doing for a moment because there is a pandemic afoot, but also to stop for a moment and think too. There has not been a lot of thinking done in TOC about this, but there certainly has been a lot of reacting.

Recently, on October 19th 2020, former FBI Assistant Director of Counterintelligence, Frank Figliuzzi, speaking on an unrelated matter [1] commented that; "as a general rule, people ignore the truth when reality is not helpful," and went on to described the particular situation that concerned him. But then he continued on by analogy to say; "Its actually quite similar to the Covid-19 response, and thinking that it is lesser than it truly is, it's less deadly than it truly is."

Likewise Doctor Ashish Jha, the Dean of Brown University's School of Public Health said [2] "From the beginning of this pandemic, I feel like all of us have been battling two enemies. First the virus which is infectious and deadly, and then disinformation. And disinformation is purposeful misinformation spread to cause confusion about what the right thing to do is."

Those comments really hit me, they synched with me, because I had been thinking about this problem for some time. Thinking of coronavirus (the agent) and Covid-19 (the illness), thinking about how this interrelates with:

• Denial, anxiety, and rejection.
• Guy Du Plessis' couching of denial in drug addiction as a profound narrowing of awareness.
• Brené Brown's concept of numbing.
• Robert Kegan's concept of immunity to change
• Margaret Heffernan's concept of wilful blindness.
• Our own dealings with diet, drink, drugs, and depression.

Figliuzzi's comment about ignoring truth (well reality actually) when reality is not helpful, a numbing to reality, just seemed to slot into that place that some would call the mermaid. Its not something that I have particularly addressed before, but it was an additional nuance that was intriguing all the same. And that begged the question, what if Jha's observations about misinformation was, in fact, part of the same thing? What if the apparent disinformation is simply just a part of ignoring the truth?

Let Me Map Our Journey

Let's start by sketching out where we will end up and then you can make the decision whether you want to follow this through step by step or not.

Let's draw this out in generalised form as an intent-impact matrix, the most effective and least utilised tool that we have.

Starting in the lower-right quadrant we have the negative impact which I have labelled as the problem. This is something that has arisen as a consequence of the positive intent of the status quo in the adjacent quadrant of the lower-left. The problem is a current negative that we wish to avoid and the status quo is the current positive that we wish to retain. What I have explicitly labelled as the "problem" here is, in fact, an effect. Ironically the cause of the problem is in the positive intent to the left, the status quo.

To counter the problem requires a solution, and that solution is the future positive intent of the upper-left quadrant. That solution can sometimes raise anxiety, denial, and rejection, and as a consequence we return back once more to the status quo, stuck, as it were, once again back at the place from whence we came. We return to the cause of the problem that we are creating and trying to address. Indeed, we end up doing the opposite of what we wanted to do.

Now, let me add here, the crux of the matter that I will build to.

You see, when we are anxious, when we fear separation, we will build negative fantasies about how the future will unfold. These stories, these negative fantasies, function to consciously or subconsciously bring us back to the status quo. We can, in fact, build negative fantasies for any quadrant. Travelling in a figure of eight, they are:

• Lower-left, we fear not retaining the current positive
• Lower-right, we fear retaining the current negative
• Upper-left, we fear not gaining the future positive
• Upper-right, we fear gaining the future negative

I described these aspects at TOCICO in June 2012. The upper-right quadrant is, however, the premier position for negative fantasy to operate in. Negative fantasies are wickedly effective tools, a negative fantasy does not have to be probable, it only has to be vaguely plausible.

However, it has also been apparent to me for some time that there is also a converse to this. As it turns out a colleague who is in medicine noted a few months ago that so much of the commentary about the future of coronavirus and Covid-19 is built around hope. Hope (not hopefulness which is something else again) is the positive fantasy. It maps out in the same manner.

• Lower-left, we hope to retain the current positive
• Lower-right, we hope not to retain the current negative
• Upper-left, we hope to gain the future positive
• Upper-right, we hope not to gain the future negative

If negative fantasy is the south pole of a magnet repelling us away from something in the future, then positive fantasy is the north pole attracting us back towards something in the present. We build positive fantasies within the present in order to keep ourselves within the present.

Although I had long mapped hope as an opposite of fear, and both together as future and thus fantasy, hope is also a part of the present in the sense of narrative fallacy. The difference, I believe, is that fallacy is more about the negation or reduction of something that already exists, where as fantasy is about the creation of something that doesn't yet exist.

Let's make it more clear:

• Negative fantasy is the creation of negative, unexpectable, yet vaguely plausible future reality.
• Narrative fallacy is the negation of a current and expectable reality in order to make it positive.

Narrative fallacy is closer to the intent of Figliuzzi's mis-information, Du Plessis's profound narrowing of awareness, Brené Brown's numbing, Robert Kegan's immunity to change, and Margaret Heffernan's wilful blindness. Later I will illustrate these two forms; negative fantasy and narrative fallacy, with Covid-19 specific examples. Both negative fantasy and narrative fallacy do not have to be probable, they only have to be plausible. Their rhetorical beauty resides in the fact that they are impossible to discount, seemingly improbable to imagine, but just every so slightly plausible at that.

But right now let's go back to the start of this year.

The Emergence of the Pandemic

The possibility of a novel virus was raised on the last day of 2019, and the next day, the first day of 2020, Singapore immigration was on the watch for symptoms of an influenza-type illness amongst incoming flights to Changi. One of the earliest interesting non-facts to emerge was the role of wet market in Wuhan and the possibility that animals there provided an intermediary host. The subsequent speed in which this virus propagated within the cool and moist but otherwise ultra-hygienic confines of so-called meat processing facilities should put this intermediate host theory to bed. In fact, the intermediate host theory is a kind of narrative fallacy, it negates what we really know. The Chinese were well aware that such viruses (OK viri for the perfectionists, although this does not seem to have a sound basis in English) were endemic within populations in proximity to bats but who had no direct or indirect contact with that host or other intermediary hosts. Bat's fly! Check out How China’s “Bat Woman” Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus in the June 1st edition of Scientific American.

In early March and "out of an abundance of caution," TOCICO decided to take the June Paris conference virtual. In hindsight, a prescient decision if ever there was one. But it produced an interesting reaction on professional social media, well LinkedIn to be specific. If I was to paraphrase that reaction I would do so with these three generalised responses:

• Surely it will blow over by then.
• Nobody is going to stop me from going to a football match.
• More people will die in auto accidents in Texas than there will be deaths from corona virus.

Its only the effort involved that stops me from going back and extracting these verbatim. At their base is some form of narrative fallacy, a lessening of reality, making things less dangerous than they might be. Less dangerous than they might seem.

Sanjeev Gupta of Realization Technologies was one of the very few people "within the community" who consistently spoke of the real and present danger. Hat's off to Sanjeev.

On other social media it appears that TOC experts were getting ahead of themselves and discussing the economic rebound from this pandemic even before the pandemic had started to take root. Specially a Deloitte economic recovery scenario plan. Within the community there was also commentary such as "Are the measures taken to battle COVID-19 leading to a much bigger Crisis?" and posts such as "Corona virus deaths in context" when they were just 82,000 world-wide, 7 months ago that is.

Continuing on this positive theme TOCICO invited speakers to the virtual conference "to look into the future, post-covid-19, with a positive posture towards our likely future reality." Well, I have to say that at that point the science of Eli Goldratt went out the window. Science doesn't have a positive or a negative posture, those things are evaluations. Rather, science probes - albeit within a social context - and those things are descriptions. Sales does posture, science does not.

At the end of March someone commented to me; "I couldn't help but noticing what I assumed to be a tone of disappointment (or even frustration and anger) in some of your recent comments on LinkedIn." A week or so later at the beginning of April I was saying privately that “we” in TOC have done a fairly great disservice to ourselves. My bad English I know, but you get the point.

There was good reason for this - and it hasn't changed even though the arguments have become more pernicious and more and more built around that old concept of Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest and death to the weakest. A beautiful circular logic that if you die or suffer long-term consequences from Covid-19 then you are weak rather than simply unlucky - and totally at odds with the fact that a strong immune system response is sometimes a bigger issue than the infection itself. If you happen to be one of those health professional helping others, or one of the myriad of public service workers, the so-called essential workers, well then I guess you are doubly unlucky.

And that brings me to the next two sections.

Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand

I just happened to have in my possession a copy of the 2005 edition of Geoffrey Rice's history of the 1918 flu pandemic in New Zealand. There is now an abridged 2017 edition called The Black Flu. It not exactly bedtime reading. Black November was so-called for both the severity of the outbreak and the fact that normal healthy people, in fact especially normal health people, would turn black after they were deceased. Geoffrey Rice, an historian, relates how his father vividly remembered: "You wouldn't forget it if you lived through it. People collapsed and died like flies, even big strong men in the prime of life." His father continued: "In that flu, when they died, the bodies turned black. That's why your Nanna called it the Black Flu. In one house I looked into the bedroom and there was the wife, still fast asleep, and her husband was dead and black beside her." Rice's father was nine years old at the time.

Mortality amongst those aged 20-50 years was very much higher than those older than 50 years of age, peaking at around 150 deaths per 10,000 at the 30-34 year age bracket. A little bit different from the current situation for sure, but the underlying cause is the same, over-reaction to the viral infection.

This is what an unmitigated pandemic mortality graph looks like.

It swept through each metropolitan area with a peak period of about 4 weeks. A pandemic that was all but written out of the subsequent N.Z. history books. (also see Black Flu - New Zealand's worst public health disaster.) As Rice records; "The First World War claimed the lives of 16,688 New Zealand soldiers over four years, while the influenza epidemic killed nearly half that number of civilians in less than two months."

I believe it was this experience that largely informed New Zealand's current pandemic plan and, moreover, was the expectation within public service healthcare for the way that this current coronavirus would unfold.

Acute Hospital Experience

I was fortunate to work in a large acute regional hospital over three winters. This is the sort of facility that counts floor space in acres (20 acres) beds by the hundreds (500 beds) and senior doctors by the same (300). There were 80,000 in-patients per annum, and 10,000 treatment codes (aka sku's). There were not many places in that hospital, clinical and otherwise, that I did not frequent and that included emergency department, and theatres.

So it astounded me when people began to discuss ICU beds as though they were a commodity and intubation as though it was routine. At least in New Zealand the criterion for ICU is multiple organ failure or post major surgery. The nursing ratio is 1:1 and you are under the care of intensivists. Yes, there are ventilators in other places, PACU (post-anaesthesia care unit or recovery) but these spaces are fully utilised by surgery and to operate such a bed continuously as an ICU bed is a totally different thing.

The point that I am getting to is that a public service hospital "heaves" in winter. In winter often ICU bed space is the limiting factor, the pinch point, on the admission of serious cases from provincial hospitals awaiting surgery. Intensivists know from personal experience that they can kill patients by not having a cascading plan for managing the bedload in that unit. If you want to have sobering discussions, work in a hospital.

Public service hospitals are great common-cause accumulators - they work because they are so big and general, and things, well, mostly they average out. Hospitals do practice for the special-cause of mass casualty, usually as table top exercises, after all they do drama really well. But they don't practice and are not designed for mass infections. Its almost beyond our direct experience. Some of our present-day regional hospitals were built after, and only as a consequence of, the 1918 flu pandemic. Dealing with rare events is a difficult concept.

If I was angry at the commentary on LinkedIn it was because of the lack of real-life experience in that commentary.

Let's turn our attention to the pandemic.

The Pandemic is Not a Dichotomy

The pandemic is not a dichotomy between health and economy. You might like to check Ed Yong in The Atlantic and see what he has to say about false dichotomies (America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral). Not that you would think there was anything other than dichotomies looking at the various clouds that have been constructed over this issue. I have yet to see one that was not couched in the language of dilemmas: a choice of either this or that, or a choice of this or not this. These are either/or arguments and we cannot solve such problems at the same logical level as we construct them (see Eli Goldratt, Albert Einstein, and Mohit Saini). They must be solved at a higher level.

A good test for a dilemma is that each side seems effort-less, hence we so easily flip-flop from one choice to the other and back again. These are technical challenges. Equally they will contain double jeopardies and therefore each side will negate the other. They are in the Aristotelean sense contradictory propositions. Notably, the ones presented on social media that I saw were not solved. That is also a characteristic of dilemmas, they place you in a bind.

If one of the pillars of TOC is that there is no conflict in reality, then why do we so readily draw out a conflict cloud, put it on the table, and then fail to solve it? If you don't know what sort of cloud the problem is, if you don't know how to solve it, then don't write it. Its like having a loaded gun, pulling the trigger, but having no idea how to aim the thing.

The only way out is to recognise that the real challenge at hand is an adaptive one. Many individuals and indeed whole nations have come to recognise this, while others have not. Let's have a look.

The Pandemic is an Adaptive Challenge

In the 10 months since this coronavirus and Covid-19 has burst onto the scene, it doesn't seem to be going away. In fact we can begin to explore this issue with a fairly simple problem statement.

In a word, coronavirus and its disease Covid-19, is uncontrolled and deadly. Just how uncontrolled and deadly depends upon your evaluation. But a reasonable description is the information coming out of the United States of America (readily available data, and good diagnostics). At least as of 19 October there were 8,154,594 confirmed cases, with 219,674 deaths (attributed to that cause), giving what is known as the case fatality rate of 2.7%. Another and more sobering way to look at this is in terms of excess mortality (because not all deaths will be attributed directly to Covid-19) which is closer to 300,000 (The Pandemic’s Real Toll? 300,000 Deaths, and It’s Not Just From the Coronavirus New York Times, 20 Oct).

The Atlantic article earlier also called the minor illness vs death a false dichotomy, and to me personally one of the apparently frequently ignored issues is the in-between situation of long-term damage. Not long-term illness, long-term damage. Early in July infectious disease expert Dr. Aileen Marty found that 2/3rds of the asymptomatic young people that she saw in Florida had lung damage click. Whether this will go away or not is unknown (Coronavirus: Warning thousands could be left with lung damage click). If you have doubts about the nature of lung scarring, then check up on the nature of pulmonary fibrosis. If twenty-something year olds consider themselves bullet-proof, consider for a second those same people in their middle-age (as the doctors call it) suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I'd like to tell you that is a negative fantasy, but think about it all the same. On balance it is more probable than plausible. Smokers in their mid-twenties never used to think about it either! And one more for the road as we say: The strange ways that coronavirus can affect the brain, Daily Telegraph, 26th October. The salient point there being that a rise in Parkinson's disease was observed in the years after the 1918 pandemic as well.

So, what do we do? We mitigate it!

In fact that is the only solution at present. So-called flattening the curve is a mitigation and in a historical sense it has been spectacularly successful! Remember those graphs from the 1918 flu pandemic above, it swept through unmitigated over a 4 week period. About 50% of the population was thought to have been infected (yep I know, no diagnostics then). At the moment in the United States 6 months into its exposure national blood sample testing (Week 41, 2,632,222 specimens) for SARS-CoV-2 yielded 141,317 positives or 5.4% click. But before you get too excited, that is not a random population sample and it most probably over-estimates the positivity because it under-represents significant portions of the population.

Early on, and especially within those exquisite petri dishes called cruise liners, it certainly looked like hand-to-surface-to-hand-to-face infection was important. These are, after all, the very places that those gastro viruses run rampant. However, it now seems that aerosols are much more important. If nothing else, choirs seemed to have proved the point. Ultimately, Asian nations with a history of mask usage (which dates back to the 1918 flu pandemic) have also shown empirically that such a mitigation strategy works spectacularly well.

The Guardian Newspaper reported on the 20 October that Vietnam with a population of 95 million people had reported just over 1,110 Covid-19 infections, and only 35 deaths. It had at that time reported no locally transmitted infections for 47 days click.

But, let me pause to show you my best-ever found-graphic.

Note especially that wearing a mask stops you from infecting others; down from 90% to 5%. I can't vouch for the numbers, I can't even find the source. I'd certainly like to get a high resolution copy and mount it on the wall as art!

So what's the issue with the solution if it is so simple. And it is simple.

Its the old anxiety, denial, and rejection thing. It doesn't matter whether it is diet, or drink, or drugs, or depression, this is the quadrant that is at the heart of an adaptive change. I don't want to populate that quadrant, but let's just say that in some parts of the world masks in public are "uncool" or worse. Conversely not wearing a mask is modelled as being cool.

[added in editing, if there was any consistency to this, then people would insist surgeons didn't wash their hands, and didn't wear masks in theatre!]

Now things start to get interesting and we can begin to build strong parallels with those other authors that I mentioned at that start. Let's have a look.

Anxiety, denial and rejection of the adaptive challenge to wear a mask in public takes us back to the present positive and a contrary action. The contrary action is no mitigation. The certain and negative impact of this positive intent is still sitting there to the right: the uncontrolled and deadly spread of the virus. And around we go again. Nothing is resolved.

But why is this so? We are creatures of positive intent. So how can no mitigation be positive to us? Let's have a look.

It turns out that the contrary action of no mitigation is supported by a double negation, which makes it positive. The common assertion that its just like the flu (quite coincidentally I heard that again today on international news media) is the same as saying "its not" (a negative) "dangerous" (a negative). A double negation like that becomes a positive. I have a convention of putting double negatives in square brackets to keep track of them.

We know it is not just like the flu because healthcare workers don't die from catching the flu from their patients. The flu does not have an infectious asymptomatic stage, the flu does not cause fit and healthy people onto ventilators in ICU and so the list goes on. But if you have a narrowed sense of awareness that bracketed statement is "true" to you. Moreover it supports your own contrary action. So indeed your own actions are not inconsistent with your own beliefs. And maybe belief is indeed the appropriate word.

What if you know of no victims yourself. What if the victims you do know of are somewhere else, sometime else, a different age or social-economic group maybe. Your belief is not challenged. But if it is challenged you can ignore it. That is the wilful blindness of Margaret Heffernan, you can numb yourself to the grief it is causing others (because it is other's grief) and so on.

If you look at this form it is almost exactly the same as Robert Kegan's immunity to change X-Ray sequence mapped into a matrix.

OK, normally I would put his contrary actions (a negation) in square brackets because the commitments and deeper beliefs are usually positive. In the case of the pandemic I have put the beliefs (a double negation) in bracket as much so that I can keep track of where the issue is. Kegan's point is that we don't do the one big thing in the upper-left because it is at odds with our commitments in the lower-left and the contrary actions that arise out of these.

The one big thing is like the New Year's resolution that is broken on the first day of the New Year and everyday after. That is what adaptive challenges are all about. It is not until we vocalise our fears of what would happen if we do the new thing, or indeed stop doing the old thing, that we can delve down and expose those underlying commitments. These are exactly analogous to the wants, needs, and objective of a cloud.

Kegan gives a germane example of a gentleman who must take life-giving heart medication but finds every reason in the world not to. Watch Understanding Immunity to Change, especially from 3:50 min through to 8:30 min. It has been re-presented elsewhere, but this is the original as far as I can ascertain. Quite independently I used this just two years ago to explain how to convert Kegan's immunity X-Ray to a matrix (One Big Thing - Take Your Meds). If I re-wrote that article with a few word changes, it would be totally appropriate to the current situation.

But what if we don't want to delve down into the swamp of our mind, into all of our insecurities, all of the petty slights; both real and imagined? Ah you see we are very clever. We still have two backups in reserve, those two entities that we mentioned at the start: negative fantasy and narrative fallacy. Let's have a look. Let's start with the easier of the two, negative fantasy.

I'll illustrate this with a singular example. It goes like this. If we mitigate the pandemic by closing down the economy, the suicide rate will go up as a consequence, therefore we shouldn't do this. This is a narrowing of awareness, maybe a wilful blindness, certainly a fear of what will happen if we start to do something different, if we start to mitigate the situation. You could equally work in all sorts of negative fantasies about loss of liberty and similar such things. The overall purpose, however remote the possibility, is to bring you back to the contrary action of no mitigation. No mitigation is, of course, a consequence of a deeper belief, but the negative fantasy has absolved us from having to address that.

But there's more. Let's look at narrative fallacy.

You see you can redouble down here by invoking narrative fallacies. The one I have argued against the most is the apparent spec from WHO that says that the infection fatality rate (random blood serum anti-body positive over attributed deaths) is 0.13%. I just had to go back and check that I hadn't imagined that number. The inference being that the impact is so low as to be discounted. Again there is a profound narrowing of awareness. What about all those who potentially have long-term damage. What about the fact that this is somewhat mitigated at present, the curve has been flattened so to speak. We haven't quite (yet) seen it go uncontrolled. But if this logic prevails we might just be so unlucky as to see it unfold.

Adaptive challenges are so tricky. They are not an effort-less bind, they are effort-full. They mean sitting back and being introspective, and well, sometimes that hurts. And sometimes if you are surrounded by conflicting noise its just so damn hard as well. We have all sorts of cognitive biases, not the least of which is a bias for confirmation. But where is the key here, where is the key that lets us unlock the challenge. They key is, if we are to be honest, within ourselves, within the anxiety that we probably choose to ignore.

What if we unlock it?

Resolving Adaptive Challenges

You know the moment we make a personal realisation that this is not the flu, or even remotely like the flu, then we are almost there. Let me draw it in two stages.

The moment we make the personal recognition that it is not like the flu - maybe we learn of someone who we knew who died of it and suddenly it is real and tangible - then no mitigation is no longer tenable, and we can strike that out. We might replace and anxiety and denial with new reservations and obstacles, like "for how long" and "where will I get this stuff" and so on, but in essence the adaptive challenge has been resolved and will begin to look like this.

What we are doing in effect is replacing our instinctful response, a comparison of something unknown (Covid) with something known (flu), by something thoughtful instead. Let's have a look at this.

Instinctfulness and Thoughtfulness

We are faced with a once in several generations challenge. Our general response is instinctful.

We are used to low infection reproduction rates, we are certainly not used to exponential rates. We are used to people, at the very least, being symptomatic - they look ill. So we know to take care not to spread whatever we have or they have. Moreover we are not used to being infected with something serious and yet not experience any symptoms at all. We are certainly not used to something that potential harms our lungs, maybe for the rest of our lives and having no inkling that it has even occurred.

On the other hand there are professionals who understand corona viruses, who understand pandemics, who understand that we have to move early and hard, who understand that at any moment what is currently apparent is already behind what will be apparent in the very near future. You see, we are creatures first and foremost of security.

We will go for security, at first sight every time. Our short-term need for security, our instinctfulness if you like, can however come at a cost to our long-term satisfaction.

We lock ourselves into that leftward descending diagonal.

The dissatisfaction we express about a pandemic is, at first at least, insufficient to push us forward or towards a thoughtful and adaptive solution, regardless of how simple such a solution may be. We are blocked by our insecurities, both real and imagined in the upper-right quadrant. We exacerbate those with negative fantasy in the upper-right and narrative fallacy in the lower-left such that we can generate a profound narrowing of our own awareness.

It is almost as though we relish the position of victim.

If I can maintain the pretence (a negative) of being a victim (a negative) I am sure and secure in my apparent positivity. Sometimes the world outside is big and frankly terrifying and the problems seem overwhelming. Moreover, from the position of victim I can obtain comfort from blaming all and sundry for all of the things that they should have done for me and didn't, and things that they shouldn't have done for me and did.

The alternative is to seize reality by the throat and take the position of victor.

Playing victim is a passive position. First you get to blame someone else for the situation. You become the passive pawn in their apparently active position against you. For those of us of a certain age or mental complexity, the response is often oppositional without any additional volition. Most of all it absolves us of any responsibility. We want to hold others to account without the maturity of any sense of reciprocal social responsibility that goes with it.

With a little bit of responsibility, we could easily turn from victim, or as Karl Buckridge used to say "at effect," to victors or again as Karl would say "at cause." If you will excuse the alliteration; we, as victors, could easily vanquish the virus.

Social responsibility is a higher order, a different logical level, from individual freedom. We know that because individual freedom depends upon, is a product of, social responsibility and not the other way around.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Did Theory of Constraints do a disservice to itself and Covid-19. Well clearly, in my evaluation, yes it did (Sanjeev Gupta excepted). And it continues to do so. This is a rare and serious matter. It is is not a game, and it is not a dress rehearsal.

We trivialised it as a false dichotomy, an effort-less choice between this or that (but couldn't decide whether it was this or that). Some called for economies to open up again, for workers to return to work. We treated the numbers at the start of an exponential progression as though they were linear and final. We suggested (and some still do) that the cure is worse than the cause. We made Covid-19 a conference theme and called for positive fantasies from the future while carefully stepping around the messy reality of the present. A narrowing of awareness if ever there was one.

And you know what, Theory of Constraints, our thinking process in fact, has a neat and succinct way of expressing all of the complexities that we have experienced. Science is like that. We can show how the quest for individual freedom and security and instinctfulness can ruin the day, and we can show how the special stories, the narrowing of awareness exacerbates this process. We can also show how social responsibility, and satisfaction, and thoughtfulness is the higher order logical level, the correct path, in fact, the only path out of this.

Let me finish-off by expressing the bitter-sweet irony that has unfolded here. Soon after the virtual conference finished someone raised that oh so familiar refrain of "how come if it is so simple no one is doing it" sort of thing. Referring of course to Theory of Constraints. This is always issued as a challenge and never as a request for learning. Otherwise the comment would start as a request to "please help me to understand," but that never happens.

However, you have to stand in wonder that if temporary mitigation measures for coronavirus are so simple, and indeed harmless to do, how come no one is doing it (at least in some places in the world) either. And rather like Theory of Constraints itself, this is made all the more poignant by the fact that, indeed, some people can simply get on with doing it.

The answer of course is that instinct rules for many people and in some cultures. Instinctfulness rules over thoughtfulness. Populism rules over realism. Mostly science gets kicked out the window. And you know this is marvellously liberating. If I can question the authenticity of everything, then I don't personally have to accept the responsibility for anything either. Such is freedom and liberty; apparently we seem to absolve ourselves of any sense of responsibility.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times writing on The threat of long economic Covid looms" said; "We are still only at the beginning. We cannot know how this will end."

What we can be certain of as a community, however, is that this virus is a not unlike a constraint; you can ignore the virus but it sure as hell will not ignore you.

References

[1] Former FBI official on Giuliani’s dealings with Russian agents, click

[2] Dr. Ashish Jha on the coronavirus pandemic: ‘The end is not near," click