Building Resilience: Recapping Day Two of FORTUNE Brainstorm Health 2021

Here’s my recap of day two of the FORTUNE Brainstorm Health Conference, which I co-chaired with Fortune Editor-in-chief Clifton Leaf and Dr. David Agus. The theme, as on day 1, was “Building Resilience” — in ourselves, in our companies, in our communities, in our healthcare system and for our planet. The pandemic exposed the costs of not being prepared. We’ve all learned so many lessons during the past year, both individually and collectively. Those lessons are different for everybody, but one element common to us all is when we nurture our resilience, we’re much better able to navigate and even thrive during times of uncertainty and disruption, more of which are surely headed our way. Here are my top takeaways from day two. 

1. Flexibility is the key to the future of... everything.

The first panel I moderated was on “Reimagining a Healthier Workplace” with Cisco Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer Fran Katsoudas, Kaiser Permanente Executive Director of Workforce Wellbeing Maria Dee, Disney Parks Chief Medical Officer Dr. Pamela Hymel and Salesforce Chief People Officer Brent Hyder. The single biggest answer that came through is that there is no single solution to creating a healthy workplace. As Fran Katsoudas put it, there will be no "one size fits all for a company” in the future, no single solution to creating a healthy workplace. It’s going to be about flexibility and meeting employees where they are — which is essentially another way of making the case for building resilience. Each panelist talked about tailoring and customizing not just a workplace model, but a well-being and mental health model for each employee. And Brent Hyder talked about leveraging technology to create these individual approaches. As Maria Dee said, “we’ve done a lot of listening to our workforce and really trying to understand the fear, the concerns.” And that’s a conversation that’s not going to stop.

2. The hybrid model can be more connected.

Brent Hyder noted that while Salesforce had experience with the hybrid model even before the pandemic, they had much to learn when the pandemic began. They did a lot of listening, employed well-being surveys and worked hard to deepen connection. “We've learned in this virtual environment that human connections can be made in many different places,” he said. And the result is that he’s now closer to his team, and even if they’re disconnected physically they’re more connected emotionally, which is the more important form of connection. As he put it: “I think this hybrid environment is really the future and it really will open and unlock both a more equal world and a more productive world.”

3. The way forward is upstream.

The need to go upstream came through in virtually every session, and not just because my co-chair, Dr. David Agus, and I kept asking about it. The pandemic had made clear the costs of going just downstream. As Dr. Marc Harrison, CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, said to Dr. Agus, “right now the system is set up to provide high-end care and put people in beds.” But keeping them out of those beds would be much better for everybody. And more and more healthcare leaders get that. As Greg Adams, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, put it, “Upstream is our lane.”

4. We need to invert the pyramid.

I’ve been lucky during the pandemic to have worked with both Dr. Lloyd Minor, Dean of Stanford School of Medicine, and Dr. Michelle Williams, Dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, so my panel with them was a huge highlight for me. Echoing the need to go upstream, Dean Minor spoke about how we need to turn our current healthcare priorities upside down and focus less on sick care: “The pyramid of resources and of attention in American healthcare is inverted... We need to be putting a lot more time and attention on prediction and prevention. Instead, we devote most of our time, attention and the vast majority of our resources to providing sick care. I'm not saying for a moment that we should take that away, but we've got to build the prediction and prevention base of the pyramid much more in America than we have in the past.”

5. Social determinants determine our health.

Several panelists talked about the need to address social determinants of health, including housing, food scarcity, transportation and job and financial insecurity. As Dr. Williams put it: “Social determinants of health are really the factors that determine 80 to 90% of our health and wellness. These are factors that relate to our food security, our housing security, education, opportunity to have a living wage and green space that would allow for physical activity and mental health and wellness. And these are levers that promote health that exist outside of the healthcare system in communities where people live and learn... I've always considered public health and medicine as sister disciplines involved in the enterprise of protecting, promoting and preserving human capacity to thrive.”

6. The role of purpose.

In her conversation with Alan Murray and former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, Lt. General (ret.) Nadja West, emphasized the role of purpose in helping leaders in both business and government navigate the chaos of the past year. And she started by quoting the U.S. Army’s definition of leadership: “Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improving the organization.” 

7. Racism is a public health crisis.

That was one of the points made by Dr. Williams. And if we want to seriously address the health disparities laid bare by the pandemic, as well as move the needle on chronic diseases, we need to also confront this issue head on. As Dr. Williams put it: “In recognizing that systemic racism can have multi-generational effects on the health, the wellness, the resilience to withstand environmental or man-made threats to health has become very clear to all. If we recognize that structural racism is a public health crisis, we will then have a framework, the tools, the capacity to develop roadmaps to address and correct and mitigate the problems that contribute to health disparities.”

8. The need for empathy.

Hubert Joly emphasized how the pandemic has made clear how essential empathy is to resilience and to what makes us thrive as humans. “As the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran said, ‘work is love made visible,” Joly said, “and business is about love, about loving your employees and customers and stakeholders.” And it’s also what will help us take care not just of ourselves and each other, but of the planet. The same theme came through in my interview with United Airlines executive chairman Oscar Munoz who managed to turn around an airline while recovering from a heart attack and a heart transplant. “In the world of personal sustainability, I think a great value inside of us is to open our lives and empathy and caring toward others around us not just ourselves.”

9. The coming challenge: post-traumatic COVID disorder. 

With Karen Lynch, CEO of CVS Health

When I asked CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch what the most important conclusion of the white paper CVS recently published about the mental health impact of the pandemic, she replied that we’re going to be facing a “post-traumatic COVID disorder. . .we’re going to see a long-standing, lingering impact of mental health issues.” This was echoed by Dean Williams who said that she believes that when all is said and done, “we will likely see a very much higher collateral damage to our mental health and wellness than to our physical health because of the impact this pandemic has had on our mental health and well-being.”  

10. No mandates for vaccine hesitancy... yet. 

We asked nearly every panelist about vaccine hesitancy and the approaches centered on communication, access and awareness. As Fran Katsoudas put it, “What we try to do is honor and respect our people’s privacy and then do our best to make it easy for them.” But as Oscar Munoz said, “this is not just about you and your health, it’s also about the health of everyone around you.” 

11. The moonshot of the vaccine.

To end on a high note, I found David’s interview with Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla riveting. It made me realize how good it is that our culture has moved from the old Silicon Valley mantra to “move fast and break things” to a new and better mantra to “move fast and make things.” That’s the slogan that encapsulates what Pfizer and other vaccine developers did, and we can all be deeply grateful. We’ve heard the word “moonshot” being used a lot lately to describe various challenges of the pandemic. But listening to Dr. Bourla describe not only creating the mRNA vaccine, but putting in place a worldwide network of dry ice to distribute it really does live up to the term.