What to Expect in The Days Ahead. And What to Do About it.

What to Expect in The Days Ahead and What to Do About It

Joseph Grenny - March 22, 2020

What to expect

Here is my speculation about the next few months. These predictions don’t necessarily represent the way I think the world should be. They simply reflect a reasonable social science view of how things are. As I think about both the likely path of the virus, and predictable patterns of human behavior, I expect us to go through the following phases.

1.    Denial (January-March 2020). When it was just a “China” problem, we were able to fool ourselves into thinking this was SARS II. It would just be an Asian problem. We were confident a bunch of smart people would keep it from ever hitting us. When it hit Iran, it was still a “foreigner” problem. When it hit Italy and then cities in the US, some realized denial was delusion. Some political leaders began to respond. Much of the response was half measures of the timid. Today, however, the President, governors and mayors are attempting to implement strong containment policies. The last lingering Deniers are on Florida beaches fiddling while the world burns.

2.    Containment (Mid-March thru May 2020). Most today have accepted some amount of “containment” logic. We are willing to suspend much of our normal lives if it will “flatten the curve.” This won’t last long in the US for a couple of reasons:

a.    Misunderstanding. Most think that curve-flattening means that avoiding each other for a few weeks will dramatically lower the total number of infections and deaths. They’re willing to accept Depression-era unemployment levels so long as the period of sacrifice is short. But the only certain promise of a flatter curve is not that fewer will get infected, but rather than they’ll take longer to do so. The goal is to stagger the number of severely ill patients over a longer period of time more matched to the capacity of our healthcare system. For this to work, we would have to suspend economic and social life for a year or more. When people discover this misunderstanding, their willingness to do this for a year or more will fade, setting us up for the third phase.

b.    Bad Scorekeeping. The news media have created a perfect setup for another motivational blow. People persist in painful efforts only if they see compelling evidence that it produces a positive result. For example, you stick with a diet if your scale shows you are shedding pounds. Unfortunately, the media has you thinking your current size is what you weighed in high school. They keep a daily drumbeat of “infections” which is undoubtedly orders of magnitude lower than reality. They disingenuously suggest that their daily scorecard is the “total number of cases.” Since they don’t make the distinction between reported infections and actual infections, as testing becomes more available, this number will rise at a terrifying rate. This will inevitably appear to be “bad news.” You’re eating nothing but kale and water, but you’re putting on pounds. Once people run out of Netflix shows to watch, they’ll despair that their sacrifices aren’t paying off, and will become less vigilant about containment just at the time it is needed most.

3.    Compromise. As people both tire and lose faith in containment, they will begin to flirt with compromise. No one will be permanently pacified by receiving a $1200 check from the Federal Government. And at $1 trillion per round, the Feds won’t be able to do that trick very many times. By early May as people’s financial and psychological resources reach their limit, they’ll begin to ask more penetrating questions. Today (March 22), the tacit consensus is that “we will sacrifice anything if it means saving millions of lives.” Within 30-60 days there will be a growing appetite to find terms of surrender to the virus. Here’s how that will happen.

a.    “You mean you have no idea how long I have to do this?” When the score is getting worse rather than better, and leaders express no certainty over how long lifestyle pain will last, support for containment will erode.

b.    “This won’t be ‘one and done?’” To make matters worse, people will begin to think they’ve been duped. They’ll discover that containment only promises delaying infections rather than reducing them. Substantial reduction will only happen if either the disease can be perfectly contained (something we’ve never done with our “normal” yearly virus) or largely prevented (through a vaccine that is far more effective than our annual flu shot). Unless a highly effective vaccine is found soon, people will become aware that even after we stem this outbreak, new ones will occur every time we begin to mix in public again. As outbreaks recur repeatedly, our appetite for repeated isolation will decline. That will bring many to the viral bargaining table.

c.    “A treatment is almost like a cure!” If some moderately effective treatments are found, those in the greatest immediate economic and psychological misery will vote for “appeasement.” Treatment availability will help many who aren’t infected feel good about themselves while talking openly about placing others at greater risk. They can rationalize that the therapy gives “those people” a fighting chance. Before World War II, British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain was willing to let Hitler take Ethiopia, Austria and a bit of Czechoslovakia if it let his fellow Brits sleep better immediately. When sacrifices become tiring, many will tire of trading the certainty of economic misery for the vague possibility of death for people they don’t know.

d.    “It’s the new normal.” People can get used to anything. We’ll get used to the idea of losing a couple million of our fellow citizens. We already do. We expect to lose 30,000 every year to auto accidents. It’s baked into our consciousness. We don't worry about or lament it. We don’t go into crisis mode every year to prevent roughly 40,000 deaths from our “normal” flu virus. Why not? Because we’ve made a bargain with it. We tell it, “Keep it below 100,000 and we’ll put up with you.” We expect to lose a few hundred thousand to diseases (cancer, heart disease, stroke, etc.) that could be dramatically reduced if we took draconian measures to change some behaviors. But we’ve accepted those. We are deeply ambivalent about gun-related deaths. It’s become “normal” to lose tens of thousands to opiate-overdoses. And so on. Joseph Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” We’ll be more willing to compromise with the virus when we accept a certain level of mortality as a normal statistic.

As a result of all of these influences, by May some will be talking openly and unashamedly about tradeoffs rather than tragedy. New calculations will circulate about the cost of containment. Potential lives saved will be compared to cumulative misery, mental health concerns, divorce, economic disaster, family conflict, crime, non-Covid deaths (for example, of those with chronic diseases with inadequate healthcare support as Covid-19 cases take priority), etc. New catch phrases will embody the new “tradeoff logic,” creating a ethical equation that makes concessions to the virus discussable. We’ll hear unabashed discussion of questions like “Are we burning down the house to kill the rat?” and “Is the cure is worse than the disease?” that make it morally permissible to come out of our caves and cut a deal with Covid.

What to Do

I might be off by a month or so, but I suspect this is pretty close to the cycle we will go through. My recommendations are based on two assumptions:

1.    A miracle vaccine is more than 6 months away.

2.    Marginally helpful treatments will be available in the next 60 days.

If these assumptions are accurate, you should prepare for “Compromise” now. Here’s what you can do:

1.    Get ready to do business in an ongoing pandemic. We’ll be crawling out of our caves with the virus still lurking. People will want to get back to work and get back to living but in a state of heightened vigilance. The new normal will be risk mitigation not risk elimination. We will make permanent changes in social patterns for greeting, meeting and living. We may need to permanently surrender handshakes, hugs and European kisses in favor of bows or Namastes. Annoying, but not overwhelming ransom for a truce.

Compromise means employees and customers will accept an acceptable amount of risk as well. Your job is to ensure they feel safe enough in your way of doing business for their risk tolerance. The sooner you get in front of these changes, the sooner we will establish a new acceptable way of living. Organizations that pivot to this new normal best will need both potent social protocols and a culture of 200% Accountability.

Successful businesses will develop social protocols suited to the new mood. They will practice social distancing and hygiene habits rigorously. For example, they will permanently space offices and workspaces to enforce social distancing. Airlines may need to issue face masks and stagger seating. Effective leaders will change meeting patterns to rely on virtual contact as a default not a temporary inconvenience. Hygiene prompts and associated cleaning products will be ubiquitous. And none of this will succeed without a culture of 200% Accountability.

200% Accountability means that not only is each employee 100% accountable for following the standard, they are also 100% accountable for enforcing the standard with everyone around them—regardless of level or position. The other day I was at a workplace that had instituted social distancing. And yet within a few minutes I saw numerous violations of the norm—people standing inches from one another, shaking hands, touching a colleague’s arm, etc. I could tell the recipients of these touches felt uncomfortable. But they said nothing. Especially if the violator had higher social status than they. 200% Accountability means that employees will have to be skilled at confronting lapses in any of new norms the instant they see it. The speed with which norms change is a function of the speed with which it becomes normal to confront violations of the new norm. Unless and until it is “okay” to call out anyone, independent of level or position, on lapses, the norm will be a farce.

2.    Make customers feel safe doing business with you. The best way to help people feel safe is to make the undiscussable discussable. Your hypervigilant customers are already thinking about risk. So, put it on the table where you can address it as the first topic. First and foremost, let customers know clearly what you’re doing to mitigate risk of spread within your company. Measure compliance with your new standards and be honest with your customers about how well (or poorly) you’re doing. At the end of the day, customers won’t trust you unless you’re trustworthy. And transparency is the foundation of trustworthiness.

Second, give them transaction options. People feel safer when they have choices. Let’s say, for example, your company has door-to-door sales agents. Hyper-vigilant homeowners will be immediately uneasy when they see a stranger on their doorstep. They will have no mental space for the pitch so long as they are worried about infection. One company mitigates this perception by having the salespeople don fresh plastic gloves in front of the homeowner. Each sales agent also sports a lanyard with a bottle of hand gel. After introducing themselves, they offer to continue the conversation either on the porch, through a virtual appointment, or in the home at a safe distance. Surprisingly, agents discover that simply describing the seriousness of their concern for safety, and offering choices, leads a far higher percentage of customers to invite the agent inside.

3.    Decide how you’ll do business with the next pandemic. Viruses aren’t done evolving. There will be a Covid 20, 21 or some other demon in the future. So, we should consider this pandemic to be a dress rehearsal for the next one. In fact, it may be a relatively merciful dress-rehearsal. If Covid 19’s mortality rate turns out to be 1%, the next one may be 2%, or 5%, or, heaven forbid, even higher. The subsequent plague could be a year away, five years away, or ten years away. But let’s accept nature for what it is: viruses aren’t done evolving.

Viruses have to evolve through random mutation. Humans evolve, too. But we generally have to use our oversized brains to do it. We must do it by choice not by mutation. So, let’s get started. Let’s recognize this moment as an opportunity to develop new patterns of responding, not just as an idiosyncratic inconvenience due to a new wad of DNA. If the next bio-threat is of similar toxicity, we need life and business patterns that move us more routinely to Compromise. If we don’t make risk mitigation a way of life, risk elimination, and its unbearable costs, will be our only alternative the next time as well.

Crises always come with opportunities embedded in them. From this moment will come new norms for working, serving, caring and connecting with each other. My family is actually closer now than we were two months ago. We have a virtual “Grenny Gab” at 5pm most days that has made me feel more involved in the lives of my children than ever before. We inquire more about one another’s needs. We are more vulnerable about sharing our concerns. And we are more generous in reaching out to those who struggle.

This crisis offers the entire planet a similar opportunity. This is the first time in the history of humanity that the entire world turned unitedly against a common foe. We are being presented with an opportunity for future cooperation as we come to recognize that borders are fictions and we are global kin.

I have argued above that human nature will inevitably speed us toward a gruesome compromise with the virus that will return us to some new version of normalcy at the cost of some lives. But the real opportunity won’t be forced on us. It will require choice and leadership.

If we are wise, we will take advantage of nature’s invitation to unprecedented unity with our brothers and sisters worldwide. We will heretofore share information more liberally, pool resources more generously, and intervene anywhere more selflessly. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the most precious lesson we can learn from this moment is that “Suffering anywhere is a threat to everyone everywhere.” Let’s not just make this about the virus, let’s make it about evolving to a better way of being.