As we increasingly isolate, something to read this weekend . . .
“Fear has its use but cowardice has none.” Gandhi
Donate 20
One of my clients is Damian Wells, formerly at EPA, now CEO of Coliban Water in Bendigo. He announced this week that, because his own job is an essential service, his livelihood is not under threat, so he’s immediately donating 20% of his salary to the Bendigo Food Bank, to help those who have lost income, or their jobs entirely. The aim is to donate 20 of something: $20, 20%, 20 minutes, or 20 hours. This follows on Damian’s announcement last week that all contractors, consultants and vendors to whom Coliban Water owes money will now be paid on 7-day terms, to help keep their businesses afloat. These are very practical ways in which an economically sound business — and individual — can help those who are not. His personal initiative is straightforward welfare, while that of his business aims to keep the velocity of money circulation in his local community as high as possible.
Question: What can you do, in practical ways, to support local businesses and people at this time?
Courage and character
I spent much of this week in a room with six executives (yes, socially distant — the room was huge!) who took their organisation from ‘having some broad ideas’ to now ‘having a clear plan’. Their CEO decided to go ahead with this retreat, especially at this time of uncertainty, as he commented, “We’re making really important choices, but based on assumed decisions”. Over three days we made a lot of what was implicit explicit and some of the most important breakthroughs occurred as a result of the group achieving moments of ‘radical honesty’. This is the ability to be ruthlessly transparent about one’s views, sharing them productively, and working through to a desired resolution. We did this repeatedly, which reminded one of our participants to comment on her time at Shell, where the following mantra was common: “Courage to challenge; character to accept”. In other words, it’s not sufficient to be radically honest, we must also be able to accept the honesty of others.
Question: “At this time, what do you need to be honest about? Whose honesty do you need to be prepared to accept?”
Testing the limits of our freedoms
Could we in Australia learn something from the way South Korea has dealt with COVID-19? Their rate of growth has almost flattened despite having, at one point, one of the largest number of infected people. What did they do? As early as January 3rd, they screened people arriving from Wuhan Province in China. Their first positive result wasn’t until late January, but they immediately scaled up testing, very early.
They created a network of 100 public labs, testing 20,000 people a day, including at drive-through testing stations. Results were supplied by text to mobile phones, within hours. This alerted those who were infected, reassured those who were not, and gave epidemiologists data they needed to track the disease’s spread. A positive result set in train aggressive ‘contact tracing’, to track down anyone who may have been infected, and subject them, too, to a test.
The Korean authorities applied police-grade rigour to this: they used security camera footage (South Korean cities have 1 camera for every 5 residents and the average person is captured every 10 seconds while in public), mobile phone tracking data (dense 4G/5G networks enable precise location tracking) and credit card spending records (South Korea is one of the most cashless societies) to find those potentially infected. In this way, they knew who to isolate, achieving a low fatality rate (just 1%) without resorting to authoritarian measures. This to my eye looks like the standard for liberal democratic nations.
Question: “What surveillance would you accept to dramatically reduce infection rates?”