By Mike Rayo (USA)
“And I can’t deny the fact that you like me … right now, you like me!”
– Sally Field, 1985, accepting Academy Award
Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash
Life for me since the beginning of the pandemic has been, in a word, crowded. Crowded for space in my house. Crowded for tasks that vie for time and attention. Crowded in the number of extra jobs that I’ve taken on. I know that each country has had a similar but distinct experience, and I’m assuming that we have all felt this.
I began the pandemic reaching out to everyone in my network, offering help. Many people and organizations took me up on it. I began working with a number of hospitals helping rework their communications so that they could more effectively consume, interpret, and convey the dizzying pace of updated and conflicting COVID-19 guidance that came from the Centers for Disease Control at the federal level, different state public health organizations, local public health organizations, their peer institutions, and their informal network of clinicians at other institutions. Notably, it was the informal network that seemed to be the most effective (hmm … WAIWAD: Work as Imagined vs. Work as Done, and a covert work system … need to make a note of that). This was short-lived, as the communications staffs of these hospitals, although past saturation, did not really want any help from those outside the organization (hmm … saturated and unable or unwilling to ask for or accept help).
After this brief stint of communications help, I worked with a team of data scientists to help my city understand the impacts of closing and opening schools, shutting down businesses, and forcing people to stay in their homes. We were also getting news from around the country of shortages in PPE, staffing and facilities, so my lab started building an Overload Calculator that would help smaller hospitals figure out the time and effort it would take to activate and enable the surge plans they had devised. We have put roughly 150 person-hours into the Overload Calculator, and although it has been a great training exercise for our students, it has not been used by a single hospital yet. Frustrating (another WAIWAD, or some other miss?).
The lack of uptake on the Overload Calculator is perhaps explained by the glut of other COVID projects we started dabbling in. We started working with our city to build a monitoring, communication, and response tool so that neighbors could speak and listen to each other, and to their city. I wrote a song to help our local and state community understand the confusing information coming at all of us. We helped David Woods launch his COVID-19 blog. We reached out to fellow healthcare system researchers to share effective practices. This last effort didn’t go anywhere. We started building the infrastructure for a COVID-19 symptoms and public sentiment tracker that could be connected directly to secure hospital data structures. This, too, has yet to be utilized. In all of these, we were asking different organizations or stakeholders groups to modify something. Borrowing from David Woods’s clever word play, we were asking them to “RE” – REvise, REthink, REconsider, REconfigure, or in some other way REdo something. In most of these cases, we were asking an organization (e.g., a local agency) to RE so that a larger community (e.g, the public) would also RE. In most of these situations, the RE that we were hoping for did not come to pass. The ask was too great, or the perceived benefit too small, or both.
However, the lack of uptake on Overload Calculator could also be explained by us REprioritizing all of our efforts, focusing on two larger initiatives in which we are effectively working with organizations, sustaining the necessary RE to effectively reduce the spread of COVID-19. We have been asked by our state and our university, separately, to set up a monitoring capability (Wait … monitoring! A potential of resilient performance! Yes!) in which we analyze both structured and unstructured data sources to assess relative threats and anomalies and recommend mitigation strategies (another potential, Responding … right?). The results of these are then analyzed in future cycles of analysis to determine what to do next and how to change our current capabilities (you guessed it … Learning!). Although we are still fighting to enable capabilities to be more Anticipatory at the state level, the university is moving at full speed in that direction, as a paucity of anticipatory power for us will likely lead to having to REconsider our strategy, either REducing in-person classes or REmoving students from campus until we can REsume safe operations. We firmly realize that investment in anticipation will be far less costly than the expenditures that those latter RE’s would entail. This is a big deal that should be celebrated – the amount of RE to get to this anticipatory footing has been incredibly painful. Everyone doing COVID related activities in both of these teams have been pulled from other functions, often still having to perform both their old duties and the new COVID-related tasks. Individuals and teams are all being asked to do things that we have never done, or are dusting off capabilities that have not practiced in quite some time. Those that are participating are doing so outside of their expertise envelope. But, right now, it looks like we are going to be able to preserve our most important goals (e.g., education and commerce) if we can continue to convince our larger communities to deprioritize some of their personal goals (e.g,. Congregating and large-scale socializing) and convince them to keep RE-ing (e.g., wearing masks).
What we are experiencing right now is what our frontline practitioners have known a long time, and try desperately to convey to us as Resilience Engineering professionals: RE-ing is crowded. And messy. The pieces are not all going to fit together again. It takes a lot of effort, and will not always seem worth it. In fact, we will often not know definitively if it is worth it until the RE-ing is over. The difference I’ve seen in the last 6 months is that, now that there are definitive signals that change is necessary, people are seeing that change, adaptation, and improvisation, are all necessary. They are not to be feared or denigrated, but encouraged. If we can jump into the fray, new folks will realize that they really do like our REA community, and that we are valuable. We can help and are helping. We are uniquely suited to read the signs and signals to propose the right kind of RE that will facilitate and sustain resilient performance. Which is what RE-ing is all about, right?