The Mismanagement of Covid-19 Part III: It Takes a Network
In almost every war, there is a moment where reality suddenly and radically changes, where the world on the day after the moment is completely different from the world before that moment. This happened with World War II on the morning of December 7, 1941 with the air strikes on Pearl Harbor and on September 11, 2001 with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Such a moment happened again on March 11, 2020 when the NBA suspended its games indefinitely after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for Covid-19. The war against the coronavirus had suddenly become very real for the U.S. In short order, the NHL and Major League Baseball suspended operations, and the NCAA cancelled March Madness as another type of madness was overwhelming a nation.
The sudden disappearance of all professional and collegiate sports in the days after March 11 struck a visceral nerve that caught everyone’s attention and changed everyday life into a world none of us had ever experienced before. The coronavirus was no longer a news snippet that was happening in some other corner of the world; it was suddenly all around us in our cities, our offices, and our homes. Without a doubt, the world on the day after March 11 was indeed radically different from the world the day before. A robust and confident people had been transformed by an onslaught of fear in the face of an unfamiliar and terrifying virus. We were suddenly at war with an enemy we couldn’t see.
For well over twenty months, we remain at war with this invisible enemy that seems to have the upper hand as, early on states were ordered into lockdown, offices were empty, and schools were closed, and later vaccine mandates and passports have taken hold in some areas. As we continue to fight this war, perhaps it’s worth asking whether or not these radical disruptions of everyday life were really necessary. Is there a chance that we went about this all wrong? If we are faced with a future pandemic, do we need to think differently?
Thinking Differently
The need to think differently was a lesson learned in a very different war when General Stanley McChrystal was engaged with a different kind of enemy. Upon taking command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, McChrystal realized he had a perplexing problem. Despite having the most highly trained and efficient military force in the world and a sizable advantage in numbers and equipment, his troops could not match Al Qaeda’s speed and adaptability. While the general’s army was organized into a highly efficient centralized hierarchy of thousands of disciplined soldiers, the terrorists were a decentralized network of local units that could move quickly, strike brutishly, and become hidden in plain sight by blending into the local population.
McChrystal quickly recognized, if his army was going to subdue the military’s version of an invisible enemy, he would have to solve their adaptability problem. Because efficient practices are often barriers to adaptability, the general knew becoming more agile would mean abandoning centuries of conventional wisdom and adopting new rules of engagement. These new rules would be guided by a key principle that emerged as an observation from McChrystal’s leadership team: It takes a network to defeat a network.
In considering how to transform his troops into an adaptable network, McChrystal recognized that he would need to radically change his mental model about how organizations work. By virtue of his education at West Point and his experiences as a highly successful military officer, McChrystal was an expert in the practice of command-and-control management. The hierarchical mental model that serves as the framework for this practice assumes that social systems work like machines. This reductionist view of human activities explains why the typical organization chart in both military and corporate organizations resembles a mechanical schematic.
From Chess Master to Gardener
The hierarchical model is a reification that assimilates the fundamental assumptions and principles for how the world works. One of its core principles is the sharp separation of planning from execution, which in the military means the generals do the planning and the troops carry out their prescribed orders. The implicit assumption depicted in the hierarchical organization chart is the notion that organizations are most effective when they are designed to leverage the individual intelligence of the elite few at the top. This mechanistic model also presumes that detailed planning by the elites can achieve predictable results. Thus, according to McChrystal, hierarchical leaders are trained to think like chess masters using their individual talents and skills to exert control over their opponents. In hierarchies, the power of an organization is a derivative of the skillful exercise of power by those in charge.
The network model reflects a very different set of organizing principles that assumes social systems work like organic ecosystems. In networks, power is a derivative of the strength of the connections among all the participants. Unlike hierarchies that leverage the intelligence of the elite few, effective networks have the capacity to leverage the collective intelligence of the many and create a shared understanding across the organization. This shared understanding provides the wherewithal for participants to autonomously adapt to unpredictable circumstances. Accordingly, these highly distributed decentralized structures are impervious to the usual control tactics that are effective between two hierarchically structured enemies. Neutralizing an adversary’s central command is not an option when the enemy is a decentralized network.
Transforming his organization into a superior network meant that McChrystal had to become a different kind of leader. In his words, he needed to stop playing chess and become a gardener. He needed to shift his focus from moving pieces on a board to shaping an ecosystem. He accomplished this by structuring his troops into fractals of relatively autonomous teams, with select members from each team participating on intersecting teams to form a highly connected network that enabled a transparent shared understanding across the troops. The leveraging of this shared understanding greatly increased the capacity of the army to add the advantages of speed and adaptability to their existing resource superiority.
By discarding a rigid command-and-control structure and transforming his organization into a highly adaptable decentralized network, McChrystal was able to finally and easily prevail over the enemy. In making this transformation, McChrystal learned a valuable lesson that may apply to the current combat against the coronavirus: Centralized control is not an effective tool for managing the complexities of a networked enemy.
Slipping into Default Modes
One of the most striking developments of the coronavirus pandemic is how quickly democratic societies morphed, however unwittingly, into authoritarian states. The idea that our entire lives could be completely disrupted by an invisible enemy was something that most of us never saw coming, with the notable exception of the public health medical community. While the infectious disease specialists had been warning us for decades that the sudden emergence of a pandemic was inevitable, their admonishments fell on deaf ears. So, it was not surprising that, when the world was suddenly overwhelmed by the exponential growth of deaths from this novel coronavirus, we immediately turned to the public health experts to navigate us through this unwelcome pandemic. Because none of us had ever experienced anything like this in our lifetimes, we did what most people do when they are confronted with an “unknown unknown” that suddenly becomes a “known unknown.” We bring in the experts and trust their judgments.
The experts’ guidance was swift and clear. To slow the spread of the virus we needed to put in place a mass application of social distancing, mask-wearing, and lockdowns. Because human-to-human contact is what drives the exponential growth of infections, the best way to slow the spread, according to the experts, was to drastically reduce human density.
In the U.S., the governors of the various states assumed almost dictatorial powers as they issued stay-at-home orders, closed down businesses, put people out of work, and limited basic civil liberties without any regard for constitutional due process rights. As vaccines became available in the early months of 2021, the governors opened up the states. However, by the summer, as the Delta variant became the dominant strain of the virus, we discovered that vaccination was not preventing people from catching and spreading the new variant. Federal and some local leaders responded by mandating mask-wearing and vaccines to engage in commercial discourse. Perhaps what is most amazing—and some might say most alarming—is how readily the vast majority of us accepted this sudden shift to a form of medical marshal law as our governmental leaders, guided by a public health elite, thoroughly defaulted to the tools and practices of command-and-control management.
When a whole nation is overtaken by the fear of the unknown, its people and its leaders can easily slip into the default modes of System 1 thinking and its affiliate, command-and-control management. That’s what seems to have happened in the U.S. in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as democratic principles have been supplanted by the dictates of command-and-control authorities. Unfortunately, despite their good intentions and their vast experience, by slipping into the two default modes, our government leaders and the public health experts have run the risk of doing us more harm than good. When we find that states that did not lockdown have equal or sometimes better rates of Covid incidences compared to those that did, it begs the question of just how effective population controls have really been. Although, it does appear the general population controls did accomplish one thing: It gave the invisible enemy a face. In a strange version of the Pogo quote, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
As governors and public health experts continue in their valiant efforts to fight the invisible enemy, it might be wise for them to consider following the example of General McChrystal and stop playing chess and become gardeners. It’s time to think differently and recognize that a stratified risk approach that transforms our population into a highly effective organic network is a far more effective strategy for handling this corosive social crisis. The continued use of an authoritarian command-and-control management strategy against Covid-19 is likely to do far more harm than good because it really does take a network to defeat a network.