The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Harvard Principles of Negotiation
•Jun 27, 2018
Erich Pommer Institut
Getting a Yes – but how?Dr. Thomas Henschel (Academy of Mediation in Berlin)explains 'The Harvard Approach' and how to get a Yes in every negotiation.
This is an excerpt of our e-training 'The Art of Negotiation'.
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfTalFEeKKE
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, April 19, 2020
R322-S106-Managing Through Crisis: Who Needs Capitalism Anyway?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Harvard Business School
Managing Through Crisis: Who Needs Capitalism Anyway?
•Apr 9, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has been highlighting some flaws of capitalism—mass purchasing of hand sanitizer and toilet paper comes to mind—but is it true that capitalism, particularly during a global crisis does more harm than good? Professor Rebecca Henderson explores how capitalism may help solve many of the problems we are currently facing and how we can make it work for us in such uncertain times.
Please, watch this video and then get ready to answer the questions below:
1) 01:30 - Do you think it's justified to think that capitalism does more harm than good?
2) 02:48 - Is capitalism a help or a hindrance in the face of a situation like this?
3) 04:40 - How can we avoid bad capitalism during a pandemic?
4) 07:52 - What companies can be used as an example for applying sustainability efforts that are good for the company and its customers?
5) 10:40 - Do companies that have invested in sustainability have a better chance to manage through a crisis like this?
6) 15:25 - Could you give an example of conscious capitalism?
7) 18:50 - Is there an idea from reimagining capitalism that should resonate with viewers?
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17g9FJYKjdI
Harvard Business School
Managing Through Crisis: Who Needs Capitalism Anyway?
•Apr 9, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has been highlighting some flaws of capitalism—mass purchasing of hand sanitizer and toilet paper comes to mind—but is it true that capitalism, particularly during a global crisis does more harm than good? Professor Rebecca Henderson explores how capitalism may help solve many of the problems we are currently facing and how we can make it work for us in such uncertain times.
Please, watch this video and then get ready to answer the questions below:
1) 01:30 - Do you think it's justified to think that capitalism does more harm than good?
2) 02:48 - Is capitalism a help or a hindrance in the face of a situation like this?
3) 04:40 - How can we avoid bad capitalism during a pandemic?
4) 07:52 - What companies can be used as an example for applying sustainability efforts that are good for the company and its customers?
5) 10:40 - Do companies that have invested in sustainability have a better chance to manage through a crisis like this?
6) 15:25 - Could you give an example of conscious capitalism?
7) 18:50 - Is there an idea from reimagining capitalism that should resonate with viewers?
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17g9FJYKjdI
Que el bicho no se coma la Democracia, por Alejandro Borensztein
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Alejandro Borensztein
Que el bicho no se coma la Democracia
Que gran momento para designar a Merkel como presidenta mundial de todos y todas y así sacarnos de encima de una buena vez a Trump, Bolsonaro, Lopez Obrador, Boris Johnson, Orban, Cristina, Maduro, y otros cracks que han transformado al mundo en esta belleza.
Líder mundial. Angela Merkel.
18/04/2020
Si tuviéramos en cuenta a todos los presidentes, ministros y funcionarios que aportaron su talento para que en los últimos 29 años pasemos de 1 dólar = 1 peso a 1 dólar = 100 pesos, podríamos agregar decenas de nuevos candidatos al gran certamen del Pelotudo del Año.
Pero no los podemos sumar porque en este torneo sólo clasifican los Pelotudos destacados durante el temporada oficial 2020. Una pena.
Para aquellos que están ansiosos por definir ahora mismo al ganador, o los que ya creen haberlo encontrado, recuerden que no hay que apurarse y que el certamen debe estar organizado con seriedad y profesionalismo. No como la Superliga.
Por ahora estamos en la etapa de Eliminatorias de donde van saliendo los que clasifican a la fase de grupos. Después, los dos mejores Pelotudos de cada grupo pasarán a octavos de final, luego cuartos, semifinales y final. Recién ahí, consagraremos al campeón.
Por supuesto, como en toda competencia, hay favoritos cuyos nombres todos conocemos pero hasta que el árbitro no de el pitazo final no está dicha la última palabra.
Esta semana clasificaron otros dos peces gordos. Uno es el ñato que maneja la cuenta de twitter del presidente Fernández, que no tuvo mejor idea que retwitear un insulto al querido Jonatan Viale. Nadie sabe bien como se llama pero, después de esa burrada, clasificó de cabeza. El otro es Cristóbal López al que pescaron pelotudeando por la Patagonia con su camioneta. Dos más a la fase final.
Si le ponemos onda, el certamen podría ayudar a distraernos y a mantenernos entretenidos durante la cuarentena.
Sin embargo, hay mucha gente que no se quiere distraer y está muy preocupada porque, con la excusa de la pandemia, están viendo que algunos políticos de acá y del mundo intentan avanzar sobre el Estado de Derecho.
A los que están preocupados por esto habría que recordarles que, en el caso de algunos políticos argentinos, no necesitan de una pandemia para querer avanzar sobre el Estado de Derecho. Les nace naturalmente.
Por eso, con o sin pandemia, un buen demócrata local siempre debe estar alerta. Pero tampoco da para preocuparse demasiado. Esto no es China.
Allá Xi Jinping tiene millones de cámaras de reconocimiento facial (millones literalmente) que además de reconocer a todas la personas, les toman la temperatura corporal a distancia. Si un tipo se baja del bondi y las cámara detectan que tiene algunas rayitas de fiebre, aparecen cinco patrulleros que inmediatamente se lo llevan a él y a todos los que estaban en el colectivo.
Al mismo tiempo van rastreando mediante las celdas de los celulares a los que se bajaron en las paradas anteriores, los agarran de las pestañas y también los meten en cuarentena.
Si a alguno se le ocurre salir a comprar tomates, aparecen drones que los detectan y vaya uno a saber lo qué les hacen. De ahí a detectar lo que el tipo piensa y convencerlo a patadas de que piense otra cosa más linda, falta un pasito. Obviamente es para preocuparse, pero es en China.
Acá el Ministro de Defensa es Agustín Rossi. No jodamos, hace 5 años perdió un misil y todavía no lo pudo encontrar. Y la Ministra de Seguridad es Sabina Frederic, que anda patrullando por Twitter a la caza de subversivos que pretendan reemplazar nuestro pabellón celeste y blanco por el sucio trapo rojo y cambiar nuestra tradicional forma de vida occidental y cristiana por el totalitarismo soviético. Obviamente, todavía no encontró ninguno.
No me imagino a estos dos ministros organizando, como en China, drones que sobrevuelen las ciudades buscando personas mayores de 70 que violen la cuarentena para salir a comprar cigarrillos. Lo más probable es que la licitación de drones termine en un escándalo de corrupción, o que los drones se choquen en el aire, o que el sindicato de drones les pare la flotilla en reclamo de mejoras salariales. Esto es Argentina.
Dado que el gobierno no puede detectar, ni controlar, ni mucho menos testear nada, por lo menos ha demostrado que puede dar consejos útiles.
El Ministerio de Salud, a través de un especialista, el viernes explicó que una buena práctica para sobrellevar el confinamiento es masturbarse, tener sexo virtual o algún otro divertimento. Como esta gente piensa en todo, el gobierno también nos recomendó que después de masturbarnos limpiemos el teclado de la computadora. Le juro amigo lector que esto es posta. Hemos escuchado cosas locas durante los gobiernos kirchneristas pero como esta no recuerdo ninguna.
También dijeron que quienes utilicen juguetes sexuales, luego de usarlos deberán lavarlos. Caramba, no se nos había ocurrido.
Pregunta: ¿Antes de usarlos también? ¿Balde de agua con dos cucharadas de lavandina, estará ok? Digo esto porque no lo aclararon.
Por su parte el Gobierno de la Ciudad tampoco aclaró si los mayores de 70 años deben pedir autorización para masturbarse o pueden hacerlo libremente. ¿Habrá que bajarse un permiso a través de una aplicación? ¿Y si habilitan un 0800-LADELMONO? Dudas que seguramente esta semana se despejarán.
Para los que dicen que estas cosas sólo pasan en la Argentina, sepan que el mismísimo Emmanuel Macron, presidente de Francia, acaba de prohibir que los mayores de 70 circulen por las calles. Por suerte todavía nos queda Angela Merkel para explicarle al mundo que “encerrar a nuestros mayores es un acto inaceptable desde el punto de vista ético y moral” (textual).
Que gran momento para designar a Merkel como presidenta mundial de todos y todas y así sacarnos de encima de una buena vez a Trump, Bolsonaro, Lopez Obrador, Boris Johnson, Orban, Cristina, Maduro, y otros cracks que han transformado al mundo en esta belleza.
Amigo lector, tengamos calma. Estemos alerta pero no nos preocupemos demasiado por estos primeros atropellos a la democracia. La historia argentina reciente nos demuestra que, por suerte, nuestros dirigentes son mucho más inútiles que autoritarios.
Para más pruebas, vale lo que le dije al comienzo: en una generación pasamos de 1 dólar = 1 peso a 1 dólar = 100 pesos.
Y esto no fue el resultado de extrañas conspiraciones ni enemigos corporativos ni siniestros intereses multinacionales. Semejante desastre no fue otra cosa más que la obra de una sucesión continua de Pelotudos.
Por estos días aparecieron un montón de tipos reclamando un plan económico en serio para salir de la crísis. Vamos, no le pidamos ahora un plan económico a un gobierno que tampoco lo tenía antes del Coronavirus.
En realidad, en la Argentina nunca hay plan económico. Tampoco lo tuvo Macri. Menos Cristina. Ni siquiera Néstor. El Compañero Centro Cultural tiró un rato con el plan que le dejaron armadito Duhalde/Remes Lenicov/Lavagna y hasta ahí llegó nomás. Fue la última vez que tuvimos un plan. Se ve que los argentinos no usamos.
El hecho de que el plan de Duhalde dejó el dólar a 3 pesos y, 17 años después, ya supera los 100 mangos, demuestra que nunca tuvimos plan. Y si lo hubo, fue horrible.
Por suerte, ahora están Carlos Heller y Máximo Kirchner diseñando políticas económicas. Dos académicos de la ostia para llevar tranquilidad a toda la sociedad.
En Noviembre, el entonces presidente electo Tío Alberto declaró que no pensaba pedirle al FMI los 11.000 palos verdes que todavía faltaban desembolsar y ya estaban acordados y listos para ser recibidos. Dijo textualmente “¿tengo un problemón y voy a pedir 11.000 millones más? Yo quiero dejar de pedir y que me dejen pagar”. Qué bien nos vendrían ahora esos 11.000 palos, no?
Moraleja para estos tiempos: en la vida, el concepto de “problemón” te puede cambiar en un minuto.
Fuente:https://www.clarin.com/opinion/bicho-coma-democracia_0_BA9oAwELm.html
Alejandro Borensztein
Que el bicho no se coma la Democracia
Que gran momento para designar a Merkel como presidenta mundial de todos y todas y así sacarnos de encima de una buena vez a Trump, Bolsonaro, Lopez Obrador, Boris Johnson, Orban, Cristina, Maduro, y otros cracks que han transformado al mundo en esta belleza.
Líder mundial. Angela Merkel.
18/04/2020
Si tuviéramos en cuenta a todos los presidentes, ministros y funcionarios que aportaron su talento para que en los últimos 29 años pasemos de 1 dólar = 1 peso a 1 dólar = 100 pesos, podríamos agregar decenas de nuevos candidatos al gran certamen del Pelotudo del Año.
Pero no los podemos sumar porque en este torneo sólo clasifican los Pelotudos destacados durante el temporada oficial 2020. Una pena.
Para aquellos que están ansiosos por definir ahora mismo al ganador, o los que ya creen haberlo encontrado, recuerden que no hay que apurarse y que el certamen debe estar organizado con seriedad y profesionalismo. No como la Superliga.
Por ahora estamos en la etapa de Eliminatorias de donde van saliendo los que clasifican a la fase de grupos. Después, los dos mejores Pelotudos de cada grupo pasarán a octavos de final, luego cuartos, semifinales y final. Recién ahí, consagraremos al campeón.
Por supuesto, como en toda competencia, hay favoritos cuyos nombres todos conocemos pero hasta que el árbitro no de el pitazo final no está dicha la última palabra.
Esta semana clasificaron otros dos peces gordos. Uno es el ñato que maneja la cuenta de twitter del presidente Fernández, que no tuvo mejor idea que retwitear un insulto al querido Jonatan Viale. Nadie sabe bien como se llama pero, después de esa burrada, clasificó de cabeza. El otro es Cristóbal López al que pescaron pelotudeando por la Patagonia con su camioneta. Dos más a la fase final.
Si le ponemos onda, el certamen podría ayudar a distraernos y a mantenernos entretenidos durante la cuarentena.
Sin embargo, hay mucha gente que no se quiere distraer y está muy preocupada porque, con la excusa de la pandemia, están viendo que algunos políticos de acá y del mundo intentan avanzar sobre el Estado de Derecho.
A los que están preocupados por esto habría que recordarles que, en el caso de algunos políticos argentinos, no necesitan de una pandemia para querer avanzar sobre el Estado de Derecho. Les nace naturalmente.
Por eso, con o sin pandemia, un buen demócrata local siempre debe estar alerta. Pero tampoco da para preocuparse demasiado. Esto no es China.
Allá Xi Jinping tiene millones de cámaras de reconocimiento facial (millones literalmente) que además de reconocer a todas la personas, les toman la temperatura corporal a distancia. Si un tipo se baja del bondi y las cámara detectan que tiene algunas rayitas de fiebre, aparecen cinco patrulleros que inmediatamente se lo llevan a él y a todos los que estaban en el colectivo.
Al mismo tiempo van rastreando mediante las celdas de los celulares a los que se bajaron en las paradas anteriores, los agarran de las pestañas y también los meten en cuarentena.
Si a alguno se le ocurre salir a comprar tomates, aparecen drones que los detectan y vaya uno a saber lo qué les hacen. De ahí a detectar lo que el tipo piensa y convencerlo a patadas de que piense otra cosa más linda, falta un pasito. Obviamente es para preocuparse, pero es en China.
Acá el Ministro de Defensa es Agustín Rossi. No jodamos, hace 5 años perdió un misil y todavía no lo pudo encontrar. Y la Ministra de Seguridad es Sabina Frederic, que anda patrullando por Twitter a la caza de subversivos que pretendan reemplazar nuestro pabellón celeste y blanco por el sucio trapo rojo y cambiar nuestra tradicional forma de vida occidental y cristiana por el totalitarismo soviético. Obviamente, todavía no encontró ninguno.
No me imagino a estos dos ministros organizando, como en China, drones que sobrevuelen las ciudades buscando personas mayores de 70 que violen la cuarentena para salir a comprar cigarrillos. Lo más probable es que la licitación de drones termine en un escándalo de corrupción, o que los drones se choquen en el aire, o que el sindicato de drones les pare la flotilla en reclamo de mejoras salariales. Esto es Argentina.
Dado que el gobierno no puede detectar, ni controlar, ni mucho menos testear nada, por lo menos ha demostrado que puede dar consejos útiles.
El Ministerio de Salud, a través de un especialista, el viernes explicó que una buena práctica para sobrellevar el confinamiento es masturbarse, tener sexo virtual o algún otro divertimento. Como esta gente piensa en todo, el gobierno también nos recomendó que después de masturbarnos limpiemos el teclado de la computadora. Le juro amigo lector que esto es posta. Hemos escuchado cosas locas durante los gobiernos kirchneristas pero como esta no recuerdo ninguna.
También dijeron que quienes utilicen juguetes sexuales, luego de usarlos deberán lavarlos. Caramba, no se nos había ocurrido.
Pregunta: ¿Antes de usarlos también? ¿Balde de agua con dos cucharadas de lavandina, estará ok? Digo esto porque no lo aclararon.
Por su parte el Gobierno de la Ciudad tampoco aclaró si los mayores de 70 años deben pedir autorización para masturbarse o pueden hacerlo libremente. ¿Habrá que bajarse un permiso a través de una aplicación? ¿Y si habilitan un 0800-LADELMONO? Dudas que seguramente esta semana se despejarán.
Para los que dicen que estas cosas sólo pasan en la Argentina, sepan que el mismísimo Emmanuel Macron, presidente de Francia, acaba de prohibir que los mayores de 70 circulen por las calles. Por suerte todavía nos queda Angela Merkel para explicarle al mundo que “encerrar a nuestros mayores es un acto inaceptable desde el punto de vista ético y moral” (textual).
Que gran momento para designar a Merkel como presidenta mundial de todos y todas y así sacarnos de encima de una buena vez a Trump, Bolsonaro, Lopez Obrador, Boris Johnson, Orban, Cristina, Maduro, y otros cracks que han transformado al mundo en esta belleza.
Amigo lector, tengamos calma. Estemos alerta pero no nos preocupemos demasiado por estos primeros atropellos a la democracia. La historia argentina reciente nos demuestra que, por suerte, nuestros dirigentes son mucho más inútiles que autoritarios.
Para más pruebas, vale lo que le dije al comienzo: en una generación pasamos de 1 dólar = 1 peso a 1 dólar = 100 pesos.
Y esto no fue el resultado de extrañas conspiraciones ni enemigos corporativos ni siniestros intereses multinacionales. Semejante desastre no fue otra cosa más que la obra de una sucesión continua de Pelotudos.
Por estos días aparecieron un montón de tipos reclamando un plan económico en serio para salir de la crísis. Vamos, no le pidamos ahora un plan económico a un gobierno que tampoco lo tenía antes del Coronavirus.
En realidad, en la Argentina nunca hay plan económico. Tampoco lo tuvo Macri. Menos Cristina. Ni siquiera Néstor. El Compañero Centro Cultural tiró un rato con el plan que le dejaron armadito Duhalde/Remes Lenicov/Lavagna y hasta ahí llegó nomás. Fue la última vez que tuvimos un plan. Se ve que los argentinos no usamos.
El hecho de que el plan de Duhalde dejó el dólar a 3 pesos y, 17 años después, ya supera los 100 mangos, demuestra que nunca tuvimos plan. Y si lo hubo, fue horrible.
Por suerte, ahora están Carlos Heller y Máximo Kirchner diseñando políticas económicas. Dos académicos de la ostia para llevar tranquilidad a toda la sociedad.
En Noviembre, el entonces presidente electo Tío Alberto declaró que no pensaba pedirle al FMI los 11.000 palos verdes que todavía faltaban desembolsar y ya estaban acordados y listos para ser recibidos. Dijo textualmente “¿tengo un problemón y voy a pedir 11.000 millones más? Yo quiero dejar de pedir y que me dejen pagar”. Qué bien nos vendrían ahora esos 11.000 palos, no?
Moraleja para estos tiempos: en la vida, el concepto de “problemón” te puede cambiar en un minuto.
Fuente:https://www.clarin.com/opinion/bicho-coma-democracia_0_BA9oAwELm.html
Saturday, April 18, 2020
EDITORIALES-Educación, un desafío renovado
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
EDITORIALES
Educación, un desafío renovado
Urge capitalizar las experiencias impuestas por la cuarentena y aprovechar la oportunidad para mejorar las deficiencias de nuestro sistema de enseñanza
18 de Abril de 2020
Los desafíos en materia educativa no cesan. Si hasta aquí proclamábamos la necesidad cada día más imperiosa de transformar los aprendizajes para acompañar en el tiempo la formación de una mayor cantidad de jóvenes, hoy la realidad nos confronta con un statu quo claramente disruptivo pero que, de aprovecharse, podría contribuir a impulsarnos en la dirección deseada.
Frente a la intempestiva suspensión del dictado de clases presenciales que impuso el avance de la pandemia, muchos nos sorprendimos al enterarnos de que la ley de educación nacional, sancionada en el año 2006 de esta era digital, no permite la educación a distancia para menores de 18 años, con excepción del ámbito rural.
Si bien distintas experiencias han confirmado que nuevas modalidades virtuales combinadas con el dictado tradicional de clases encierran un enorme potencial, no podemos desconocer que muchísimas familias carecen tanto de dispositivos tecnológicos como de conectividad o de los fondos para pagar un uso intensivo de internet. Ni hablemos de los segmentos más postergados, en los que la posibilidad de una educación a distancia es una utopía por infinidad de razones; basta con pensar en tantas familias numerosas en las que un simple dispositivo móvil no permite satisfacer las necesidades de niños y adultos a la hora de aprender o de entretenerse.
Ni todas las escuelas contaban con los recursos necesarios para encarar la crisis ni todas las familias estaban preparadas para acompañar a los jóvenes ante dinámicas no habituales, pero la nueva realidad obliga a repensar las aulas. Nos referimos a dar rudimentariamente los primeros pasos, con las limitaciones que la realidad nos impone, pero en la dirección correcta, tomando lo mejor del pasado y proyectando la transformación que hoy claramente se nos propone. No será sencillo acortar la brecha entre alumnos de contextos tan disímiles, pero debemos propulsarnos hacia el futuro para evitar quedar atrapados en una inercia que atrasa y nos condena a renunciar al único instrumento de desarrollo posible.
El doctor Alberto Taquini (h.), destacado experto en políticas educativas desde hace más de 50 años, observa que la educación será una más de todas las actividades que continuarán registrando profundos cambios a partir de los avances de las comunicaciones. "Ante la pandemia, la educación a distancia está en ciernes y, aunque todavía débil, hay que usarla ya", alega convencido.
Por su parte, el prestigioso psicopedagogo italiano Francesco Tonucci asegura que el encierro demuestra "todavía más" que la escuela, como hoy la conocemos, no funciona. La crisis nos acerca aceleradamente un futuro diferente en materia de educación.
Las variantes que se impusieron ante la necesidad de aprender desde el hogar deben sistematizarse y regularizarse. Nadie puede desconocer la importancia de una enseñanza presencial a edades tempranas, pero aun así urge impulsar un proyecto que derogue aquel arcaico artículo 109 y que habilite, en todos los niveles, modalidades y edades, el sistema de educación a distancia como complemento imprescindible. El proyecto de reforma en este sentido, impulsado por el diputado nacional José Riccardo (UCR-San Luis), contempla convocar al Consejo Federal de Educación.
Muchos alumnos, padres y docentes tienen hoy la posibilidad de acceder al conocimiento que habita en la nube gracias a la tecnología. Con educandos que son nativos digitales, poco a poco, la sociedad deberá organizar formas eficaces de sistematizar los nuevos aprendizajes, flexibilizar normas que ya se muestran indiscutidamente obsoletas e impulsar los cambios que sean necesarios para otorgar validez a los nuevos procesos pedagógicos. Apoyar y capacitar adecuadamente a los docentes para ser instrumento de la transformación que se propone en estos nuevos escenarios, revisar contenidos, rediseñar currículas, fijar nuevas maneras de evaluar a los alumnos son solo algunos de los desafíos que hoy enfrentamos con la transformación digital y la incorporación de la virtualidad.
El cambio se impone inexorablemente. Está claro que no habrá ya vuelta atrás y que las resistencias ante instrumentos largamente rechazados y cuestionados se han reducido sobre el terreno, en un contexto inédito de distancia social impuesta que obligó a muchos a improvisar. Abruptamente, la burocracia educativa se topó con una demanda de complejos sistemas, como las plataformas educativas, que muchos no pudieron anticipar y los vínculos virtuales plantearon nuevos roles; hubo también que encontrar formas para dar continuidad a los procesos de aprendizaje de un día para el otro.
Ojalá podamos capitalizar estas experiencias aún en ciernes y aprovechar la oportunidad que se nos presenta de mejorar las graves deficiencias que, en términos de estándares internacionales, muestra nuestro vetusto andamiaje educativo, disparador de deserción y repitencia. Ante una pandemia que nos fuerza a cambiar la mirada y a impulsar una profunda e impostergable transformación educativa, desperdiciar tan trascendente oportunidad sería condenarnos imperdonablemente a una merecida decadencia.
Fuente:https://www.lanacion.com.ar/editoriales/wisim-dunt-ulluptat-commy-nulla-aliquis-nostio-ea-feugaiteducacion-un-desafio-renovado-nid2355468
EDITORIALES
Educación, un desafío renovado
Urge capitalizar las experiencias impuestas por la cuarentena y aprovechar la oportunidad para mejorar las deficiencias de nuestro sistema de enseñanza
18 de Abril de 2020
Los desafíos en materia educativa no cesan. Si hasta aquí proclamábamos la necesidad cada día más imperiosa de transformar los aprendizajes para acompañar en el tiempo la formación de una mayor cantidad de jóvenes, hoy la realidad nos confronta con un statu quo claramente disruptivo pero que, de aprovecharse, podría contribuir a impulsarnos en la dirección deseada.
Frente a la intempestiva suspensión del dictado de clases presenciales que impuso el avance de la pandemia, muchos nos sorprendimos al enterarnos de que la ley de educación nacional, sancionada en el año 2006 de esta era digital, no permite la educación a distancia para menores de 18 años, con excepción del ámbito rural.
Si bien distintas experiencias han confirmado que nuevas modalidades virtuales combinadas con el dictado tradicional de clases encierran un enorme potencial, no podemos desconocer que muchísimas familias carecen tanto de dispositivos tecnológicos como de conectividad o de los fondos para pagar un uso intensivo de internet. Ni hablemos de los segmentos más postergados, en los que la posibilidad de una educación a distancia es una utopía por infinidad de razones; basta con pensar en tantas familias numerosas en las que un simple dispositivo móvil no permite satisfacer las necesidades de niños y adultos a la hora de aprender o de entretenerse.
Ni todas las escuelas contaban con los recursos necesarios para encarar la crisis ni todas las familias estaban preparadas para acompañar a los jóvenes ante dinámicas no habituales, pero la nueva realidad obliga a repensar las aulas. Nos referimos a dar rudimentariamente los primeros pasos, con las limitaciones que la realidad nos impone, pero en la dirección correcta, tomando lo mejor del pasado y proyectando la transformación que hoy claramente se nos propone. No será sencillo acortar la brecha entre alumnos de contextos tan disímiles, pero debemos propulsarnos hacia el futuro para evitar quedar atrapados en una inercia que atrasa y nos condena a renunciar al único instrumento de desarrollo posible.
El doctor Alberto Taquini (h.), destacado experto en políticas educativas desde hace más de 50 años, observa que la educación será una más de todas las actividades que continuarán registrando profundos cambios a partir de los avances de las comunicaciones. "Ante la pandemia, la educación a distancia está en ciernes y, aunque todavía débil, hay que usarla ya", alega convencido.
Por su parte, el prestigioso psicopedagogo italiano Francesco Tonucci asegura que el encierro demuestra "todavía más" que la escuela, como hoy la conocemos, no funciona. La crisis nos acerca aceleradamente un futuro diferente en materia de educación.
Las variantes que se impusieron ante la necesidad de aprender desde el hogar deben sistematizarse y regularizarse. Nadie puede desconocer la importancia de una enseñanza presencial a edades tempranas, pero aun así urge impulsar un proyecto que derogue aquel arcaico artículo 109 y que habilite, en todos los niveles, modalidades y edades, el sistema de educación a distancia como complemento imprescindible. El proyecto de reforma en este sentido, impulsado por el diputado nacional José Riccardo (UCR-San Luis), contempla convocar al Consejo Federal de Educación.
Muchos alumnos, padres y docentes tienen hoy la posibilidad de acceder al conocimiento que habita en la nube gracias a la tecnología. Con educandos que son nativos digitales, poco a poco, la sociedad deberá organizar formas eficaces de sistematizar los nuevos aprendizajes, flexibilizar normas que ya se muestran indiscutidamente obsoletas e impulsar los cambios que sean necesarios para otorgar validez a los nuevos procesos pedagógicos. Apoyar y capacitar adecuadamente a los docentes para ser instrumento de la transformación que se propone en estos nuevos escenarios, revisar contenidos, rediseñar currículas, fijar nuevas maneras de evaluar a los alumnos son solo algunos de los desafíos que hoy enfrentamos con la transformación digital y la incorporación de la virtualidad.
El cambio se impone inexorablemente. Está claro que no habrá ya vuelta atrás y que las resistencias ante instrumentos largamente rechazados y cuestionados se han reducido sobre el terreno, en un contexto inédito de distancia social impuesta que obligó a muchos a improvisar. Abruptamente, la burocracia educativa se topó con una demanda de complejos sistemas, como las plataformas educativas, que muchos no pudieron anticipar y los vínculos virtuales plantearon nuevos roles; hubo también que encontrar formas para dar continuidad a los procesos de aprendizaje de un día para el otro.
Ojalá podamos capitalizar estas experiencias aún en ciernes y aprovechar la oportunidad que se nos presenta de mejorar las graves deficiencias que, en términos de estándares internacionales, muestra nuestro vetusto andamiaje educativo, disparador de deserción y repitencia. Ante una pandemia que nos fuerza a cambiar la mirada y a impulsar una profunda e impostergable transformación educativa, desperdiciar tan trascendente oportunidad sería condenarnos imperdonablemente a una merecida decadencia.
Fuente:https://www.lanacion.com.ar/editoriales/wisim-dunt-ulluptat-commy-nulla-aliquis-nostio-ea-feugaiteducacion-un-desafio-renovado-nid2355468
Friday, April 17, 2020
R322-S106-Crisis Management -Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Crisis Management
Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline
When the stakes are high, forbearance is an act of leadership.
Podcast Transcript:
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Adi Ignatius. This is “Real Leaders,” a special series examining the lives of some of the world’s most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, and the lessons they offer today. In our first two episodes we profiled the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and then writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson. This week, Abraham Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
NANCY KOEHN: “The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land will yet swell the course of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”
NANCY KOEHN: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
ADI IGNATIUS: The words of Abraham Lincoln have endured. He gave those three iconic speeches in the prelude to the Civil War and during the war itself. At that time Lincoln was struggling to lead the U.S. through its greatest crisis, and he was widely hated. Now, of course, he’s revered as the leader who saved the Nation. Today we’ll explore Lincoln’s life and how he made himself into such an effective and enduring leader. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of Harvard Business Review. And I’m here with Nancy Koehn, the great historian at Harvard Business School, who has researched Lincoln’s life and work. Hello, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hello, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: Nancy, thank you for reading those speeches. We had them printed out for you, but it looked like you were actually reciting most of those from memory.
NANCY KOEHN: I have learned most of Lincoln’s most famous speeches from memory, mostly on long dog walks with my spaniels. And it’s been just a wonderful thing for me. It’s like a library I carry around in my head that I can refer to.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you can assume that these speeches were part of his efforts at political persuasion. Is that accurate? Is that fair? Or, was there more going on than that?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln used the English language as a really critical tool of his leadership. He was using it to inform people. He was using it to help people understand the larger frame of the moment, what was at stake. He was using it to help inspire people, particularly in moments like the Second Inaugural at the end of the war and the Gettysburg Address, in the middle at the critical moment in the war. He was using it to help lead.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I find rereading Lincoln’s speeches, it’s like reading Shakespeare. You’re reading a play and you’re suddenly, “Oh my god, that’s where that amazing line came from.” And there are so many, you know: “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” “the better angels of our nature,” “four score and seven years…” I mean all these things. And at the same time he had a blue streak. I mean he —
NANCY KOEHN: — He was a master storyteller. He could tell very funny, very dirty, very bawdy jokes. He went high and he went low.
ADI IGNATIUS: Is there a Lincoln joke you’ve got in your back pocket?
NANCY KOEHN: When Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas for the Senate seat from Illinois, they were outside of Galesburg, Illinois, at a college and a huge windstorm came up and they had to move the dais over to the edge of a building. So to get to the dais, he and Douglas had to clamber through a window onto the platform and Lincoln clambered through and said, “Well, now I can say I’ve been through college.”
ADI IGNATIUS: What I also like from the Lincoln-Douglas debate is when Douglas made one of his arguments, and Lincoln said Douglas’s argument, and I’m going to read this: “was as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” That’s pretty good.
NANCY KOEHN: That is really good, and I can’t believe you picked that out because it’s one of my favorite Lincoln quotes.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right so let’s do some quick context setting. Lincoln was born into fairly modest circumstances, suffered some tough blows as a child including the death of his mother. How did these early experiences shape his values and create the resilience that we would see throughout his life?
NANCY KOEHN: The death of his mother is just an incredibly traumatic event for him. They were living in Indiana. His father goes back to Kentucky to find a wife, and the two kids are left alone. He and his sister just kind of fend for themselves. They’re eating nuts. They’re trying to kill squirrels. That’s an important moment because he has to somehow figure out, “How do I keep going?” He doesn’t turn inward and into victimhood. He doesn’t say, “I’m going to let this get the better of me.” He finds a way to move forward, and that’s really a huge part the story of a lot of Lincoln’s life. I mean he failed so many more times than he succeeded. He suffered so much disappointment. And I just really believe that all those experiences, including the bouts with depression, were moments in which he developed muscles of resilience and grit that were critical to his ability to hold the line during the Civil War and continue to lead and really almost insurmountable circumstances.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln made his career as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He and his partner tried something like 4,000 cases which, I mean that’s really the essence of who he was as a professional. Then Lincoln was tempted by political office. What’s interesting to me is he lost a lot of elections, including a lot of critical ones. It’s easy in hindsight to say, “OK, those loses motivated him.” But my question, I guess for you, is what’s going on in Lincoln’s head? Those victories, those losses, his constant return to the political battle after these losses. What’s going on here?
NANCY KOEHN: So, he loses a number of really critical elections. He loses his first election for State Legislature when he was a young man in his early 20s. He loses a party battle in Central Illinois to get nominated for Congress. Eventually he would get to Congress for a term of two years in the 1840s, in which he will do anything but distinguish himself and he will come back depressed and sure that his political fortunes have fallen, which they had. He will then try and run for Senate a couple of times and get nowhere and lose the nominating battle. At each of these points, he’s discouraged. It’s not that the losses motivated him. It’s quite the opposite. He gets depressed. He says at one point, “I don’t expect anyone to ever remember me for anything.” And I think each loss and the corresponding time in the canyon of self-flagellation and depression — it’s both, in his case. Not all depression is self-flagellating, but his is. Gives him time to think and refine himself and he was always a great student of “what could I do better next time?” He was self-aware and he was a fabulous steward of his self-awareness to make himself better.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln has this amazing reservoir of resilience and capacity for growth and self-improvement. Where does this drive come from?
NANCY KOEHN: One of the most interesting aspects of Lincoln’s making as a leader, and it’s a lesson of leadership as well, is Lincoln’s ability to teach himself all along his life’s journey. He has less than a year of formal schooling. And yet, he is constantly involved in a series of surgical strike, self-teaching adventures, or self-teaching missions. When he’s young it’s about reading and writing and arithmetic. When he gets to New Salem, which is the first place he goes after he leaves his father’s home, a small village outside of Springfield which is becoming the capital of Illinois, he teaches himself surveying to earn a living. He teaches himself geometry because he thinks it will help him think and reason better. He teaches himself the law. He teaches himself how to do public speaking by reading Shakespeare and reciting passages of Shakespeare out loud. He teaches himself the laws of debate because he joins the New Salem Debating Society. He keeps taking these issues or these aspects that he thinks will help him do something and teaches himself that. And that’s a lesson of leadership. So when you don’t know something and you believe it’s critical to your mission, or critical to the next place you need to reach on your journey, you can teach yourself those things.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think one of the reasons people like reading about Lincoln so much is it’s partly his greatness and partly just the story, but partly the humanity. To what extent does depression define Abraham Lincoln?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln was a person and he is no more easily defined by one aspect of our particular preoccupations than he is by anything else. He was a very complicated person, like most of us. But depression was very important particularly in his young adult life because he didn’t just sort of slip into a dark place. I mean his early depressions, people were so worried about him, friends were so worried, that they’d take his razors away. They’d go on vigils watching him.
ADI IGNATIUS: The treatment then was, I was reading, was —
NANCY KOEHN: Leeches.
ADI IGNATIUS: Leeches, mustard —
NANCY KOEHN: Mustard. Plasters, yup —
ADI IGNATIUS: And cold baths –-
NANCY KOEHN: And cold baths. When he was President his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton his second Secretary of War, with whom he formed a very close working relationship and Stanton thought of Lincoln as a good friend, was worried about Lincoln’s kind of self-image at certain moments, when he grew dark. He was like, “We gotta keep the President safe. We can’t risk that he’s going to jump into the Potomac or do something harmful.” That was a real conversation at a couple of junctures. Not a lot and not for very long. So, this was real. I think what’s important about it is not that it defines Lincoln in some sense more than any other particular aspect, it’s how he used it. A reporter who’s written about this, a journalist, Joshua Shenk, who’s written about this in a book called Lincoln’s Melancholy, I think makes a very good case. I agree with it completely. That because of his own experience and particularly the suffering, he develops great powers of empathy. And I think that’s exactly right. He was a sensitive person to begin with, always — as a young boy, as a young adult, as President. But he then develops a sense of empathy that we can see, say in these last paragraph of the Second Inaugural [speech] – “with malice towards none, with charity toward all.” And that becomes very, very important — not only in connecting people, not only in reaching out to individuals, but also in his political life of trying to influence others. That was, I think, very much related to his depression.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln’s big opening politically came in 1858 when he was running against Stephen Douglas for Senator in Illinois. They had a series of debates where Lincoln became a national figure, and he was essentially arguing against slavery, I think more forcefully than he had. But I want to sort of talk about Lincoln and slavery now because his views evolved over time, they were nuanced, they were complicated. Help us understand Lincoln’s views on African-Americans and slavery.
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln’s position on slavery, which evolved throughout his life, was all the way to the time he won the White House, including his first Inaugural, was what today we would consider tepid at best and immoral at worse because his public position was we can’t interfere with the law of the United States which says that slavery is legal in these places, and it should not be enlarged to other places. It should not be made legal in new territories that become States. It should not be expanded, but we cannot legally abolish it. That is the position Lincoln made his name on. That is the position the Republican Party was born on. Not that we’re going to eliminate slavery, but we’re going to restrict its territorial enlargement because we don’t believe it’s right and we can’t allow it to expand. And it’s protected in the Constitution.
ADI IGNATIUS: Lincoln also said things about Blacks that really identified Blacks as inferior to Whites.
NANCY KOEHN: I think Lincoln probably thought African-Americans, I think his views changed, but I think for most of Lincoln’s life he had no reason to think differently than most White Americans that he was exposed to, which were African-Americans were inferior. And he says at one point, “I would never marry an African-American woman and just because I don’t want slavery to expand doesn’t mean I think Blacks and Whites should intermarry.” So again, from our sensibilities today, this seems egregious. But it wouldn’t have seemed similarly egregious if we parachuted back into political debates of people that had office or had reasonable chances of assuming elected office locally at the state level or the national level, in America in the 1850s. Now, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, lots of other folks, Charles Sumner, the Senator from Massachusetts, were saying something very different and much more radical – that African-Americans are exactly equal in all ways to White Americans and we can’t possibly tolerate the morally reprehensible practice of enslaving Americans by other Americans.
ADI IGNATIUS: So for all the nuance and equivocation on Lincoln’s part, by the time he’s elected President in 1860, the slave-holding South views that as a sign that the economy that is built on slave owning.
NANCY KOEHN: The social structure.
ADI IGNATIUS: The social structure that is built on slave owning, suddenly is a great risk.
NANCY KOEHN: Absolutely.
ADI IGNATIUS: And boom. What happens?
NANCY KOEHN: As soon as he’s elected President, states start seceding from the Union, saying we’re not playing on this tennis court anymore. We’re out.
ADI IGNATIUS: Coming up after the break, the American Civil War begins. We’ll analyze Lincoln’s leadership during that momentous political crisis.
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome back to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius with Nancy Koehn. Hello again, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hey, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: So the Civil War begins in April of 1961. No one at that time could imagine that this will continue for another four Aprils. So, talk about what’s happening broadly and, in particularly for Lincoln, as the war starts.
NANCY KOEHN: Really quickly it’s clear that this war’s not going to be over anytime soon, and the casualty counts start growing. But you can chart the process of Lincoln’s growing capacity to think, to see the big picture, to consult lots and lots of people — not unlike JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then make his decisions with that kind of consultative material.
ADI IGNATIUS: So let’s break down a little bit. So Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War — to what extent does that look like other presidential crisis we’ve seen, like, say, JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis?
NANCY KOEHN: So, one of the really important aspects that both John Kennedy and Lincoln shared in the moments of crisis leadership was what today we would call forbearance or emotional discipline. Even though my emotions and a lot of influence around me says I need to do something right now. So what Kennedy does is to just slow everything down and say, “Wait a minute. Let’s not get too hot under the collar because if we do that, we’ll lose control of events and the repercussions of that are not fully well understand and they may be very, very dangerous.”
ADI IGNATIUS: So what about Lincoln? Did he manage similarly to maintain his patience and self-control as he is conducting the Civil War?
NANCY KOEHN: With Lincoln, he learned this in his adult life. I’m not exactly sure when. But we see it in his presidency at lots and lots of junctures. The most striking one, or the most telling one is one that happens right around the Battle of Gettysburg, which occurs in the first three days of July 1863 in this Pennsylvania town. And it’s this crucial battle, so they knew it was crucial. Lee — Robert E. Lee, who led the Army of Northern Virginia, the biggest Confederate fighting force — had invaded the North. On the opposing side, in this small town in Pennsylvania, is George Meade, who’s the commander of the largest Northern fighting force, the Army of the Potomac. The two armies duke it out over two and a half extraordinary days of fighting. Lee loses, turns his army around, and immediately begins moving his men and a wagon train of Confederate wounded that was 17 miles long back South, heading South. Meade makes a critical decision that afternoon and confirms it the next day — that he’s not going to pursue Lee. So the Northern General decides, “My soldiers are too exhausted. We can’t have another big military clash right now.” And Lincoln gets this news from Meade and he is absolutely enraged. He thinks that if Meade can pursue and squash Lee’s army the war will effectively be over — and there was good reason to think that. But [Lincoln is] furious. And he begins to write a letter. All of us can just imagine how we feel when we get a particular piece of news and we need to react by getting on our computer, or our phone and start tapping out a text or an email in response. And Lincoln starts writing this letter saying things like, “Your decision not to pursue General Lee’s army has extended the war immeasurably. Thousands more will die. You have made a huge mistake and I am immeasurably distressed and disappointed.” And then, here’s the kicker. He folds the letter up. He puts it in an envelope and he writes on the envelope: “To George Meade, from Abraham Lincoln, July 5th, 1863. Never signed, never sent.” And he puts in in a cubbyhole in his desk, where it’s found after he died. And that’s Lincoln. Lincoln used that power to discipline himself to think ahead, to just take a breath and let his emotions cool over and over and over again. And it’s such an important lesson for our time.
ADI IGNATIUS: Alright, but for a long time, and especially around the Battle of Gettysburg, the War is not going very well for Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: Right. This is being photographed for the first time in history. It’s being talked about. The casualty counts are telegraphed. The carnage and the outrage and the incredible criticism coming at Lincoln because the North can’t win, seemed to move the pendulum of military advantage decidedly to its own side, is extraordinary. The pressures on him.
ADI IGNATIUS: So this one is fair to say Lincoln is proving to be an unsuccessful President, unsuccessful war leader.
NANCY KOEHN: Unsuccessful decision maker. Unsuccessful politician. I mean it’s not really until the summer of 1864 at the beginning of August that it looks like the Union will truly win the war. Because that happens Lincoln is constantly under a barrage of attack, not to mention all these other pressures he’s dealing with. I mean he is, during his presidency, the most hated person in American history. No question. Hated by friends, hated by foes, hated by everyone in the South — hated by every White person in the South.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, all right. Let’s look for a lesson here. I mean this is leading a country, in this case. But leading an enterprise in an extended, dark, often hopeless seeming moment. How do you prevail? How do you continue? How do you lead in a situation like that?
NANCY KOEHN: So, it’s like a great change leader in an organization — where you’re not just trying to make the changes, restructure the business, reorganize your workforce, transform your organization while keeping it alive. You’ve also got to tell people what you’re doing and why because if you don’t do that, no one will keep fighting because it’s just too hard. No one will keep changing. The Gettysburg Address is the greatest change leadership speech ever given in English.
ADI IGNATIUS: How so?
NANCY KOEHN: So, what’s he doing in those 200, depending on which draft, 200 and 74 words. He’s framing the stakes of the change and he’s convincing people why it’s worth to doing. So the first paragraph is, who are we and where did we come from and why do we exist? The second paragraph is just a brilliant kind of movement of the camera, the narrative camera, to say now we are engaged — we’re engaged in a great civil war and we’re testing whether we really believe that and we can continue to exist based on that. Then he takes the lens and he clicks it down closer to the ground and he says, we’ve met on a great battlefield, to dedicate a portion of the field for the men who died fighting for that. We’re doing that because it’s fitting and proper, but the most important thing is not that we consecrate this land — they’ve already done that. The most important thing is that we try to understand what this struggle has been about. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. So these men died. They died for a big deal. It’s an important deal. It’s who we are. And by the way, even though they died, it is up to us to commit ourselves to continue that fight because it’s so important. That’s what that critical fourth paragraph really is. That this nation, we commit ourselves, we dedicate ourselves to the proposition that these men will not have died in vain and that this nation under God will have a new birth of freedom. He doesn’t say we’ll return to where we were. He doesn’t say, we’ll rediscover the power of the original proposition. He says, “This nation under God will have a new birth of freedom.” And that democracy, government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish. So he’s framing the stakes. He’s saying this is terrible this change process, but we have to, in spite of the obstacles, in spite of the tradeoffs, we all have to carry on.
ADI IGNATIUS: So he’s basically changing the definition of the struggle, what’s at stake. In hindsight it seems brilliant. There’s no guarantee that anyone is going to be listening and is going to allow the debate to be reframed because of his oratorical skills.
NANCY KOEHN: Well Lincoln was a master calculator, politically. He’s always calculating, calculating, calculating. He would never have made that speech if he didn’t think the political capital was growing and viable in the North. He has enough capital to say, this war is about slavery, and we’re going to end slavery. So that was incredibly important. It was incredibly important. The war stopped being a war solely to save the Union on the basis in which it entered the war with the territorial, with the legal —
ADI IGNATIUS: With the South, North —
NANCY KOEHN: With the South, North, and the legalization of slavery in certain places. And now became a war to fundamentally change the terms of the American experiment and to restore what Lincoln believed to be its true defining principle, as codified in the Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal and all men are free.
ADI IGNATIUS: So it meant compromise was probably impossible, or —
NANCY KOEHN: It meant that there could never be a brokered peace. Slavery would be over and the war would be over, or the Southerners would win and they would have their own country.
ADI IGNATIUS: So that’s an interesting question about leadership because there were also articulate voices saying, “Too many people are dying.” The final total I think was 600,000 killed. Insane number and people saying, “We have to stop the fighting.” And in essence Lincoln had come up with this position that was tactical, that was principled — but was sort of absolute. What does that say about leadership? I mean you could say he won so it was a good thing. But you could say he also kind of limited his flexibility at that point.
NANCY KOEHN: He certainly did. He thought that’s where the nation had arrived — that it was that stark. And by the way lots and lots of other people did it on both sides of the issue. So there were people in 1863, lots of folks in the North that thought we got to end the bloodshed. But there were just as many people and, I think perhaps more, who thought this war’s got to be about more than saving the Union. It’s got to be about transforming the Union and ending the moral cancer, which was a common term for slavery.
ADI IGNATIUS: So when thinking about the deepest leadership lessons we can all draw from Lincoln, part of it is holding firm. But part of it seems in his life is that he evolved. He evolved as a thinker, as a human, as a leader, as a tactician. We don’t all do that.
NANCY KOEHN: But we all have the opportunity to do it. It’s given to us by our free will. A powerful leadership lesson from Lincoln is how he moves from “my life is about Abraham Lincoln’s political career” to “Abraham Lincoln is about saving and transforming the nation.” That’s why his death is so truly tragic because if he had lived — a man who saw the big picture, who himself had been transformed and chastened and irrevocably changed in the experience of leading the nation through the Civil War — I think he was absolutely trying to knit the nation together with “malice toward none, with charity for all.” These words don’t come from just a skilled wordsmith, just a man who became a master of rhetoric. They come from a person whose soul had been truly tormented and transformed in the extraordinary crucible of what he experienced at the center of the perfect storm.
ADI IGNATIUS: Next time on “Real Leaders,” Nancy Koehn and I will be talking about Oprah Winfrey. She’s not just a tremendously successful businesswoman, she’s probably one of the most influential people on the planet. And Nancy, you actually know her.
NANCY KOEHN: Yes. I met her by surprise when she paid an unexpected visit to my class many years ago — the first time I taught the Harvard Business School case that I’d written about her. My students, and many students who heard about it from outside my classroom, who just poured into the classroom to see her, were incredibly impressed with her — her warmth, her intelligence, and a piece of the extraordinary story of her life.
ADI IGNATIUS: This episode was produced by Anne Saini and edited by Curt Nickisch. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt, and Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor and Chief of Harvard Business Review. Thanks for listening to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast.
Source:https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/03/real-leaders-abraham-lincoln-and-the-power-of-emotional-discipline?referral=03759&cm_vc=rr_item_page.bottom
Crisis Management
Real Leaders: Abraham Lincoln and the Power of Emotional Discipline
When the stakes are high, forbearance is an act of leadership.
Podcast Transcript:
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Adi Ignatius. This is “Real Leaders,” a special series examining the lives of some of the world’s most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, and the lessons they offer today. In our first two episodes we profiled the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and then writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson. This week, Abraham Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
NANCY KOEHN: “The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land will yet swell the course of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”
NANCY KOEHN: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
ADI IGNATIUS: The words of Abraham Lincoln have endured. He gave those three iconic speeches in the prelude to the Civil War and during the war itself. At that time Lincoln was struggling to lead the U.S. through its greatest crisis, and he was widely hated. Now, of course, he’s revered as the leader who saved the Nation. Today we’ll explore Lincoln’s life and how he made himself into such an effective and enduring leader. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of Harvard Business Review. And I’m here with Nancy Koehn, the great historian at Harvard Business School, who has researched Lincoln’s life and work. Hello, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hello, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: Nancy, thank you for reading those speeches. We had them printed out for you, but it looked like you were actually reciting most of those from memory.
NANCY KOEHN: I have learned most of Lincoln’s most famous speeches from memory, mostly on long dog walks with my spaniels. And it’s been just a wonderful thing for me. It’s like a library I carry around in my head that I can refer to.
ADI IGNATIUS: So you can assume that these speeches were part of his efforts at political persuasion. Is that accurate? Is that fair? Or, was there more going on than that?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln used the English language as a really critical tool of his leadership. He was using it to inform people. He was using it to help people understand the larger frame of the moment, what was at stake. He was using it to help inspire people, particularly in moments like the Second Inaugural at the end of the war and the Gettysburg Address, in the middle at the critical moment in the war. He was using it to help lead.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I find rereading Lincoln’s speeches, it’s like reading Shakespeare. You’re reading a play and you’re suddenly, “Oh my god, that’s where that amazing line came from.” And there are so many, you know: “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” “the better angels of our nature,” “four score and seven years…” I mean all these things. And at the same time he had a blue streak. I mean he —
NANCY KOEHN: — He was a master storyteller. He could tell very funny, very dirty, very bawdy jokes. He went high and he went low.
ADI IGNATIUS: Is there a Lincoln joke you’ve got in your back pocket?
NANCY KOEHN: When Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas for the Senate seat from Illinois, they were outside of Galesburg, Illinois, at a college and a huge windstorm came up and they had to move the dais over to the edge of a building. So to get to the dais, he and Douglas had to clamber through a window onto the platform and Lincoln clambered through and said, “Well, now I can say I’ve been through college.”
ADI IGNATIUS: What I also like from the Lincoln-Douglas debate is when Douglas made one of his arguments, and Lincoln said Douglas’s argument, and I’m going to read this: “was as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” That’s pretty good.
NANCY KOEHN: That is really good, and I can’t believe you picked that out because it’s one of my favorite Lincoln quotes.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right so let’s do some quick context setting. Lincoln was born into fairly modest circumstances, suffered some tough blows as a child including the death of his mother. How did these early experiences shape his values and create the resilience that we would see throughout his life?
NANCY KOEHN: The death of his mother is just an incredibly traumatic event for him. They were living in Indiana. His father goes back to Kentucky to find a wife, and the two kids are left alone. He and his sister just kind of fend for themselves. They’re eating nuts. They’re trying to kill squirrels. That’s an important moment because he has to somehow figure out, “How do I keep going?” He doesn’t turn inward and into victimhood. He doesn’t say, “I’m going to let this get the better of me.” He finds a way to move forward, and that’s really a huge part the story of a lot of Lincoln’s life. I mean he failed so many more times than he succeeded. He suffered so much disappointment. And I just really believe that all those experiences, including the bouts with depression, were moments in which he developed muscles of resilience and grit that were critical to his ability to hold the line during the Civil War and continue to lead and really almost insurmountable circumstances.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln made his career as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He and his partner tried something like 4,000 cases which, I mean that’s really the essence of who he was as a professional. Then Lincoln was tempted by political office. What’s interesting to me is he lost a lot of elections, including a lot of critical ones. It’s easy in hindsight to say, “OK, those loses motivated him.” But my question, I guess for you, is what’s going on in Lincoln’s head? Those victories, those losses, his constant return to the political battle after these losses. What’s going on here?
NANCY KOEHN: So, he loses a number of really critical elections. He loses his first election for State Legislature when he was a young man in his early 20s. He loses a party battle in Central Illinois to get nominated for Congress. Eventually he would get to Congress for a term of two years in the 1840s, in which he will do anything but distinguish himself and he will come back depressed and sure that his political fortunes have fallen, which they had. He will then try and run for Senate a couple of times and get nowhere and lose the nominating battle. At each of these points, he’s discouraged. It’s not that the losses motivated him. It’s quite the opposite. He gets depressed. He says at one point, “I don’t expect anyone to ever remember me for anything.” And I think each loss and the corresponding time in the canyon of self-flagellation and depression — it’s both, in his case. Not all depression is self-flagellating, but his is. Gives him time to think and refine himself and he was always a great student of “what could I do better next time?” He was self-aware and he was a fabulous steward of his self-awareness to make himself better.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln has this amazing reservoir of resilience and capacity for growth and self-improvement. Where does this drive come from?
NANCY KOEHN: One of the most interesting aspects of Lincoln’s making as a leader, and it’s a lesson of leadership as well, is Lincoln’s ability to teach himself all along his life’s journey. He has less than a year of formal schooling. And yet, he is constantly involved in a series of surgical strike, self-teaching adventures, or self-teaching missions. When he’s young it’s about reading and writing and arithmetic. When he gets to New Salem, which is the first place he goes after he leaves his father’s home, a small village outside of Springfield which is becoming the capital of Illinois, he teaches himself surveying to earn a living. He teaches himself geometry because he thinks it will help him think and reason better. He teaches himself the law. He teaches himself how to do public speaking by reading Shakespeare and reciting passages of Shakespeare out loud. He teaches himself the laws of debate because he joins the New Salem Debating Society. He keeps taking these issues or these aspects that he thinks will help him do something and teaches himself that. And that’s a lesson of leadership. So when you don’t know something and you believe it’s critical to your mission, or critical to the next place you need to reach on your journey, you can teach yourself those things.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think one of the reasons people like reading about Lincoln so much is it’s partly his greatness and partly just the story, but partly the humanity. To what extent does depression define Abraham Lincoln?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln was a person and he is no more easily defined by one aspect of our particular preoccupations than he is by anything else. He was a very complicated person, like most of us. But depression was very important particularly in his young adult life because he didn’t just sort of slip into a dark place. I mean his early depressions, people were so worried about him, friends were so worried, that they’d take his razors away. They’d go on vigils watching him.
ADI IGNATIUS: The treatment then was, I was reading, was —
NANCY KOEHN: Leeches.
ADI IGNATIUS: Leeches, mustard —
NANCY KOEHN: Mustard. Plasters, yup —
ADI IGNATIUS: And cold baths –-
NANCY KOEHN: And cold baths. When he was President his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton his second Secretary of War, with whom he formed a very close working relationship and Stanton thought of Lincoln as a good friend, was worried about Lincoln’s kind of self-image at certain moments, when he grew dark. He was like, “We gotta keep the President safe. We can’t risk that he’s going to jump into the Potomac or do something harmful.” That was a real conversation at a couple of junctures. Not a lot and not for very long. So, this was real. I think what’s important about it is not that it defines Lincoln in some sense more than any other particular aspect, it’s how he used it. A reporter who’s written about this, a journalist, Joshua Shenk, who’s written about this in a book called Lincoln’s Melancholy, I think makes a very good case. I agree with it completely. That because of his own experience and particularly the suffering, he develops great powers of empathy. And I think that’s exactly right. He was a sensitive person to begin with, always — as a young boy, as a young adult, as President. But he then develops a sense of empathy that we can see, say in these last paragraph of the Second Inaugural [speech] – “with malice towards none, with charity toward all.” And that becomes very, very important — not only in connecting people, not only in reaching out to individuals, but also in his political life of trying to influence others. That was, I think, very much related to his depression.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Lincoln’s big opening politically came in 1858 when he was running against Stephen Douglas for Senator in Illinois. They had a series of debates where Lincoln became a national figure, and he was essentially arguing against slavery, I think more forcefully than he had. But I want to sort of talk about Lincoln and slavery now because his views evolved over time, they were nuanced, they were complicated. Help us understand Lincoln’s views on African-Americans and slavery.
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln’s position on slavery, which evolved throughout his life, was all the way to the time he won the White House, including his first Inaugural, was what today we would consider tepid at best and immoral at worse because his public position was we can’t interfere with the law of the United States which says that slavery is legal in these places, and it should not be enlarged to other places. It should not be made legal in new territories that become States. It should not be expanded, but we cannot legally abolish it. That is the position Lincoln made his name on. That is the position the Republican Party was born on. Not that we’re going to eliminate slavery, but we’re going to restrict its territorial enlargement because we don’t believe it’s right and we can’t allow it to expand. And it’s protected in the Constitution.
ADI IGNATIUS: Lincoln also said things about Blacks that really identified Blacks as inferior to Whites.
NANCY KOEHN: I think Lincoln probably thought African-Americans, I think his views changed, but I think for most of Lincoln’s life he had no reason to think differently than most White Americans that he was exposed to, which were African-Americans were inferior. And he says at one point, “I would never marry an African-American woman and just because I don’t want slavery to expand doesn’t mean I think Blacks and Whites should intermarry.” So again, from our sensibilities today, this seems egregious. But it wouldn’t have seemed similarly egregious if we parachuted back into political debates of people that had office or had reasonable chances of assuming elected office locally at the state level or the national level, in America in the 1850s. Now, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, lots of other folks, Charles Sumner, the Senator from Massachusetts, were saying something very different and much more radical – that African-Americans are exactly equal in all ways to White Americans and we can’t possibly tolerate the morally reprehensible practice of enslaving Americans by other Americans.
ADI IGNATIUS: So for all the nuance and equivocation on Lincoln’s part, by the time he’s elected President in 1860, the slave-holding South views that as a sign that the economy that is built on slave owning.
NANCY KOEHN: The social structure.
ADI IGNATIUS: The social structure that is built on slave owning, suddenly is a great risk.
NANCY KOEHN: Absolutely.
ADI IGNATIUS: And boom. What happens?
NANCY KOEHN: As soon as he’s elected President, states start seceding from the Union, saying we’re not playing on this tennis court anymore. We’re out.
ADI IGNATIUS: Coming up after the break, the American Civil War begins. We’ll analyze Lincoln’s leadership during that momentous political crisis.
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome back to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius with Nancy Koehn. Hello again, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hey, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: So the Civil War begins in April of 1961. No one at that time could imagine that this will continue for another four Aprils. So, talk about what’s happening broadly and, in particularly for Lincoln, as the war starts.
NANCY KOEHN: Really quickly it’s clear that this war’s not going to be over anytime soon, and the casualty counts start growing. But you can chart the process of Lincoln’s growing capacity to think, to see the big picture, to consult lots and lots of people — not unlike JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then make his decisions with that kind of consultative material.
ADI IGNATIUS: So let’s break down a little bit. So Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War — to what extent does that look like other presidential crisis we’ve seen, like, say, JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis?
NANCY KOEHN: So, one of the really important aspects that both John Kennedy and Lincoln shared in the moments of crisis leadership was what today we would call forbearance or emotional discipline. Even though my emotions and a lot of influence around me says I need to do something right now. So what Kennedy does is to just slow everything down and say, “Wait a minute. Let’s not get too hot under the collar because if we do that, we’ll lose control of events and the repercussions of that are not fully well understand and they may be very, very dangerous.”
ADI IGNATIUS: So what about Lincoln? Did he manage similarly to maintain his patience and self-control as he is conducting the Civil War?
NANCY KOEHN: With Lincoln, he learned this in his adult life. I’m not exactly sure when. But we see it in his presidency at lots and lots of junctures. The most striking one, or the most telling one is one that happens right around the Battle of Gettysburg, which occurs in the first three days of July 1863 in this Pennsylvania town. And it’s this crucial battle, so they knew it was crucial. Lee — Robert E. Lee, who led the Army of Northern Virginia, the biggest Confederate fighting force — had invaded the North. On the opposing side, in this small town in Pennsylvania, is George Meade, who’s the commander of the largest Northern fighting force, the Army of the Potomac. The two armies duke it out over two and a half extraordinary days of fighting. Lee loses, turns his army around, and immediately begins moving his men and a wagon train of Confederate wounded that was 17 miles long back South, heading South. Meade makes a critical decision that afternoon and confirms it the next day — that he’s not going to pursue Lee. So the Northern General decides, “My soldiers are too exhausted. We can’t have another big military clash right now.” And Lincoln gets this news from Meade and he is absolutely enraged. He thinks that if Meade can pursue and squash Lee’s army the war will effectively be over — and there was good reason to think that. But [Lincoln is] furious. And he begins to write a letter. All of us can just imagine how we feel when we get a particular piece of news and we need to react by getting on our computer, or our phone and start tapping out a text or an email in response. And Lincoln starts writing this letter saying things like, “Your decision not to pursue General Lee’s army has extended the war immeasurably. Thousands more will die. You have made a huge mistake and I am immeasurably distressed and disappointed.” And then, here’s the kicker. He folds the letter up. He puts it in an envelope and he writes on the envelope: “To George Meade, from Abraham Lincoln, July 5th, 1863. Never signed, never sent.” And he puts in in a cubbyhole in his desk, where it’s found after he died. And that’s Lincoln. Lincoln used that power to discipline himself to think ahead, to just take a breath and let his emotions cool over and over and over again. And it’s such an important lesson for our time.
ADI IGNATIUS: Alright, but for a long time, and especially around the Battle of Gettysburg, the War is not going very well for Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: Right. This is being photographed for the first time in history. It’s being talked about. The casualty counts are telegraphed. The carnage and the outrage and the incredible criticism coming at Lincoln because the North can’t win, seemed to move the pendulum of military advantage decidedly to its own side, is extraordinary. The pressures on him.
ADI IGNATIUS: So this one is fair to say Lincoln is proving to be an unsuccessful President, unsuccessful war leader.
NANCY KOEHN: Unsuccessful decision maker. Unsuccessful politician. I mean it’s not really until the summer of 1864 at the beginning of August that it looks like the Union will truly win the war. Because that happens Lincoln is constantly under a barrage of attack, not to mention all these other pressures he’s dealing with. I mean he is, during his presidency, the most hated person in American history. No question. Hated by friends, hated by foes, hated by everyone in the South — hated by every White person in the South.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, all right. Let’s look for a lesson here. I mean this is leading a country, in this case. But leading an enterprise in an extended, dark, often hopeless seeming moment. How do you prevail? How do you continue? How do you lead in a situation like that?
NANCY KOEHN: So, it’s like a great change leader in an organization — where you’re not just trying to make the changes, restructure the business, reorganize your workforce, transform your organization while keeping it alive. You’ve also got to tell people what you’re doing and why because if you don’t do that, no one will keep fighting because it’s just too hard. No one will keep changing. The Gettysburg Address is the greatest change leadership speech ever given in English.
ADI IGNATIUS: How so?
NANCY KOEHN: So, what’s he doing in those 200, depending on which draft, 200 and 74 words. He’s framing the stakes of the change and he’s convincing people why it’s worth to doing. So the first paragraph is, who are we and where did we come from and why do we exist? The second paragraph is just a brilliant kind of movement of the camera, the narrative camera, to say now we are engaged — we’re engaged in a great civil war and we’re testing whether we really believe that and we can continue to exist based on that. Then he takes the lens and he clicks it down closer to the ground and he says, we’ve met on a great battlefield, to dedicate a portion of the field for the men who died fighting for that. We’re doing that because it’s fitting and proper, but the most important thing is not that we consecrate this land — they’ve already done that. The most important thing is that we try to understand what this struggle has been about. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. So these men died. They died for a big deal. It’s an important deal. It’s who we are. And by the way, even though they died, it is up to us to commit ourselves to continue that fight because it’s so important. That’s what that critical fourth paragraph really is. That this nation, we commit ourselves, we dedicate ourselves to the proposition that these men will not have died in vain and that this nation under God will have a new birth of freedom. He doesn’t say we’ll return to where we were. He doesn’t say, we’ll rediscover the power of the original proposition. He says, “This nation under God will have a new birth of freedom.” And that democracy, government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish. So he’s framing the stakes. He’s saying this is terrible this change process, but we have to, in spite of the obstacles, in spite of the tradeoffs, we all have to carry on.
ADI IGNATIUS: So he’s basically changing the definition of the struggle, what’s at stake. In hindsight it seems brilliant. There’s no guarantee that anyone is going to be listening and is going to allow the debate to be reframed because of his oratorical skills.
NANCY KOEHN: Well Lincoln was a master calculator, politically. He’s always calculating, calculating, calculating. He would never have made that speech if he didn’t think the political capital was growing and viable in the North. He has enough capital to say, this war is about slavery, and we’re going to end slavery. So that was incredibly important. It was incredibly important. The war stopped being a war solely to save the Union on the basis in which it entered the war with the territorial, with the legal —
ADI IGNATIUS: With the South, North —
NANCY KOEHN: With the South, North, and the legalization of slavery in certain places. And now became a war to fundamentally change the terms of the American experiment and to restore what Lincoln believed to be its true defining principle, as codified in the Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal and all men are free.
ADI IGNATIUS: So it meant compromise was probably impossible, or —
NANCY KOEHN: It meant that there could never be a brokered peace. Slavery would be over and the war would be over, or the Southerners would win and they would have their own country.
ADI IGNATIUS: So that’s an interesting question about leadership because there were also articulate voices saying, “Too many people are dying.” The final total I think was 600,000 killed. Insane number and people saying, “We have to stop the fighting.” And in essence Lincoln had come up with this position that was tactical, that was principled — but was sort of absolute. What does that say about leadership? I mean you could say he won so it was a good thing. But you could say he also kind of limited his flexibility at that point.
NANCY KOEHN: He certainly did. He thought that’s where the nation had arrived — that it was that stark. And by the way lots and lots of other people did it on both sides of the issue. So there were people in 1863, lots of folks in the North that thought we got to end the bloodshed. But there were just as many people and, I think perhaps more, who thought this war’s got to be about more than saving the Union. It’s got to be about transforming the Union and ending the moral cancer, which was a common term for slavery.
ADI IGNATIUS: So when thinking about the deepest leadership lessons we can all draw from Lincoln, part of it is holding firm. But part of it seems in his life is that he evolved. He evolved as a thinker, as a human, as a leader, as a tactician. We don’t all do that.
NANCY KOEHN: But we all have the opportunity to do it. It’s given to us by our free will. A powerful leadership lesson from Lincoln is how he moves from “my life is about Abraham Lincoln’s political career” to “Abraham Lincoln is about saving and transforming the nation.” That’s why his death is so truly tragic because if he had lived — a man who saw the big picture, who himself had been transformed and chastened and irrevocably changed in the experience of leading the nation through the Civil War — I think he was absolutely trying to knit the nation together with “malice toward none, with charity for all.” These words don’t come from just a skilled wordsmith, just a man who became a master of rhetoric. They come from a person whose soul had been truly tormented and transformed in the extraordinary crucible of what he experienced at the center of the perfect storm.
ADI IGNATIUS: Next time on “Real Leaders,” Nancy Koehn and I will be talking about Oprah Winfrey. She’s not just a tremendously successful businesswoman, she’s probably one of the most influential people on the planet. And Nancy, you actually know her.
NANCY KOEHN: Yes. I met her by surprise when she paid an unexpected visit to my class many years ago — the first time I taught the Harvard Business School case that I’d written about her. My students, and many students who heard about it from outside my classroom, who just poured into the classroom to see her, were incredibly impressed with her — her warmth, her intelligence, and a piece of the extraordinary story of her life.
ADI IGNATIUS: This episode was produced by Anne Saini and edited by Curt Nickisch. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt, and Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor and Chief of Harvard Business Review. Thanks for listening to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast.
Source:https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/03/real-leaders-abraham-lincoln-and-the-power-of-emotional-discipline?referral=03759&cm_vc=rr_item_page.bottom
R322-S106-🦠 A better way?-Building capacity, adaptation and resilience, by Azeem Azhar
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
🦠 A better way?
Building capacity, adaptation and resilience
Azeem Azhar
Mar 17
Was there a better approach to tackling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (virus that causes COVID-19 disease) across Western countries, especially the UK and US? Last week, I challenged the notion that science was immutable, dictating only one path. And I had my doubts about the British government’s softly-softly approach.
All that changed yesterday with a shift in strategy delivered by a persuasive Boris Johnson. For more details of how this emerged, read Alex Wickham’s eye-ball popping report after this essay.
A new paper produced by Neal Ferguson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis essentially argues that the mitigation strategy that Johnson-and-crew were recommending last week was ten times worse (in terms of deaths) than a suppression strategy. The paper is readable and in the interests of being an informed citizen, of any country, I suggest you do. Ultimately, it is about needing to go further than “flattening the curve”. (As I pointed out in #261, we need to think harder than just flattening the curve.)
It isn’t just about the dead
The balancing act for any government is not simply driven by the number of deaths. It is a systems problem, and actions need to prevent the “system” collapsing, whether that is the health system collapsing, the economy collapsing or civil society collapsing. Deaths are tragic. Then they become statistics.
But they are also an indicator of the overall health of the system.
Ferguson identifies two strategies to tackling the pandemic:
(a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection,
(b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely.
This is the key chart in Ferguson’s modelling of mitigation, which qualitatively applies to the United States and the UK.
The red line is the surge capacity of critical care. As you can see, even under heavily mitigated strategies like the blue line, our surged capacity is exceeded by mid-April. The mid-June peak still represents a demand for critical care beds that is eight times higher than our surge. So for every 1 patient in a critical care bed, there are about 7-8 in urgent need queuing up from coronavirus. (Not to mention routine operations independent of the disease.)
This model (and remember Box’s edict, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”) shows that aggressive mitigation could reduce a death toll by about 50% on a pure numbers basis. The paper doesn’t describe how unmitigated those deaths would be. Most of them would not occur in the critical care bed, but wherever they happened, in the corridor, parking lot, tent, requisitioned hotel room.
Suppression
“Given that mitigation is unlikely to be a viable option without overwhelming healthcare systems, suppression is likely necessary in countries able to implement the intensive controls required,” says Ferguson. Suppression involves much tougher controls and compliance than mitigation.
The top chart shows the full scale for demand on critical care beds, zoomed in on the lower chart.
Suppression may be better for a condition like COVID-19 because the virus that causes it can spread at least two days before symptoms are noticed. Even with perfect testing, this asymptomatic spread is problematic in mitigation approaches.
Two strategies of suppression seem to work best. The brown one (case isolation, quarantine and social distancing) and the green one (brown + closure of schools and universities.)
They both limit immediate pressure early in the pandemic, but store it up for the autumn time. At this level, all other things being equal, brown beats green if you can build up enough critical care capacity in a furloughed economy by the middle of April. (Can you produce enough medical supplies and devices, and train enough nurses and doctors in the next four weeks? Medical schools in the UK are, I hear, accelerating graduations of the summer class.)
But what happens in October?
Adaptive pulsing
One dose of suppression just buys us time. It pishes the curve out. To smash the curve we need to do more.
The team suggests adaptive triggering of suppression strategies. That is, when it looks like we have the current wave of the epidemic under control, as measured by the decline in ICU admissions, we can relax social controls. And then ICU admission starts to rise, it becomes an indication that the virus is spread again, so we regulate its spread by turn on suppression policies.
In this two year forecast, the blue boxes represent the time when suppression is in place. Two years should be long enough to find a vaccine and innoculate the population, providing “herd immunity” through more humane means.
The outcome of this approach would be to reduce deaths by 85-91% and crucially in many scenarios to never exceed our current critical care capacity for more than a short duration. Table 4 in the paper lays off a range of trade-offs.
The problem is that we’ll need to spend anything like 58-90% of the next two years in a state of on-and-off case isolation, quarantine, social distancing and school and university disruption.
And we’ll need to be able to resolutely switch into “suppression mode” for weeks at a time, like an extended wet-break at school. Well, not like that, more like one of those science fiction movies where the sun pulses dangerously once-in-a-while and we have to scurry indoors for weeks to avoid being scorched.
This also means communicating why and when we move into “on” and “off” modes. In the UK, the government didn’t do a great job communicating their strategy last week as I wrote here. In the US, the communication challenge may be more extreme.
Capacity, adaptation and resilience
I said that this isn’t just about deaths and beds. It is about the system. So let’s imagine some things we can do under a suppression strategy. The first is we need to buy time. We need to buy time in order to start to adapt. Every day or week of space that is created is an opportunity to build adaptations (provided that time is frittered in front of Netflix). Those adaptations might be technical (like 3-d printing ventilator parts) or they might be social (like establishing a neighbourhood wellness scheme to check on those in your community.) But they take time to set-up. And take it takes many iterations to learn how to do them well.
Systems capacity
Time allows us to build capacity in the system. In the UK’s case, this means, inter alia, increasing our critical care beds shown by the black dotted line, in my annotated chart above.
We currently have a fifth the number of critical care beds as Germany, according to the OECD. It would certainly mean increasing our COVID-19 (or other disease) testing capacity. Singapore is a decent benchmark.
Capacity could also mean better front line protocols for detection and personal isolation. Better more widespread detection means more isolated quarantines and less widespread disruption. This can be low tech. Mumbai airport is stamping people who need quarantine with semi-permanent ink.
Experts have gone on to stress the importance of “testing, testing, testing” to quote Tedros Adhanom.
If you know precisely where the cancer is you can hit it with a gamma knife. If you don’t, you need to surge the whole body with radiation. So to Sars-COV-2 running amok our nations. If we know where it is, we can isolate those people affected.
We can also build capacity “in the system” to handle surging a completely different usage pattern of broadband, electricity and water for which the systems were designed. It might include our capacity for the consumer economy to function without large malls and supermarkets, whether that is more local shops or home deliveries.
Adaptation
It also gives us time to adapt to new systems of managing threats like this. Taiwan seems like an exemplary case of pandemic alertness and systems which can operate to allow freedom—even for those with suspected COVID-19. Despite it’s proximity to China and a high-density urban agglomeration, Taiwan only has 67 cases of COVID-19. (Tapei’s population density is double London’s; Taiwan’s population density is seven times that of the US.)
Neither the US or the UK can wholesale copy Taiwan’s strategies, but there are several that could be of interest. (Sorry, I don’t have time to go into it here, but I have spoken to people involved.)
Much adaptation will be social. Hugging and handshaking less. Working from home more. Washing hands and being cleaner around the house. Changing our patterns of play, socialising, worshipping and more. (My earlier essay Six ways Coronavirus will change the world missed most of the meaningful changes to our habits and daily lives of which there will be plenty.)
Some will be technical. Could we create a Fitbit-style app that tracks your social interactions for you and prompts you if you are meeting too many new people? Better, it also tells three of your friends so that they can apply social pressure on you to comply more effectively. (That is just my dumb idea, many better ones are floating around, like this one.)
There are other innovations we could bring to bear to help us all contribute to reducing the spread. Could high-risk venues like places of worship or conferences adopt more stringent policies to enable contact tracing and case isolation? (Again, just one idea of thousands.)
Our economies will need to adapt. One example, airline staff not be needed in such numbers. Do they retrain for the burgeoning nursing and care market? They know how to work in complex patterns and deal with people from all walks of life. What can pilots, used to managing complex mission-critical systems, turn their hands to?
And beyond adaptations for a war-like mobilisation, how do we start to adapt our ways of life to build some joy into them? How do we adapt so we move beyond fear into thriving kindly and sustainably?
Resilience
We now need to invest in a culture of resilience. Last year I spent some time with General Sir Richard Barrons who used to run Britain’s Joint Operations Command. We talked about resilience at one point. He said:
We’ve had a really lovely period in the history, particularly, of the West, where, since 1989, no one has had any thought, in the UK or Germany or France and many other countries, of existential peril. There was no sense of invasion or civil war or harm from a profoundly challenging natural disaster, and that’s allowed us to spend our money on other things, a much better social offer to ourselves. This has accentuated this millennial sense of it’s all about the individual and perfect freedom to lead your life, really without commitment or expectation, or any sense of harm.
That period is now over, and partly because of the way the strategic context is changing, partly because of the way technology is changing, we have to come to terms with the fact that we in the West exists as strategic snowflakes now, where our daily life is enormously fragile.
One huge challenge is that the suppression model is very brittle and demands a high level of compliance. For some, like these British tourists, compliance may require a bit more duress. Complying to the suppression strategy will be boring, tedious, not fun… not great for ‘strategic snowflakes’. However, we’ll need to comply to help each other comply.
The time we buy needs to go into building resilience in our systems. But being unedifyingly zeroed on “shareholder value”, airlines have no resources to support themselves through this hiccup. About 96% of their free cash flow from the last decade went on share buybacks.
Centralised systems also need to be complemented by more decentralised ones whether in energy production, food production, ability to live one’s life in a short radius if need be. Decentralisation drives resilience, albeit at the cost of centralised control. We’re ready for more decentralisation now—the technologies support it.
Where next
All this buys us time. It buys us time for the Hail Mary passes we need.
It could be the invention of a brilliant, accurate, at-home test that works pre-symptomatically. It could be a success with treatment, like remdesivir. It could be the arrival of summer and the possible reduction of the virus’s potency.
Or it could be the ultimate 80-yarder, a vaccine.
Amazingly, one is already in testing, less than three months into this global spread of this disease.
Ferguson’s paper on suppression strategies, which triggered this letter, is instructive. There are paths we can take that have different, better outcomes, provided we use the time these tough approaches give us wisely.
Even finite, time is wonderful. It gives us a chance to try new things out until we beat this thing.
I’m mindful of the words of American Army colonel, Hal Moore:
There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor—and after that one more thing, and after that…. The more you do the more opportunities arise.
Source:https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-a-better-way
🦠 A better way?
Building capacity, adaptation and resilience
Azeem Azhar
Mar 17
Was there a better approach to tackling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (virus that causes COVID-19 disease) across Western countries, especially the UK and US? Last week, I challenged the notion that science was immutable, dictating only one path. And I had my doubts about the British government’s softly-softly approach.
All that changed yesterday with a shift in strategy delivered by a persuasive Boris Johnson. For more details of how this emerged, read Alex Wickham’s eye-ball popping report after this essay.
A new paper produced by Neal Ferguson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis essentially argues that the mitigation strategy that Johnson-and-crew were recommending last week was ten times worse (in terms of deaths) than a suppression strategy. The paper is readable and in the interests of being an informed citizen, of any country, I suggest you do. Ultimately, it is about needing to go further than “flattening the curve”. (As I pointed out in #261, we need to think harder than just flattening the curve.)
It isn’t just about the dead
The balancing act for any government is not simply driven by the number of deaths. It is a systems problem, and actions need to prevent the “system” collapsing, whether that is the health system collapsing, the economy collapsing or civil society collapsing. Deaths are tragic. Then they become statistics.
But they are also an indicator of the overall health of the system.
Ferguson identifies two strategies to tackling the pandemic:
(a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection,
(b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely.
This is the key chart in Ferguson’s modelling of mitigation, which qualitatively applies to the United States and the UK.
The red line is the surge capacity of critical care. As you can see, even under heavily mitigated strategies like the blue line, our surged capacity is exceeded by mid-April. The mid-June peak still represents a demand for critical care beds that is eight times higher than our surge. So for every 1 patient in a critical care bed, there are about 7-8 in urgent need queuing up from coronavirus. (Not to mention routine operations independent of the disease.)
This model (and remember Box’s edict, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”) shows that aggressive mitigation could reduce a death toll by about 50% on a pure numbers basis. The paper doesn’t describe how unmitigated those deaths would be. Most of them would not occur in the critical care bed, but wherever they happened, in the corridor, parking lot, tent, requisitioned hotel room.
Suppression
“Given that mitigation is unlikely to be a viable option without overwhelming healthcare systems, suppression is likely necessary in countries able to implement the intensive controls required,” says Ferguson. Suppression involves much tougher controls and compliance than mitigation.
The top chart shows the full scale for demand on critical care beds, zoomed in on the lower chart.
Suppression may be better for a condition like COVID-19 because the virus that causes it can spread at least two days before symptoms are noticed. Even with perfect testing, this asymptomatic spread is problematic in mitigation approaches.
Two strategies of suppression seem to work best. The brown one (case isolation, quarantine and social distancing) and the green one (brown + closure of schools and universities.)
They both limit immediate pressure early in the pandemic, but store it up for the autumn time. At this level, all other things being equal, brown beats green if you can build up enough critical care capacity in a furloughed economy by the middle of April. (Can you produce enough medical supplies and devices, and train enough nurses and doctors in the next four weeks? Medical schools in the UK are, I hear, accelerating graduations of the summer class.)
But what happens in October?
Adaptive pulsing
One dose of suppression just buys us time. It pishes the curve out. To smash the curve we need to do more.
The team suggests adaptive triggering of suppression strategies. That is, when it looks like we have the current wave of the epidemic under control, as measured by the decline in ICU admissions, we can relax social controls. And then ICU admission starts to rise, it becomes an indication that the virus is spread again, so we regulate its spread by turn on suppression policies.
In this two year forecast, the blue boxes represent the time when suppression is in place. Two years should be long enough to find a vaccine and innoculate the population, providing “herd immunity” through more humane means.
The outcome of this approach would be to reduce deaths by 85-91% and crucially in many scenarios to never exceed our current critical care capacity for more than a short duration. Table 4 in the paper lays off a range of trade-offs.
The problem is that we’ll need to spend anything like 58-90% of the next two years in a state of on-and-off case isolation, quarantine, social distancing and school and university disruption.
And we’ll need to be able to resolutely switch into “suppression mode” for weeks at a time, like an extended wet-break at school. Well, not like that, more like one of those science fiction movies where the sun pulses dangerously once-in-a-while and we have to scurry indoors for weeks to avoid being scorched.
This also means communicating why and when we move into “on” and “off” modes. In the UK, the government didn’t do a great job communicating their strategy last week as I wrote here. In the US, the communication challenge may be more extreme.
Capacity, adaptation and resilience
I said that this isn’t just about deaths and beds. It is about the system. So let’s imagine some things we can do under a suppression strategy. The first is we need to buy time. We need to buy time in order to start to adapt. Every day or week of space that is created is an opportunity to build adaptations (provided that time is frittered in front of Netflix). Those adaptations might be technical (like 3-d printing ventilator parts) or they might be social (like establishing a neighbourhood wellness scheme to check on those in your community.) But they take time to set-up. And take it takes many iterations to learn how to do them well.
Systems capacity
Time allows us to build capacity in the system. In the UK’s case, this means, inter alia, increasing our critical care beds shown by the black dotted line, in my annotated chart above.
We currently have a fifth the number of critical care beds as Germany, according to the OECD. It would certainly mean increasing our COVID-19 (or other disease) testing capacity. Singapore is a decent benchmark.
Capacity could also mean better front line protocols for detection and personal isolation. Better more widespread detection means more isolated quarantines and less widespread disruption. This can be low tech. Mumbai airport is stamping people who need quarantine with semi-permanent ink.
Experts have gone on to stress the importance of “testing, testing, testing” to quote Tedros Adhanom.
If you know precisely where the cancer is you can hit it with a gamma knife. If you don’t, you need to surge the whole body with radiation. So to Sars-COV-2 running amok our nations. If we know where it is, we can isolate those people affected.
We can also build capacity “in the system” to handle surging a completely different usage pattern of broadband, electricity and water for which the systems were designed. It might include our capacity for the consumer economy to function without large malls and supermarkets, whether that is more local shops or home deliveries.
Adaptation
It also gives us time to adapt to new systems of managing threats like this. Taiwan seems like an exemplary case of pandemic alertness and systems which can operate to allow freedom—even for those with suspected COVID-19. Despite it’s proximity to China and a high-density urban agglomeration, Taiwan only has 67 cases of COVID-19. (Tapei’s population density is double London’s; Taiwan’s population density is seven times that of the US.)
Neither the US or the UK can wholesale copy Taiwan’s strategies, but there are several that could be of interest. (Sorry, I don’t have time to go into it here, but I have spoken to people involved.)
Much adaptation will be social. Hugging and handshaking less. Working from home more. Washing hands and being cleaner around the house. Changing our patterns of play, socialising, worshipping and more. (My earlier essay Six ways Coronavirus will change the world missed most of the meaningful changes to our habits and daily lives of which there will be plenty.)
Some will be technical. Could we create a Fitbit-style app that tracks your social interactions for you and prompts you if you are meeting too many new people? Better, it also tells three of your friends so that they can apply social pressure on you to comply more effectively. (That is just my dumb idea, many better ones are floating around, like this one.)
There are other innovations we could bring to bear to help us all contribute to reducing the spread. Could high-risk venues like places of worship or conferences adopt more stringent policies to enable contact tracing and case isolation? (Again, just one idea of thousands.)
Our economies will need to adapt. One example, airline staff not be needed in such numbers. Do they retrain for the burgeoning nursing and care market? They know how to work in complex patterns and deal with people from all walks of life. What can pilots, used to managing complex mission-critical systems, turn their hands to?
And beyond adaptations for a war-like mobilisation, how do we start to adapt our ways of life to build some joy into them? How do we adapt so we move beyond fear into thriving kindly and sustainably?
Resilience
We now need to invest in a culture of resilience. Last year I spent some time with General Sir Richard Barrons who used to run Britain’s Joint Operations Command. We talked about resilience at one point. He said:
We’ve had a really lovely period in the history, particularly, of the West, where, since 1989, no one has had any thought, in the UK or Germany or France and many other countries, of existential peril. There was no sense of invasion or civil war or harm from a profoundly challenging natural disaster, and that’s allowed us to spend our money on other things, a much better social offer to ourselves. This has accentuated this millennial sense of it’s all about the individual and perfect freedom to lead your life, really without commitment or expectation, or any sense of harm.
That period is now over, and partly because of the way the strategic context is changing, partly because of the way technology is changing, we have to come to terms with the fact that we in the West exists as strategic snowflakes now, where our daily life is enormously fragile.
One huge challenge is that the suppression model is very brittle and demands a high level of compliance. For some, like these British tourists, compliance may require a bit more duress. Complying to the suppression strategy will be boring, tedious, not fun… not great for ‘strategic snowflakes’. However, we’ll need to comply to help each other comply.
The time we buy needs to go into building resilience in our systems. But being unedifyingly zeroed on “shareholder value”, airlines have no resources to support themselves through this hiccup. About 96% of their free cash flow from the last decade went on share buybacks.
Centralised systems also need to be complemented by more decentralised ones whether in energy production, food production, ability to live one’s life in a short radius if need be. Decentralisation drives resilience, albeit at the cost of centralised control. We’re ready for more decentralisation now—the technologies support it.
Where next
All this buys us time. It buys us time for the Hail Mary passes we need.
It could be the invention of a brilliant, accurate, at-home test that works pre-symptomatically. It could be a success with treatment, like remdesivir. It could be the arrival of summer and the possible reduction of the virus’s potency.
Or it could be the ultimate 80-yarder, a vaccine.
Amazingly, one is already in testing, less than three months into this global spread of this disease.
Ferguson’s paper on suppression strategies, which triggered this letter, is instructive. There are paths we can take that have different, better outcomes, provided we use the time these tough approaches give us wisely.
Even finite, time is wonderful. It gives us a chance to try new things out until we beat this thing.
I’m mindful of the words of American Army colonel, Hal Moore:
There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor—and after that one more thing, and after that…. The more you do the more opportunities arise.
Source:https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-a-better-way
R322-S106-TED TALKS-How to make faster decisions, by Patrick McGinnis
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Way We Work | December 2019
How to make faster decisions
In a world of endless reviews and options, it's easy to become paralyzed by indecision.Investor and writer Patrick McGinnis shares the dangers of "FOBO" -- the fear of better options -- and how to overcome it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Patrick McGinnis · Venture capitalist, writer
Patrick J. McGinnis is a venture capitalist, writer and speaker.
Transcript:
You're probably familiar with FOMO.
[This guy invented the term]
That's short for "Fear Of Missing Out." It's that feeling you get when it seems everyone else is doing something better than what you're doing now. But there's another FO you need to know about, and it's far more dangerous. It's called FOBO, and it's short for "Fear Of a Better Option."
[The Way We Work]
We live in a world of overwhelming choice. Even decisions that used to be simple, like choosing a restaurant or making everyday purchases, are now fraught with overanalysis. Technology has only made the issue more pronounced. If you want to buy a pair of white shoelaces online, you have to sort through thousands of items and read through hundreds of reviews. That's an astounding amount of information to process to just buy two pieces of string that cost less than your morning latte.
Chances are you've experienced FOBO when you've struggled to choose just one from a group of perfectly acceptable outcomes. It's a symptom of a culture which sees value in collecting and preserving as many options as possible.
You might wonder why all of this is so bad. It seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't it be a privilege to have so many good options to choose from? The problem is, FOBO induces such severe analysis paralysis that it can negatively impact both your personal and professional life. When you can't make decisions with conviction, you waste precious time and energy.
Luckily, there is a way to overcome FOBO. Here's a secret. With any decision you make, you first have to determine the stakes, as this will inform your decision-making strategy. When it comes down to it, you only really face three types of decisions in life: high stakes, low stakes and no stakes.
Let's start with no-stakes decisions. These are the minor details of life, where there is almost never an incorrect answer, and in a few hours, you won't even remember making the decision. A good example of this is choosing what to watch on TV. With thousands of shows, it's easy to get overwhelmed, yet no matter what you pick, the consequences are basically nonexistent. So spending more than a few moments on FOBO is a massive waste of energy. You just need to move on.
When it comes to no-stakes decisions, the key is to outsource them to the universe. For example, you can whittle down your choices to just two and then flip a coin. Or try my personal favorite -- ask the watch. Assign each one of your choices to one half of your watch, then let the second hand tell you what you're going to do. Looks like I'll be having the fish.
That brings us to low-stakes decisions. These have consequences, but none are earth-shattering, and there are plenty of acceptable outcomes. Many routine things at work, like purchasing a printer, booking a hotel or choosing between possible venues for an off-site are classically low-stakes in nature. Some thinking is required, but these aren't make-or-break deliberations, and you'll probably forget about them in a few weeks. Here, you can also outsource decision-making, but you want some critical thinking involved, as there are some stakes. This time, you'll outsource to a person.
Set some basic criteria, select someone to present a recommendation, and then take their advice. Make sure to avoid the temptation to canvass. Your goal is to clear your plate, not to kick the can down the road.
Now that you tackled low-stakes and no-stakes decisions, you've created the space and time you'll need to handle high-stakes decisions. These are things like "which house should I buy" or "which job should I accept." Since the stakes are high and there are long-term implications, you absolutely want to get it right.
Before we get to work, let's establish a few basic principles to guide you through the process.
First, think about what really matters to you, and set your criteria accordingly.
Second, gather the relevant facts. Make sure you collect data about all of the options, so you can be confident that you're truly making an informed decision.
And third, remember that FOBO, by nature, comes when you struggle to choose just one from a group of perfectly acceptable options. So no matter what you choose, you can rest assured that the downside is limited.
Now that you've established some ground rules, the process can begin. Start by identifying a front-runner based on your intuition, then compare each of your options head-to-head with the front-runner, one-by-one. Each time, choose the better of the two based on the criteria, and discard the other one. Here's the trick to avoiding FOBO. When you eliminate an option, it's gone forever. If you keep returning to discarded options, you risk getting stuck. Now repeat this process until you get down to one final choice.
If you follow this system, you will usually end up with a decision on your own. On the rare occasion that you get stuck, you will outsource the final decision to a small group of qualified people who you trust and who are equipped to provide you with guidance on this particular topic. Engage a group of five or less, ideally an odd number of people so that you have a built-in tiebreaker if you need it.
Now that you've made your choice, one last challenge remains. You have to commit. I can't promise you that you'll ever truly know if you've made the perfect decision, but I can tell you this: a significant percentage of people in the world will never have to worry about FOBO. Unlike the billions of people who have few options, if any, due to war, poverty or illness, you have plentiful opportunities to live decisively. You may not get everything you want, but the mere fact you get to decide is powerful.
In fact, it's a gift. Make the most of it.
Source:https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_mcginnis_how_to_make_faster_decisions
The Way We Work | December 2019
How to make faster decisions
In a world of endless reviews and options, it's easy to become paralyzed by indecision.Investor and writer Patrick McGinnis shares the dangers of "FOBO" -- the fear of better options -- and how to overcome it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Patrick McGinnis · Venture capitalist, writer
Patrick J. McGinnis is a venture capitalist, writer and speaker.
Transcript:
You're probably familiar with FOMO.
[This guy invented the term]
That's short for "Fear Of Missing Out." It's that feeling you get when it seems everyone else is doing something better than what you're doing now. But there's another FO you need to know about, and it's far more dangerous. It's called FOBO, and it's short for "Fear Of a Better Option."
[The Way We Work]
We live in a world of overwhelming choice. Even decisions that used to be simple, like choosing a restaurant or making everyday purchases, are now fraught with overanalysis. Technology has only made the issue more pronounced. If you want to buy a pair of white shoelaces online, you have to sort through thousands of items and read through hundreds of reviews. That's an astounding amount of information to process to just buy two pieces of string that cost less than your morning latte.
Chances are you've experienced FOBO when you've struggled to choose just one from a group of perfectly acceptable outcomes. It's a symptom of a culture which sees value in collecting and preserving as many options as possible.
You might wonder why all of this is so bad. It seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't it be a privilege to have so many good options to choose from? The problem is, FOBO induces such severe analysis paralysis that it can negatively impact both your personal and professional life. When you can't make decisions with conviction, you waste precious time and energy.
Luckily, there is a way to overcome FOBO. Here's a secret. With any decision you make, you first have to determine the stakes, as this will inform your decision-making strategy. When it comes down to it, you only really face three types of decisions in life: high stakes, low stakes and no stakes.
Let's start with no-stakes decisions. These are the minor details of life, where there is almost never an incorrect answer, and in a few hours, you won't even remember making the decision. A good example of this is choosing what to watch on TV. With thousands of shows, it's easy to get overwhelmed, yet no matter what you pick, the consequences are basically nonexistent. So spending more than a few moments on FOBO is a massive waste of energy. You just need to move on.
When it comes to no-stakes decisions, the key is to outsource them to the universe. For example, you can whittle down your choices to just two and then flip a coin. Or try my personal favorite -- ask the watch. Assign each one of your choices to one half of your watch, then let the second hand tell you what you're going to do. Looks like I'll be having the fish.
That brings us to low-stakes decisions. These have consequences, but none are earth-shattering, and there are plenty of acceptable outcomes. Many routine things at work, like purchasing a printer, booking a hotel or choosing between possible venues for an off-site are classically low-stakes in nature. Some thinking is required, but these aren't make-or-break deliberations, and you'll probably forget about them in a few weeks. Here, you can also outsource decision-making, but you want some critical thinking involved, as there are some stakes. This time, you'll outsource to a person.
Set some basic criteria, select someone to present a recommendation, and then take their advice. Make sure to avoid the temptation to canvass. Your goal is to clear your plate, not to kick the can down the road.
Now that you tackled low-stakes and no-stakes decisions, you've created the space and time you'll need to handle high-stakes decisions. These are things like "which house should I buy" or "which job should I accept." Since the stakes are high and there are long-term implications, you absolutely want to get it right.
Before we get to work, let's establish a few basic principles to guide you through the process.
First, think about what really matters to you, and set your criteria accordingly.
Second, gather the relevant facts. Make sure you collect data about all of the options, so you can be confident that you're truly making an informed decision.
And third, remember that FOBO, by nature, comes when you struggle to choose just one from a group of perfectly acceptable options. So no matter what you choose, you can rest assured that the downside is limited.
Now that you've established some ground rules, the process can begin. Start by identifying a front-runner based on your intuition, then compare each of your options head-to-head with the front-runner, one-by-one. Each time, choose the better of the two based on the criteria, and discard the other one. Here's the trick to avoiding FOBO. When you eliminate an option, it's gone forever. If you keep returning to discarded options, you risk getting stuck. Now repeat this process until you get down to one final choice.
If you follow this system, you will usually end up with a decision on your own. On the rare occasion that you get stuck, you will outsource the final decision to a small group of qualified people who you trust and who are equipped to provide you with guidance on this particular topic. Engage a group of five or less, ideally an odd number of people so that you have a built-in tiebreaker if you need it.
Now that you've made your choice, one last challenge remains. You have to commit. I can't promise you that you'll ever truly know if you've made the perfect decision, but I can tell you this: a significant percentage of people in the world will never have to worry about FOBO. Unlike the billions of people who have few options, if any, due to war, poverty or illness, you have plentiful opportunities to live decisively. You may not get everything you want, but the mere fact you get to decide is powerful.
In fact, it's a gift. Make the most of it.
Source:https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_mcginnis_how_to_make_faster_decisions
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