On Thursday 12 March 2020 Norway, like many other countries, shut down. All office staff at my company were ordered to work from home, and our offices became barren landscape over night. It was the start of what would be almost 2 full years of Covid induced rules and regulations to keep us safe. Some countries, like China, took almost a full year more to “reopen”, as the return to normality has been coined. The period gave us bountiful learning opportunities. In the next couple of posts I will explore some of my learnings from this period starting with our inate inability to learn from others.
The wake-up call
I remember vividly asking my boss at the time on Friday 13th March 2020 at 18:00 whether we were ok to take the weekend (i.e. whether there would be a need for extraordinary meetings etc.), the answer was yes, we would continue on Monday. I started the weekend, and aimed for R&R as I knew things would be difficult come Monday. At 15:00 on Saturday I was in the playground with my son when I got an SMS telling me that our parent company had decided that a whole business unit I was responsible for, generating some 10-15% of the company’s revenues at the time, would be shut down completely by Monday. I had just hired a manager for that particular business area, and was left with a difficult decision to make. Should I accept the decision – this would certainly be the most comfortable choice as I couldn’t be blamed for it – or fight and hope to reverse the decision?
After some hard thinking I decided to spend the rest of the day and night researching our business area and compare with what was being done all across the world. Discovering that even in Wuhan China, the very epicenter of the pandemic, similar businesses were operating as normal, I decided to fight the decision. I put my research into writing and sent it to my boss and the chair of our board of directors, followed up with conversations early Sunday morning. My message was simple – if the decision is final, then I’ll abide with it, but if there is the slightest possibility of reversing it, please read the research and let’s reconsider.
By Monday the decision was paused. We spent the rest of that week fact-checking with government entities and even with competitors – what would the domino effects of such a decision be (being the second largest player in the field). We even got a recommendation from public health authorities to keep open. By Friday the decision had been completely reversed and the business unit remained open throughout the pandemic. No health incidents occurred, and the business unit grew almost 200% during the pandemic – a huge lost opprtunity if we had not reversed our decision.
Irrational human beings
My experience was not unique, in fact similar situations were playing out both in families, businesses and government organizations all over the world. I remember vividly my father in law saying “It won’t come here in northern Sweden” to which the obvious reply is “It made it from Wuhan in China to Italy to Stockholm and Sundsvall, what makes you think it can’t travel 50 km more?”. A few weeks later a family member got sick and reality took hold.
As exasperating as these conversations were, they seem to be pretty common. You could daily in news read about how one country was handling certain aspects and compare this to how your own country was doing it. Seemingly everyone was talking and nobody was listening. Learning from neighbours seemed very hard indeed. Ever heard of “not invented here syndrome“? It was all over the place during the pandemic.
The lesson is simple – remember that we are not rational beings – therefore learning from others does not come easily to us. Were we rational we would seek factual truth and adapt to that, but we tend to be optimistic on our own accounts (“it won’t affect me, won’t be dangerous for me etc.”) and pesimistic on other’s account (“that is a stupid policy they have, it won’t go well”). I recon if we spend half as much time as we do on explaining why something is NOT applicable to us, to understand the lessons better, we would probably accelerate our growth many fold.
Facts are readily available
The paradox here is that facts are almost always very readily available. That doesn’t help if our irrational minds move us away from them. Our irrationality is well documented by research in a variety of fields. For a primer have a look at Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman‘s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Concepts such as “anchor values“, cognitive biasses of optimism and pessimisn etc. are well researched and documented by a variety of behavioural scientists. The facts are easily available, but not easily understood, and even less easily implemented – which generally means they are well worth the time understanding and learning.
To me, what really hit home the message of our own irrationality is that, as my own situation illustrates, facts were readily available. You could follow the exact statistical development of covid cases for almost all countries in the world for free on sites like Worldometer (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), you could easily check what rules and regulations were followed in almost all countries of the world, and you could get additional information from government organizations, companies and other insitutions to fill inn details. Even so we often chose low-quality sources of information, preferred speculation to fact-checking and made costly avoidable mistakes.
Surprisingly few countries and companies did learn from others. Even today after most of the world has “moved on” some countries, businesses and individuals are clinging to misguided solutions. Many a negative consequence could have been avoided by rapidly learning from others – from avoiding death to avoiding business shutdowns.
Make sure you are the one taking advantage of facts and rapid learning to stay ahead.