One of the fundamental roles for a leader is to focus on the future. When others are embedded in the day-to-day operations of a business, the leader has a longer outlook – the strategic consideration of risks and opportunities coming over the horizon.
Keeping that future focus is incredibly hard at a time like this. Grappling with the extended uncertainty presented by the COVID-19 pandemic makes forward planning seem impossible.
After all, our forward planning depends on some degree of confidence about the future – or at least knowing a realistic range of positive and negative scenarios to estimate within. How can we expect our leaders to perform their future-focussed roles if none of us know what will happen next?
Given the enormous scope and many layers of uncertainty in a global pandemic, how can our leaders even begin to forecast where we will end up? And how are they to know how soon it will end?
Why we are so desperate to know when it will end
Psychological research tells us that our brains are hard-wired to desire certainty.
A feeling of uncertainty about the future triggers an alert response in our brain. Unconsciously, the brain focuses on the emerging threat, ever-wary of developments that might disturb our safety. Whilst occupied with threats, our brain’s ability to focus on other things correspondingly diminishes.
This certainty-craving phenomenon explains why we are hungry for news in a crisis. Scrolling compulsively through a Facebook feed, or listening continuously to rolling TV coverage, demonstrates our brain’s need to absorb data, make sense of chaos and bring back certainty and control. This is precisely why media outlets love breaking from scheduled programming and switching to continuous coverage of a crisis – the departure from certainty creates an alert in our brain, and we are hard-wired to continue to consume the news feed, even when there is no new information for us about the situation.
Predictably then, faced with the current coronavirus pandemic, our overloaded brains are yearning to have one simple question answered – when will it be over?
More specifically, our brains want an answer to the question, when will the threat to my personal health and safety be over? When will the restrictions on my movement and activities be lifted? When will things be normal again?
These are not just questions leaders are asking, but basic human desires that we all have. We all want certainty back and we all want to know when it will be over.
Who can tell us when will it be over?
Some of us may assume that because COVID-19 is a new virus, that the world would never have had a crisis of this magnitude, and that we are therefore all powerless to know its trajectory or impact.
Of course, that is not true. This coronavirus is novel, but it is not unprecedented.
The world has experienced pandemics of even greater magnitude before, and the experience of those crises gives us some insight into what is in store for us.
Counter-intuitively, the future is more predictable than we think, and we often overlook historical precedent as a guide to the future. Psychologists even have a name for it – availability bias, which is the tendency of our brains to place great weight on recent events and information when making decisions (performance appraisals are one common display of this phenomenon in the work arena).
If we don’t believe that historical occurrences are a guide to future, consider this description of life in the US city of Minneapolis during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918:
"The measures used to contain influenza greatly affected the day-to-day lives of citizens. While some accepted the changes imposed on them, others protested regulations that they considered unfair. Some called for more stringent methods, while others blatantly broke the new rules that were intended to protect them.
The closing of public places in Minneapolis was announced in advance, so people rushed to complete those activities that would soon be banned, resulting in the very same crowded conditions the ban sought to prevent.
Minneapolis football teams chose to ignore the ban and attempted to play against each other in front of large crowds… Several establishments serving alcohol and food deliberately broke the closing order to continue their regular business". [i]
Compare that to 2020, when we again have some people ignoring stay-at-home directives, or holding illegal house parties, whilst others call for universal mandatory lockdowns. We saw crowds flocking to beaches and bars for “one last fling” just before shutdowns were imposed. And of course AFL and NRL matches continued despite the looming danger, whilst rogue bars opened to patrons and risked fines.
Human behaviour evidently does have some constant rhythm across the generations – as does the rise and decline of viruses.
History could be our guide to how and when this pandemic crisis will end.
So how do pandemics end?
Pandemics end when the virus does not have enough susceptible people to infect.
Examples of previous pandemics illustrate this. In the case of smallpox, it was the invention of the world’s first vaccine that made the crucial difference in ending the pandemic. It did, however, take 181 years from the creation of smallpox vaccine for the world to be free of the disease, and in the meantime over 50 million people died.
In contrast, the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic lasted only 20 months, thanks to the development of an effective vaccine. Because H1N1 was a related strain of the same virus that caused Spanish flu in 1918, there were decades of vaccine research to draw upon. Even with the production of a vaccine, the pandemic caused 575,000 deaths worldwide.
In the case of Spanish flu, what started in 1918 in overcrowded medical camps and military hospitals full of sick soldiers in France, ended up infecting 500 million people and killing around 10% of them.
The end of the war meant infected soldiers returned to their homes – and this helped spread the disease. Three deadly waves of infection occurred – each roughly four months apart – but after the third peak, the threat ended relatively quickly.
Once soldiers were home, travel declined, and the viral spread slowed as people had less contact with outsiders. As time passed, the virus also mutated into a milder form. The effects of natural selection meant that those who caught the milder form of the mutated virus survived, and developed an immunity. This growing spread of post-infection immunity reduced the incidence of the disease, and the virus didn’t hop as easily to new patients.
Viral mutation was also one of the factors in the 2002 SARS threat being overcome. SARS randomly mutated and became much more severe, but harder to transmit to humans. This mutation, combined with stringent government action to interrupt all human-to-human transmission (namely the quick isolation of patients and the strict enforcement of quarantine), helped contain deaths to only 800, when a large-scale pandemic was a realistic possibility.
Notably, a vaccine for SARS – which is one of the closest biological diseases to COVID-19 – is still not available, almost 18 years after the first outbreak.
When will coronavirus be over?
So what does this mean for us today? Is coronavirus a quick eight-month crisis like SARS, a 20-month crisis like swine flu, or a two-year crisis like Spanish flu?
Sadly, the most realistic answer to the question “when will this be over?” is – probably – never.
For it to be truly over, we need large enough portions of the community to have immunity – by either catching the disease and recovering, or through the development of a vaccine.
We have not been able to create human vaccines for coronaviruses before, and the virulent spread of the current virus makes it unlikely that it could be easily eradicated. If a vaccine is possible, the World Health Organization says it does not expect a vaccine to be available in less than 18 months.
It is of course possible that like SARS or Spanish flu, the virus will mutate to a less virulent or harder to catch form. It is also entirely possible that COVID-19 – even in a milder form – will be around for the rest of our lives.
There is no definitive answer to when it will all be over. But the cautious review of previous pandemics should lead us to conclude that it will be much longer than we think. Certainly no comparable pandemics have been over in six months.
What does this mean for leaders? Plan for a longer horizon than you think. Plan for some disruptions and restrictions to continue for far longer than others are forecasting – or perhaps permanently.
Rather than seeing our current situation as temporary and banking on a strategy of things getting “back to normal”, design your new normal assuming that some aspects of this situation could be with us for many years.
If the vaccine never comes, how does your organisation work under more restrictive government regulations? What will your customer base, staffing load, and supply chain look like as we adapt to this different reality? Are there new opportunities and different challenges?
Previous pandemics did not end quickly. Leaders today should plan accordingly.
If you want to improve your ability to handle crises, consider our Crisis Management Training for your team, or consider our leadership coaching services.
[i] Ott M, Shaw SF, Danila RN, Lynfield R. Lessons learned from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Public Health Reports. 2007;122(6):803–810.
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