Epidemic Leadership. Larry McEvoy
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and repetitive precaution. Although we might consider a hypothetical disease called “Ebola lightweight” “better” if it were very difficult to pass from one person to the next and killed only 2 percent of those afflicted, the fundamental reality is that the Ebola virus is a recipe packet for human harm. On the other hand, innovation, collaboration, creativity, and empathy are action-ideas we would love to see bloom into epidemics in multiple places where they are currently missing. Although biological and behavioral epidemics are both different and similar, what differentiates bad and good is not how the epidemic organizes and moves, but what it carries. Positive epidemics carry good “pathogens,” or payloads, whereas bad epidemics carry bad ones.
As we might expect in a world filled with its share of ambiguity and trade-offs, some epidemics carry both. Malaria, for example, has the nasty effects of causing illness, organ damage, and death, but has also driven the genetic origin of a hemoglobin variant that provides resistance to malaria. That variant, in turn, carries the burden of sickle cell disease. Viruses themselves carry genes that have integrated into our own genome over generations. Some of these genes contain the coding for essentially human processes—gestation, for example.9 As we shall see, designing or selecting the right payload is critical, as is the ability to design and facilitate uptake and diffusion—spread!—constructively matched to that payload or idea.
Instead of waiting for small ideas and particles to mushroom serendipitously into big problems, would it be possible to think of large-scale positive effect and then grow it from a tiny—and accessible—idea or action into a macro effect? What if leaders could conjure positive “idea pathogens” and then support their interactive trafficking into stable and impactful patterns by tapping how epidemics originate and move?
For a moment, let's imagine the promising power of positive epidemics. Get the words “bad,” “devastating,” “death,” “disease,” and “harmful” out of your head. Let's look not at the effects epidemics wreak upon our minds and bodies and social institutions, but at the way they work, their intrinsic properties.
Epidemics Spread Exponentially
Epidemics explode from almost nothing to spectacularly something because they grow via nonlinear dynamics. Epidemics are an effective way for apparently powerless things to create big effects. They have the capacity to start behind, catch up, and go way past expectations. Despite being made of tiny particles with a massive energy deficit relative to their target organisms, with immune systems and barriers arrayed against them, epidemics have mastered the transition from current state to future state, from the way things are to the way things will be when they are on the move. They are able to move their version of an idea, a pathogenic particle, quickly, from behind and insignificant to swarming and impactful. A friend of mine likes to say we're “late, late, late” on addressing our biggest problems. Epidemics, in their ability to move quickly from nothing to something, offer a way to catch up when we're late, late, late.
Because they are exponential, epidemics create enormous leverage. Influenza is a tiny particle of quasi-life, yet it can shift the steady state of each of our entire bodies, which themselves are collective systems of one hundred trillion cells. That's a serious return on investment! Every leader and team benefits from leverage. There are more metrics and goals, opportunities and challenges, and energy and time requirements than we can ever handle ourselves. That's why humans have organized themselves into communities where we can better survive, create, respond, prosper, and live. Families, churches, companies, and governments all embody some type of social leverage. The “novel coronavirus” causing COVID-19 possesses leverage in spades. We were not able to stop it from going exponential.
Epidemics Tap Local Resources
Epidemics survive and flourish by co-opting the abundant resources of the natural system in which they live. While they may sprawl across wide territory, they are never burdened by long and complicated supply lines. Epidemics possess very little start-up capital; they “own” very little internal resource. Influenza doesn't get into your body with its own energy—it enters passively and then cranks up your vast energy-making capacity to fuel its own multiplication and impact. There are caveats and trade-offs to how epidemics co-opt our resources: the more invisible and mild the pathogen, the faster and wider it moves. Epidemics that don't ensure sufficient health of hosts—at least for a time—to allow for further contagion are scary and have a higher death rate, but they're not very successful. Epidemics that kill hosts too quickly and in high percentages compromise their own path to massive coverage of a population.
Epidemics Are Adaptive: They Flourish Against Resistance and Surprise
No one wants epidemics to pop up, let alone spread, and yet … they do! Epidemics face layers of obstacle and resistance—formal structures, money, organized social programs, and finally, our own immune systems, which are designed to recognize them, hunt them down, kill them, and keep a record for the next time. Epidemics are not confined to a single plan; they're constantly changing their playbook. If they don't, they are no longer an epidemic—they're a past epidemic, and likely a small one. Leaders constantly encounter resistance. Epidemics must thrive on the situation at hand. If that situation changes, they rapidly shift, or they cease to exist.
Epidemics have to be agile and opportunistic. With so many things out to stop them, they adapt relentlessly and frequently or die quickly. Our lives as leaders may not appear to be quite so harsh, but our world demands adaptation and agility as a continuous capacity.
Epidemics Organize Themselves
Epidemics launch without analytics, business plans, or protocols, from simple principles to complex patterns and into networks of relationships. How many of us have been taught to trust the power of self-organization? After all, it doesn't seem to work in teenage closets or postholiday kitchens. Imagine if your team, your company, or your school self-organized? Oddly and truly, self-organization is a predominant form of getting things done in the universe and overwhelmingly so in the biological world. Leaders can harness self-organization effectively and easily if we are willing to understand its requirements.
Epidemics self-organize in complex settings by riffing endlessly on simple building blocks and clumping combinations into patterns. It is this clumping of simplicity that paradoxically underpins an epidemic's enviable adaptability and ability to thrive in a world of complexity. They just keep finding different combinations until they hit a winning formula, and they keep working it until something forces a change. In a complex world, simplicity turns out to be not just a brain saver but an essential design parameter for scaling both uniformity and infinite variety.
Epidemics Have “Distributed Intelligence”
Epidemics have no “boss” or “alpha particle”; they don't have a single “knockout point.” Their power is spread across a diffuse population of tiny things. You can't stop an epidemic by stopping one viral particle or one bacterium, or even one case of a disease (unless it's the first case, but we are rarely that lucky). Leaders would love to have an approach that “couldn't be knocked out.” Increasingly, we now have the science to design distributed intelligence in both our computing platforms and our human teams and organizations.
Epidemics Flower in Instability and Disruption
Epidemics originate and thrive in perturbations and messes, making them ideal prototypes for how we might use instability to advantage in this modern age. If the point of disruption is just that—more disruption—then ethical leaders have little to learn from this originating condition of epidemics. On the other hand, if instability is not going away in our world, if “back to normal” is less likely than “forward to healthy,” leaders of all styles can amplify their own positive effects because of, not in spite of, instability. Epidemics flower when “normal” shatters; so can you and your work.