Covid has awakened the innovation buds of our brains

Even after several months of the covid pandemic, we still do not know how many more people will get infected, or if those once infected could catch the virus again. We do not know when a vaccine will offer relief or how many people around the world will get vaccinated. We have far too many unanswered questions about covid-19.

A recent book, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by John Kay and Mervyn King, provides an answer to why the world is still so clueless. Although it was written well before the outbreak, while describing radical uncertainties, the authors had the foresight to say, “We must expect to be hit by an epidemic of an infectious disease resulting from a virus which does not yet exist."

Under the existing paradigm, the typical problems which governments and businesses face can be expressed in terms of well-defined models that are based on large amounts of past data. The behaviours of various players involved can be predicted from this data. In most of these problems, the underlying processes are more or less completely understood. They remain constant over time and are not affected much by external events. Even if they are, such events and their impact can be either ascertained or modelled in advance. So, the “optimal" solution to these problems are often ready even before they occur.

But there are events whose outcomes are hugely unpredictable. These uncertainties cannot be described with the aid of probability distribution charts, nor can they be unravelled with extra information. These are events that Donald Rumsfeld, former US secretary of defense, had described as “unknown unknowns"—events of which we don’t even know what we don’t know.

The pandemic was a radically uncertain event in which the models and algorithms developed on the basis of historical data were largely irrelevant. What is happening in the present is very different from what happened in the past. Many people who have been trained in economics, statistics or decision theory find it difficult to accept the centrality of radical uncertainty. That’s because they are trained to believe that what is happening now and what could happen in the future are variations of what happened in the past.

In reality, information from the past is of little use in mapping the future in such times. The best option is to manage the present as best as one can as it unfolds. How well we do this depends on how well we understand the intricacies of the circumstances. For that, we need to develop a system with ears close to the ground. Decision-making during radical uncertainty requires a multiplicity of skills, and these are rarely found in a single individual. Therefore, a multidisciplinary team is needed to review ground realities from different perspectives, and its collective wisdom should be used to develop multiple solutions. Since one is not sure how various factors will shape up, these solutions should be rolled out on an experimental basis. Feedback from the ground can help improve them before wide implementation.

Good examples of such a “live-in-the-present" strategy against the pandemic are the initiatives by the administration of Kottayam district in Kerala. The administration captured ground realities through various departments of the government, from leaders of local bodies to social leaders. The district collector, who heads the administration, had a multi-disciplinary team that looked at various local issues threadbare and brain-stormed its way to the best possible solution. For instance, as the pandemic spread, a large number of people were going into home quarantine. Many of them were unaware of what needed to be done or not done.

The district administration created a WhatsApp group for those under quarantine under the “Karam Thodatha Karuthal" (Care, sans the hand touch) initiative. This was rolled out across its 71 panchayats and six municipalities. Initially, short awareness-creation films using film personalties from the district were shared among members of the group. Slowly, the team, now with its ears to the ground, started getting innovative. It realized that those in quarantine were tense and needed psychological support as well. The WhatsApp group was used not only to provide heath tips, but also to share the experiences and talents of the group’s members. Various puzzles and fun games were developed. As some of the issues cropping up were new and without any precedent to go by, the team was forced to think and act in new ways. This led to the generation of many innovative ideas.

As humans increasingly depend on machines to do a job, it becomes harder for them to perform that task themselves. So, as we store phone numbers on our mobile devices, we find it tough to remember the numbers even of our closest friends. Similarly, decades of strategic planning and use of predictive models seemed to have paralysed the innovative thinking capacity of organizations and individuals. Radical uncertainty created by covid has given those flabby brains some vigorous exercise.

Biju Dominic is the chief executive officer of Final Mile Consulting, a behaviour architecture firm.