Strategic Reading

Strategic Reading - Weekly Summary

This week's summary of new posts published on Strategic Reading.

If you are not already getting this directly by email, you can sign up here. Every new post is also tweeted by @StratRead - so follow to find out what's new even faster.

What Covid-19 tells us about service

Joel Bailey

Behind this bland title, there is a radical and compelling essay on the nature and intrinsic value of service. It helps to makes sense of some of what we are seeing in the responses – and in responses to those responses – to the present crisis, but its power goes much further and deeper than that.

It restores a link to a deeper sense of the meaning of service than is commonly implied by phrases such as service industry and customer service agent:

Service is noble. Those who serve, in whatever function, are working to progress others. This nobility of service is what we’re seeing globally right now. This is the form of selfless service that is closer to what our evolved selves instinctively need than the usual, narrow view of service.

Suddenly that meaning is laid bare as it becomes apparent just how fundamental the idea of service is to much of what we really value – and yet how misaligned that value is to the way we reward, recognise and celebrate the activity of those who serve. That insight goes far beyond the service of personal care which is now much celebrated as an expression of the social response to an epidemic: it is also about how, between individuals and within and between organisations, service is an enormous positive force which we fail to recognise because we systematically overlook the good which comes from it, for those who serve as well those who are served.

This essay is not how you will have been accustomed to thinking about service. That is the measure of its importance – and of the service it provides to those who read it.

When part of your job is *not* caring

Terence Eden

Strategic Reading – and indeed strategy – tends to the lofty, the grand scale and the dispassionate. So at first sight, this personal and emotional reflection by Terence Eden might seem out of place here. But it is precisely because of the lofty perspective that his point is so important. Thinking about and, even more so, making decisions about issues which affect thousands or millions of people can never be about each of them as individuals. And few real world complex problems have a reassuring Pareto-optimal solution where we can sleep easy knowing that we have made things better for some and worse for none.

Abstracting from the individual can be a very necessary thing to do. But that’s not at all the same as forgetting that there are individuals, real people with real lives which can be made better or worse by distant decisions. To lose sight of that is to become less human. The first step to treating people badly is to strip them of their individuality. More insidiously, stripping people of their individuality is a step towards the risk of treating them badly. And yet as Terence says,

I simply cannot think about them as individuals. No one’s brain has room to contemplate the pain and joy and heartbreak and elation of so many people. It is unfair of me to care about any one person more than another.

The dilemma is inescapable. Being aware of it is the very least we should expect of those whose work forces that issue upon them.

Avoid learning too many lessons from these ‘unprecedented times’

Matt Jukes – Digital by Default

When things get back to normal (whatever that might mean), will everything have changed, or not very much at all?

This post makes the simple and powerful point that it is rash to assume that changes made under pressure in the particular circumstances of a crisis will survive once those immediate pressures have lessened. The much-touted “new normal” may well turn out to be surprising like the old one. So it’s a good idea to read this against the accidentally parallel piece by Matt Ballantine.

Is there any way of reconciling these points of view, beyond the trite observation that opinions differ?None that is certain, of course, it is genuinely too early to tell. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too early to think about what the answer might be. And in reflecting on that, it’s worth starting with Charlie Stross’s adage for thinking about the future:

The near-future is comprised of three parts: 90% of it is just like the present, 9% is new but foreseeable developments and innovations, and 1% is utterly bizarre and unexpected.

Are all offices, are some offices, is your office in the 90%, the 9% – or the 1%?

The world turned upside down?

Matt Ballantine

When things get back to normal (whatever that might mean), will everything have changed, or not very much at all?

This post argues that the office ion its current form can’t and won’t survive an era of social distancing. As long as physical distancing is required, no part of modern office design can work effectively, reversing its social value as well as its physical utility;

The “corner office”, blocked off in an open-plan space for senior bod, no longer has social capital when the main reason people work in an office is because they haven’t got the space at home to work remotely.

The post stresses how little physical change there has been to offices in the last half century, though in doing so perhaps understates the degree of social change which those physical structures have absorbed. But the more immediate question is whether the current hiatus in office life will be a driver for more radical change and the argument here is that it will be, both by choice and by inexorability.

All that makes it interesting to read alongside Matt Juke’s post which argues to an opposite conclusion.

The path from crisis

Matthew Taylor – RSA

A matrix to help distinguish between one-off crisis actions and interventions that have longer-term potential, and between innovations resulting from new activities and those enabled by putting a hold on business and bureaucracy as usual.It is easy, but not in the end very productive, to worry about how we got into a crisis and to pin the blame as we choose. It is harder, and very much more productive, to look at what the crisis has forced us to do and to ask how we can discard that which was of only short term utility while keeping and developing that which shows promise of longer term value.

This post provides a really useful framework not just for thinking about the difference between what we have needed to do in the crisis and what we may be able to do beyond it – neatly summarised in the matrix. But it goes beyond that to reflect on what is capable of making potentially radical change more robustly sustainable. The answers to that come not just in institutional change and adaptation, important though those opportunities are, but also from an approach to public engagement and participation which has the potential to provide the foundations necessary for better decision making more generally.

Could the crisis be a turning point, rekindling our belief in progress? It has reminded us that it is not hope that leads to action as much as action that leads to hope. It has underlined our common humanity while encouraging us to empathise with our less protected and advantaged fellow citizens. It has, I sense, made us intolerant of the unreason and cynicism that underlies so much populist rhetoric. […]

The crisis is forcing us to think differently and to act differently. Perhaps the most profound shift would be if we were ready for a different kind of leadership.

How to Make Better Decisions About Coronavirus

Thomas Davenport – MIT Sloan Management Review

It’s generally far easier to make decisions badly than to make them well, even at the best of times. Knowing that is the first step towards countering it, and this post gives a pretty standard account of a range of cognitive biases which may be relevant in the context of COVID-19.

Nine biases are covered in the post, some more obviously of particular relevance to present circumstances than others. The last two are perhaps most pertinent. Neglect of probability is essentially the same point made in Scott Alexander’s much more detailed argument, that structuring thinking in terms of probabilities is harder than the attractive simplicity of binary choices. And perhaps the most challenging of all, normalcy bias. What is normal is a really useful guide to what is to come, until it isn’t. There is a lot of rhetoric around at present about things not going back to the way things were and about the need for and desirability of a new normal. But we have seen from other crises that the sense of what is normal, the sense of there being a natural order of things (often reinforced, as it happens, by a poor grasp of probability) can too easily overwhelm the sense of opportunity and possibility which the crisis itself has created. Normalcy bias is part of what made the crisis what it is, but it is also part of how we will manage the aftermath, with the risk of becoming part of why fewer lessons will have been learned and applied when we come to look back at this period in the years to come.

If you like what you read here, click the buttons below to share on Twitter or to forward this to a friend.

Strategic Reading

Strategic Reading

London SW8 1BJ, UK

 

TWEET FORWARD
MailerLite