Читать книгу Epidemic Leadership - Larry McEvoy - Страница 17

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.