Category Archives: leadership

Exponential Risk

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Things are looking really bad again, folks.  Illinois saw more than 10,000 new COVID cases for the fourth day in a row.  Between the first and third weeks of October, COVID inpatient census rose 500% in one metropolitan hospital system, and it’s still climbing.  At this rate, we may run out of ICU beds by Thanksgiving.

I had more calls today about COVID (symptoms and/or exposures) than any day since the pandemic started.  Every call takes time to explain the profound importance of distancing, masking, and minimizing contacts, then the logistics of quarantine, testing, and contact tracing.  It’s totally straight forward in some ways, and completely convoluted in others. 

With rapidly escalating disease prevalence, every unmasked contact with a non-household (or ‘pod’) member carries exponential risk.  You breathe on me, I breathe on you.  We have now exposed each other to everybody we have each contacted in the past 14 days—we have merged our bubbles irrevocably in this one encounter, endangering everyone in each bubble and all of their extended contacts.  It cannot be undone.  This is the nature of a pandemic. 

I understand how hard it all is—how inconvenient, fatiguing, disruptive, and maddening.  Our masking and distancing, missing friends and activities, restricting our kids’ social lives, is all immediately and concretely costly to us, and only distantly and abstractly beneficial to others (and us).  Still, it is what we can do to slow the spread of a deadly virus that has infected more than 10 million Americans, and will have killed more than 240,000 of us by tomorrow.

Avoid these 9 pitfalls to stay safe.

If you want to pod, follow this guide closely. 

We can stop all paths of the virus through us.  But it takes all of us.

For Real — Go High

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Four years ago I started experiencing contempt from some people.  “Trumped That Bitch” and other pejoratives reverberated.  Daughter asked earnestly if we, natural born citizens, would be deported.  Random people asked me if I speak English, and people who look like me all across the country were yelled at, by total strangers, to go back to China.  We have been verbally and physically assaulted with escalating frequency since then.

Today, my phone vibrated with celebratory text threads.  Friend Unicorn labelled the experience a collective catharsis.  That made me consider… “I hope we can be less vindictive than the other side was last time,” I replied.  Friend Pegasus wrote back, “I believe we will be because the person leading will promote it.”  Exactly.  Leaders set the example.  Character really matters.  My friends and I feel soothed already, like we can finally take a breath and a pee break, refreshed for the next leg on the race toward progress.  Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s speeches tonight further lifted our hopes and enthusiasm for healing and reconciliation.

I thought of my conservative friends throughout the day and evening, wondering how they’re doing.  I checked in with a few.  Some expressed disappointment and grief.  I can relate.  I also remember worrying about and praying for the Obamas’ safety immediately after the Grant Park celebration in 2008, and still do today.  Flashes of fear for Biden’s and especially Harris’s safety flared tonight. 

74 days until transfer of power.  Will it be peaceful?  I believe we each have more agency over this than we think.  Ignore agitators—give them no platform.  Amplify and uplift the peacemakers.  We’ve got serious work to do, together.  Stay focused; allow no distractions.  Go High—really—for all our sakes.

Postmortem as Prenatal

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

Feedback and root cause analysis:  If you’re like most people I know, you love neither.  I relish the former; my friend revels in the latter.  We make a great team!  We conducted a series of both recently, and yet another complementary relational phenomenon occurred to me:  These are not concluding activities; they are initiating.

Many of us procrastinate and dread feedback—both the giving and the getting.  On the other side of dread and gnashing of teeth, we sigh with relief when it’s ‘over.’  For more complex issues, just one session may not suffice—we must dig deeper—ask more questions, really dissect out the nerves, vessels, and tumors.  A good postmortem requires patience, curiosity, and a nimble beginner’s mind.  We never know what will emerge, and we follow clues with a balance of enthusiasm and realism.

So many times in the past week someone has told me, “This is very good information,” when I have either given or described feedback I received.  Very good indeed, and sometimes painful and humbling.  I did not sigh with relief and closure.  I inhaled deeply and prepared to contemplate longer—to gestate.  The figurative autopsies I assisted in this week served as developmental studies of our paths to current state. They shed light on the potential anatomy of better processes, understanding, and collaboration.

We dread the hard conversations.  We think if we can just get through them, we can be free and slink away.  But the joyfully ironic truth is, hard conversations are exciting and inviting beginnings.  If we both steel and soften ourselves to pass through these jagged archways, myriad new possibilities beckon.  We get to be the architects, together, of a much healthier new future.