Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Leaders Declare What’s a Priority & What’s Not

What would you think if a decision-maker said to your face, “Sorry, your project is not a priority.  We’re focusing our efforts elsewhere”?  Would your first instinct be, “@#$ing @$$-%*&#!”?  Would it be, “Damn old fart doesn’t know what’s good!”?  Would it be, “Senior management doesn’t understand what’s really important!”?

Or would it be, “Thank God we have a clear sense of priorities here”?

You might come to that last one after you calm down and reflect a bit.  Seriously.  Hopefully.

I’ve noticed a chronic inability for non-leaders to declare what is and what is not a priority.  If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

I’m looking at a document right now that has the following categories:

• Urgent Priority
• High Priority
• Priority
• Moderate Priority

And that’s it.  That either means Really-High, High, Medium, Low, or High, Medium, Low, Not-Really-Worth-Talking-About.  But the authors of the document don’t want to put it that way.  Everything’s important.  Everything’s a priority.

It takes backbone to declare that something is not a priority.  Why?  Because someone will stand up and voice an objection.  Nobody wants to hear that their concerns are low-priority.  Yet a true leader must prioritize, because time and resources are finite.  Some things must be given higher priority and allocated greater resources and effort.  By doing so, the necessary corollary is that some other things will be given lower priority and allocated less resources and effort – or none at all.

Politicians are possibly the worst at this.  If something is a “priority”, that means it’s worth diddly-squat and they don’t care.  That’s the bottom of their particular scale.  Unofficially it goes something like Priority, High Priority, Urgent Priority, Critical, and … yes, I’ve heard a veteran public servant tell me a politician has used this… a Sacred Trust.  But notice that everything is labelled some kind of priority.

How many politicians do you honestly consider true leaders?  Not frickin’ many, I’d wager.

So don’t be a frickin’ politician in your work and in your pursuits.  Take a stand.  Make it known.  The scale does not run Urgent Priority, High Priority, Priority, Moderate Priority.  A real, honest scale will be something along the lines of:

• Priority
• Important
• We’ll Get To It If We Can
• Why the F*** Are We Even Talking About This

Be a leader, and let it be known what is a priority and what’s not.  Avoid the insipid and dangerous wishy-washiness of declaring everything a priority.

It’s Not “an Ask” – It’s “a Request”

President Obama is a great speaker.  He has good stage presence.  He is eloquent.  He delivers with good pacing and emphasis.  But there is one thing that he does that really irks me.  As far as I can tell, it originated with him.  It is entirely possible, maybe even probable, that it began elsewhere, but he made it prominent and now I see and hear it everywhere.

“An ask.”  That is used as in “We’re going to present this as an ask.”  Or, as I just read in a document in front of me, “Original ask reduced to…”

There is already a word that exists for this concept, and it’s called “a request”.  We are requesting something.  Our request has been reduced to something else.  There is no need to inject a perfectly good verb and use it as a noun like this.

A friend of mine was recently railing against the use of contractions in academic papers.  That’s the bee in her bonnet.  Well, the bee in my briefs is the use of “ask” as a noun!

Language evolves.  I know that.  But there is a natural evolution of language that flows smoothly, born out of new situations, new expectations, new understanding . And then there is the absurd evolution brought about by business-speak, where people insecure with themselves adopt faddish language in order to appear whip-cracking smart.

Using the verb “ask” as a noun is not as grating as entire phrases like “paragon shift” or “think outside the box”, but as far as I’m concerned, it falls right in the same category.  Hopefully it’ll fade away from mainstream use just as those classic phrases have done.

Unfortunately for me, and anyone else who can be a bit of a language purist at times, that will take time.

Until then, my blood pressure goes up just a little bit each time I hear or read “ask” being used as a noun, and my respect for the person using it in that way goes down just a bit.

Has the H1N1 Pandemic been all hype?

With the movie 2012 playing in theatres, more mediocre disaster flicks than you can shake a stick at, movies like Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, and dire comparisons with the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, it’s hard not to conclude that the current H1N1 pandemic has been something of a flop.

What happened to the hordes of sick and incapacitated that we were told to expect?  What happened to the dead and dying littering our streets?  What happened to the hysteria of people barricading themselves at home with their stashes of food and water, using grandpa’s trusty old shotgun to warn strangers to back away from the front door?  What happened to the collapse of civilization, with burning cars in the streets, looters pillaging every store in sight, and martial law imposed in a vain attempt to keep the end of the-world-as-we-know-it at bay?

Is that what it would take for us to really consider a pandemic to be serious?

Perhaps.  Surely we all admit that media and entertainment skew our perceptions – and surely the scale that we’re accustomed to seeing in disaster movies must skew our expectations somewhat.

Chances are, you never even got sick during these past few months.  And if you got sick, chances are it was pretty mild.  Just like a regular seasonal flu.   Chances are also that you don’t know anyone who got really sick from the H1N1 virus beyond the wallop that the regular flu might give.

But that’s looking at things at a very low level.  Yes, we all think we are the center of the universe, but we can’t all be right.  So let’s take it away from the individual level and look at things at the system level.

I’m going to use US numbers here just because I have them handy.  But they pretty much jive with the Ontario numbers that I’ve been seeing.

Over 9,800 people in the US have died due to H1N1, versus the 36,000 people who die every year from seasonal influenza.  No big deal, right?  One problem with that comparison is that the 36,000 figure includes deaths where the flu triggers or exacerbates other existing conditions.  Direct deaths due to seasonal influenza are about 9,000 per year in America.  In terms of pure, direct mortality, H1N1 is just as serious as seasonal flu, not less.

The other, more serious problem, is the age distribution amongst the fatalities.  90% of deaths from seasonal influenza (including those through aggravation of existing conditions) is in the elderly.  But what we find with H1N1 is that just over 10% of deaths occurred in children under 18 years of age, and over 75% of deaths were amongst those aged 18 to 64.  Less than 15% of those who died from H1N1 were seniors over the age of 65.

If you look at this in terms of “years of life lost”, H1N1 is clearly more serious than the regular, seasonal flu.

Now how about the load placed on the healthcare system?  In the US, and here in Canada and Ontario, H1N1 has led to many more serious cases requiring hospitalization in Intensive Care Units than seasonal flu.  The healthcare system, particularly at the acute care level, is being stressed to the seams handling the increased load due to serious H1N1 cases.

You know that driving is one of the most dangerous activities that any of us does on a regular basis.  So you take simple precautions like wearing your seatbelt.  The vast majority of us will never be in a serious collision where the seatbelt saves our lives.  But on a system-wide scale, auto collisions causing fatalities happen often enough that they need taken seriously.

Similarly with H1N1 influenza, most of us will not come anywhere near the Grim Reaper because of the virus.  But enough of us will that it is considered serious, and needs to be treated seriously.  Getting yourself vaccinated is like wearing a seatbelt in that regard.

If you’re not vaccinated, get yourself vaccinated.  The virus can come back for a third wave this flu season, and it might even mutate just a bit to make things even worse.  It takes about 10 days after inoculation for you to actually build immunity against the virus.  So if you think you can just get a shot when things start turning bad, that’s like trying to put on your seatbelt just before the collision.

It’s too late by that point.

For the vast majority of us, those of us who have not been working in the healthcare system that is operating at the red line, the H1N1 pandemic has been a flop.  It’s been a disappointment.

But that’s only because our perspectives are skewed not only by the fact that we generally don’t see things at the system level, but also because our perceptions have been warped by watching too many disaster movies.  At least mine has, and hey, my work deals very closely with the H1N1 response!

Logistics will Make or Break Your Emergency Management Efforts

Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.  That is a military maxim that applies to endeavours emergency management.  It’s easy to concentrate on tactics: the front line, where the rubber meets the road.  It’s easy to forget that there is no rubber and no gas in the engine without the right logistics behind the effort.  In fact, without the right logistics behind the effort, you’re just going to get a serious case of road rash.

“Road Rash: (n) abrasion from sliding on pavement after a crash”

I’ve been reading a book titled “Supplying War”, written by Martin Van Creveld.  It is an interesting investigation into the nature of logistics from the 1560 through to 1945 in terms of its impact on what could be, and what was, accomplished in European wars throughout that timeframe.  I have long read books on the tactics and strategies undertaken in different eras of warfare, but this is the first time I have begun to delve into the logistics behind the scenes.

The overriding message?  Logistics and logistic capability dramatically constrains what you can do – sometimes in an obvious manner, and sometimes in the most insidious of details that would not occur to someone not intimately familiar with the conditions on the ground.

Armies march on their stomachs, yes, but did you know that until the modern era, the constraining factor was actually feeding your horses?  Men were easy to feed – they ravaged the land that they marched over.  And did you know that the railways used prior to and during WW1 were, in fact, basically useless because of bottlenecks at the railheads where supplies were offloaded?

Details matter.  And unfortunately, logistics is a big bag of details that people don’t like to think much about.  It is, however, vitally important for a leader to think about because it is the very thing that, perhaps more than the situation at hand, most constrains your choices.

Let’s look at the recent public health response to the pH1N1 virus, shall we?  I can speak best about Ontario, since that is where my experience has been.  Ontario, like the other provinces in Canada, had a plan to roll out mass quantities of H1N1 vaccine to the public.  But while it sounds like it would have been a flood of vaccines like a remake of the Shock & Awe campaign in Iraq, the reality was something far less dramatic.

What the logistics chain – one that extended back to the vaccine manufacturer itself – was able to support was having everyone vaccinated by Christmas.  It was, by all accounts, a mammoth undertaking to get millions of Ontarians vaccinated in less than 6 weeks, but the overall timeframe was measured in months, not weeks.  That was a logistics issue.

However, things didn’t go smoothly.  The manufacturer ran into production difficulties right when public demand was highest – right when people wanted the vaccine, we weren’t able to get it out to everyone.  Some flu vaccination clinics even ran out of vaccines and had to close for a day or two at the height of the demand curve.  And Canada had only one supplier, so there were no other options other than to wait for the supplier to get things ironed out and back up to speed.  That was a logistics issue.

The Province wanted to start getting family doctors involved in the vaccination effort.  But at that time, vaccines were only available in 500-dose batches.  The Provincial warehouses who distributed the vaccines to public health units, who then distributed to doctors and clinics, dealt only with Costco-sized packages when family doctors really only needed regular supermarket-sized, or even convenience store-sized packages.  So, the Province had to scramble to repackage the vaccines into smaller 100-dose batches.  Again, this was a logistics issue.

Tactics are flashy.  Strategy is sexy.  Logistics is the ugly miscreant standing in the back, like Quasimodo on a bad day.  You can think up great strategy and design creative tactics, but if you don’t pay proper and sufficient attention to logistics, you’re asking for trouble.  Logistics isn’t sexy and can be a real pain in the ass to just look at, much less deal with.  But as they say, the devil is in the details – and logistics is pretty much the devil’s playground when it comes to putting rubber on the road and making things happen.

Pay attention to logistics.  If you don’t, it’s not just you who has to pay for it, but also the people you’re supposed to be helping.

How you did in school is not a measure of intelligence

According to our education system, I’m smarter than a lot of other people.  I know it isn’t true, but I’m not going to turn down awards, scholarships, and ego boosts by giving an acceptance speech by saying it’s all bunk.  But it is.

Our education system, as it is currently constructed, is a game.  If you know how to play the game, you get better marks, which gives you rewards.  The assumption is that if you have better marks, you are:

• more intelligent
• more capable
• more worthy

It’s not true at all.  Marks are but one possible measure of what a person knows and what they can do.  My brain works the way that seems to match what the school system – from primary school through to university – is looking for.  But I will admit to you that there are a lot of areas where I’m dumb as a pile of rocks.  And I know there are people who are smart and excel in the very areas where I’m useless.

Intelligence is not about how well you can do mathematics, analyze scientific problems, and compose elegant papers.  Yes, those skills are important if you are going into finance, medicine, academics, engineering, or scientific research.  But is that all the world is about?  Is that all that is worthwhile?

I don’t believe it is.  There is a lot more to the world than science, medicine, academics, and finance.

But aren’t these the only ways a person can make a ton of money and be considered “successful” by society’s most prevalent standard?  Not necessarily.

I’ll have more to say on this topic in the future, but let me share with you an interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking speech:

I’m a smart person.  But so are many of the folks who didn’t excel in school.  It’s a shame that our education system and our society would ever let kids and people who didn’t excel in school think otherwise.