Managing Uncertainty in a Public Health Crisis

The U.K., among others, is pushing forwards against COVID-19 with an emphasis on ‘common sense’. This is a potentially dangerous and wily approach to public health strategies.

Common sense is a vertebra in the backbone of a well-functioning, healthy democracy. If you can rely on autonomous people to properly apply their own intuition, discretion, and understanding, you don’t need resource intensive paternalism and legalism. For the most part, when we can rely on the common sense of others, we can maximise personal responsibility and, in turn, personal freedom. This is a condition we enjoy. We prefer being free to learn from our mistakes to the over-bearing safety of monitoring and hand holding.

I’m all for empowering decision makers on the ground (the public), because they can adapt quickly to changing landscapes. Decentralised command is at the heart of effective strategy and good governance. A well-defined chain of command creates well-defined roles, responsibilities, and expectations. Those few at the top, who have information feeding in from many different sources on the ground, set clear goals and decide clear strategies. They communicate those goals and strategies to the people on the ground, and let them self-organise to complete the mission. Nobody is better placed to know how to achieve a goal than the people who must work around the obstacles to achieving it. Nobody is better placed to set a goal than the person who can see everything that is currently happening and the lay of the land ahead. This is a marriage of top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Empowering the people on the ground to proactively solve problems is what ‘common sense’ strategies should be about. Provide the public with informational and logistical support. Speak with clarity and candour about what we know, what we don’t know, the risks, and how to manage them.

In novel situations, we lack the quality and quantity of information and prior experiences to exercise sound judgement. The best actions are the ones with the lowest risk. The best approach is risk-mitigation. Take a small step towards whatever seems like low-risk progress, assess your situation, adjust course, if necessary, then take another step forwards, and never make a move with existential risk. As more information and support becomes available, we can take bigger, bolder steps. Progress is supported by cooperation throughout the chain of command. This is the best of staying alert and controlling a situation.

Unfortunately, common sense can be hollowed and warped for expedience. Relying on the judgement of the people you lead, calling for a “common sense” approach, is not a panacea. A common-sense approach does not relieve leaders of their duties. Our sound judgement is contingent upon the quality of information available to us, the quantity of information available to us, our ability to reason about the facts, and our experiences practising sound judgement. This is true for a team, a department, and a society.

Common sense is not a strategy; common sense only characterises a strategy. Therefore, when a leader presents a strategy reliant on common-sense, they make it incumbent upon themselves to provide support and information to the people on the ground. They promise servant leadership.

The worst common-sense approaches just shift blame. They characterise leadership as hands-off not hands-on. Such strategies are not empowering. When someone asks for more guidance, they are told to use common sense; when someone asks for clearer guidance, they are told to use common sense; when unexpected problems arise, they are told they should have used common sense. Such an outcome would represent shirked duties and abdicated responsibilities.

We must not disavow the boons of a common-sense approach, but we should be vigilant that the approach does not slide into neglectful leadership.

P.S.

On October 13 2020, Annie Duke wrote a very brief Twitter thread on ‘Decision Stacking’:

“This stacking strategy entails finding ways to make low-impact, easy-to-quit decisions to inform your high-impact, harder-to-quit decisions. Classic examples of decision stacking are renting before you buy or dating before you marry. Beta testing is an example of decision stacking. A beta test lets you gather valuable information to inform your high impact choices where, even if the test goes poorly, it won’t have much of an impact on your bottom line.”

Decision Stacking is the perfect name for what I described above:

“In novel situations, we lack the quality and quantity of information and prior experiences to exercise sound judgement. The best actions are the ones with the lowest risk. The best approach is risk-mitigation. Take a small step towards whatever seems like low risk progress, assess your situation, adjust course if necessary, then take another step forwards, and never make a move with existential risk. As more information and support becomes available, we can take bigger, bolder steps”.”