Reinventing Life

Every time I turn around these days, I discover someone doing something differently than they used to do it in the past.  Our daughter is a physician and we talk frequently about how medicine is being redesigned, if not reinvented.  Because it is not safe for folks to gather, even in a doctor’s office, while awaiting their call into the doctor, medical practices are reinventing the way they meet and examine their patients. One practice asks that you present yourself so they know you are there. Then you return to your car until they call you. So, no one is sitting six inches from another patient awaiting their call into the doc’s exam room.  Also, the concept of a “virtual visit” is now making its way into our lives. A virtual visit is via phone. And that creature, the virtual visit is still in process of being invented/designed into existence.  One of the issues is how often or when should a patient visit his or her doctor? Emergency situations are probably obvious, or when obvious symptoms have suddenly appeared, warranting some medical fix. But absent that, when/why should a patient visit the doctor? And this question appears not only for your general practitioner, but for all the specialists you might visit periodically.  During this crazed period, neither the patients nor the medical staff want to undergo unnecessary risks from this COVID-19 virus. So, unnecessary visits pose unnecessary risks to both.  This uncertainty is now under examination by our medical staff, and amounts to a reinvention of medical care.

And then we have other professions—all other professions. This pandemic closeting of everyone caused me to wonder about the workplace in general. When, I wonder, did the first business model appear on Earth? Likely, I assume it involved food production. The first dudes who decided to kill animals for food, or actually grow food, also would have been faced with this notion of sharing, either out of the goodness of their hearts, or for a profit.  I imagine trading began at that point. And at some point, trading itself became a business, where some dude didn’t actually grow anything, but figured out how to make money by trading other peoples’ made goods.

And so, we began creating companies, some to make products, and some to trade products.  And as these companies began expanding in size, they created offices where working stiffs could gather together to either make or trade stuff.  I grew up with offices representing “work”, i.e., if you “worked for a living”, you probably worked in an office of some kind.  The offices allowed intra-company communications to happen—your boss could tell you directly what you were to do that day, and you could tell other staff what they were to do.  People chatted because that’s how work habits occurred. Well, other stuff was chatted about also, but that other stuff is partly what made working for a living bearable.

But the whole notion of a “workplace” that involved a physical space wherein you could gather people so as to carry out “work” became the norm.  In the early days, before the telephone, there was no other way to communicate the requirements of “work”. As the telephone became common, it allowed for communications between workplaces, especially valuable for companies that grew to multiple locations and offices.

When I first entered the world of work, I worked at large weapons manufacturing plants—first the Firestone Guided Missile Division, making the Corporal Guided Missile, a direct descendent of the old German WW II V II rocket; then second, at Lockheed on the Polaris missile program. In both cases, those companies had vast “offices” that included large open spaces for engineers and other office workers, and then even larger spaces that housed the physical manufacturing plant where the missiles were physically created and assembled.

But everywhere I went, I encountered physical office spaces in which people produced some form of “work”. It is how all “work” got done.  Now those physical office spaces included telephones, and, later, computers, but most of the “work” was accomplished either directly by an employee, or via direct communications among employees. I know, I know, all this seems obvious and barely worth repeating. Everyone knows that work is done in physical places called offices, or created in large physical places called production factories or plants.  

But at some stage during the last 20 + years, computers became ubiquitous and “work” began changing. Often, the change involved an actual speeding up of some of the work, since computers could accomplish some tasks (e.g., mathematical calculations) much faster than people.  But computers soon became involved in guiding other physical plant processes, like assembly lines, such that some humans were shunted aside to make way for the computer guided processes.

Still, even with computers, humans continued to gather in various physical spaces to create their “work”.  I then thought of “War”, that activity in which one group of humans attempts to dominate another group of humans. Being old, I have lived through a whole bunch of “wars”, beginning with World War II, which lasted roughly from 1939 to 1945, and covering physical spaces in Europe and Asia. What was “war” but one group of armed humans moving enmasse into another territory belonging to a different collective of humans, broadly known as nations. But regardless of how sophisticated, with mechanical devices, airplanes, bombs and even missiles being used to subdue, the wars always involved eventually, a group of heavily armed humans physically moving into another human’s territory or nation-space. The war would not be declared “over” until that movement of people in large groups took place.  So even the primitive human approach we now call War required people to gather.

So, now we have entered a new era, a pandemic in which the only actual current solution is to require humans to cease gathering.  But how can the world continue to exist if humans cease gathering? And note, it is not that only humans in a limited physical space—a single nation—are being told not to gather. It is humans in every part of our globe.  To be fair, not every nation has been so instructed, but that instruction is flying around the globe.

Exceptions have been made. For example, certain industries and working spaces have been declared “essential”, so humans may continue to gather, regardless of the risks to their lives.  People engaged in actual health care, or who make products required by humans to exist, e.g., food, may still gather. I imagine the list of “essentials” is quite large. After all, we still need our beer, our wine, our coffee, and our chocolate, right??

But as humans now “work from home”, they have begun a reinvention of this thing we call “work”.  To be fair, many thousands, perhaps millions of humans are not now “working from home”. Instead, they are now not working at all, and so, the rolls of the officially unemployed continues to climb. Still, since this pandemic thing is unlikely to end any time soon, perhaps even not before there is a real vaccine (as opposed to the fake vaccines being touted by our moron President).  And that could take up to a year or more.

During this time of panic and gloom and doom, we are likely to be reinventing what we call work in hundreds, perhaps thousands of workplaces around the world.  We may begin discovering ways to get “work” done without the physical presence of humans in one physical space called an “office”.  We have no idea yet whether any of this “reinvention” will be carried out by thoughtful consideration of facts, and by purposeful redesign by humans who actually know what they are doing, or whether we will simply stumble onto some new grounds for carrying out the world’s work.  Hopefully, at least some of the world’s “work” will actually be redesigned by experts meeting and discussing/arguing the facts. I would hope, for example that medical care would be redesigned by its experts discussing and consulting with one another to arrive at sensible, scientifically rational solutions.

But as we all begin sinking into an abyss of self-pity, this process of work reinvention will go on, whether we like it or not.  It occurs to me that we should all at least consider the facts of our working environment and processes, and begin thinking of new and perhaps better ways of getting our work done.  Maybe we can all turn to our new technologies to gather in virtual spaces to talk about the need for this reinvention, and how we might collectively get it done rationally and with some considered intelligence. Otherwise, it will get done the other way humans do things—you know by some idiot who imagines himself to be lord and master of our universe.

Just a thought.