COVID Strategic Planning

Seems like 100 years ago, but early in my career I used to work in the aerospace industry on weapon system designs.  I worked with companies designing and building the Corporal (an immediate successor to the old German V-II), the Polaris, and the Minuteman weapon systems.  And then I broke off and began work with a strategic planning and control consulting firm, working with the Air Force on long range planning and control systems.

Then several years later, USAID hired our firm to go to India, to work with their Planning Commission on long range planning and control systems approaches to assist their own long range development programs and goals..

The work was intense and complex in all these ventures, mainly because such work is demanding and grand in scale. Much depends on the outcomes, so the investments in planning seem eminently worthwhile.

Enter the COVID19 Pandemic, ravaging the world, and, especially the world’s various work forces. Part of the basic difficulty here is the set of unknowns coupled with a complete lack of medical tools that might help in battling this disease.  We have no vaccine (yet) and we really have little in the way of treatments should folks contract this nasty disease.

And so, work around the globe is being interrupted because of the possibility of person-to-person transmission, especially from touching surfaces that might be hosting the virus, or, even worse, airborne transmission.  We know that some personal protective equipment, masks, help, but are not a panacea.  So, the idea of people working within the same rooms, or even in the same buildings, traveling in the same cars to get to and from work, sitting together in cafeterias, sitting in rooms where meetings are taking place is now anathema. Close contact breeds illness and even death.  This thing does not produce the common cold, or even the ordinary influenza.  Those are nasty, but they rarely are fatal. This thing is killing thousands every day. And, again, we have no treatment and no preventive approach.

So, what does our federal government do under Trump’s guidance? Punt.

Yeah, Donald Trump really has no idea what he is doing as President, during one of the worst, most catastrophic periods in our history. He basically keeps doing the same thing—punting the ball to someone else, really anyone else.  But in his case, because he has no idea what he is doing, he “manages” by trying to direct the blame for failure to someone else, really anyone else.  First he blamed everything on Hillary. Then he began blaming everything on Obama.  Then he began blaming governors, or mayors.

And now, because he wants things to open up to better support his re-election campaign. He wants large open rallies. He wants schools to reopen, shops to reopen, everything to reopen. And if they can’t/won’t simply reopen, he yells a lot, throwing shade on everyone but him.

The schools thing is interesting. He has been yelling, along with his idiot-malenfant Education Secretary DeVos that the schools must reopen right away. But he has no plan for them to reopen. He simply demands that they reopen, and soon.  But the threat level posed by open schools with kids gathering in large groups—classrooms, cafeterias, school buses, and then returning home is mind-boggling.  While the kids arguably might avoid the worst consequences, they might well act as superspreaders, bringing the disease home to parents or elderly grandparents.  Further, the risks to teachers and administrative staff is very large. 

What is required is less shreaking and more intelligent long range planning. We need some bodies of professionals skilled in the arts of planning and evaluation to begin gathering (with appropriate social distancing, maybe even ZOOMing), to discuss alternative means to the end of educating our children at all levels, from kindergarten through college.  We need to develop alternative program designs that can be tested and evaluated. We need a major Federal planning intervention, to assist states, local systems, and colleges to better understand how they might go about their tasks of educating our children safely. The local systems are not equipped to carry out such planning initiatives. This would be an amazing use of federal financial assistance towards the aim of a more productive educational system. And the Feds have carried out such planning initiatives many times over the past 50-100 years.

And once you begin imagining such an approach to a more productive educational system, it begins to occur almost immediately that such an approach could be employed in dozens of other environments.  Many companies are using virtual means to work while separated. Some external planning assistance could be deployed here to examine and devise alternative approaches to working at home, or while socially distant.

It is easy to imagine a highly productive use of federal money and expertise (the Feds gathering expertise) to develop enhanced approaches to the world of work.  It could be the biggest opportunity since the Cold War and the development of superior weapon systems, for a major federal intervention in the Nations’ systems of economic development.  During earlier presidencies, ones accompanied by some actual intelligence, we had initiatives like the Eisenhower federal highway system, development of rural health care systems, even early systems for advancing computer systems communications. The list is endless.

But there has rarely been so clear a role for a major Federal intervention as now. Beginning immediately. All it takes is intelligence within the upper reaches of Government.

Oh dear.