{"id":25846,"date":"2020-04-01T18:31:10","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T14:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=25846"},"modified":"2020-04-01T18:31:10","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T14:31:10","slug":"coronavirus-could-the-world-have-prepared-better-for-a-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/coronavirus-could-the-world-have-prepared-better-for-a-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus: could the world have prepared better for a pandemic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Conversation<\/span><\/h4>\n

\"\"Deep cleaning at El Prat airport in Barcelona.\u00a0Enric Fontcuberta\/EPA<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

As much of the world gets used to\u00a0social distancing, school closures and\u00a0restrictions in movement\u00a0in response to the coronavirus pandemic, obvious questions are being asked about how governments and companies can prepare themselves for these sorts of extreme events.<\/span><\/p>\n

One technique that has gained prominence in helping business people and officials deal with events that have a low probability but high impact is called\u00a0scenario analysis or scenario planning. There are a number of different methods that can be used to model scenarios, but in essence these all involve developing stories about a number of possible ways that the future could unfold.<\/span><\/p>\n

Probably the best known and most widely used approach, which was\u00a0developed within Shell during the 1970s, involves groups of stakeholders discussing what happens when two unrelated but highly uncertain drivers of change interact in extreme ways. The eminent scenario analyst\u00a0Kees van der Heijden, a former head of scenario planning at Shell, has described how one of the company\u2019s early scenario-planning exercises examined the government approach to the energy sector and the potential discovery of significant natural gas reserves.<\/span><\/p>\n

This approach does not aim to predict the future, and in fact recognises that this is a fundamentally impossible and futile thing to do. Instead, it encourages what van der Heijden has called \u201cstrategic conversations\u201d, which allow those involved to have their world views challenged. The hope is that this makes business people and officials more aware of when things are not going according to plan \u2013 and so better able to respond.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not a black swan event<\/span><\/h4>\n

There is little doubt that this sort of agile thinking has helped some officials and companies respond earlier and more decisively to the changing events of recent weeks. In some ways, the COVID-19 pandemic is a prime example of a\u00a0black swan\u00a0event \u2013 a term coined by the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe very high impact events that are unimaginable before they happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the COVID-19 pandemic should not really be a black swan event. Epidemiologists have been\u00a0warning\u00a0for decades that a pandemic of a novel flu strain was inevitable. There have been a number of scares over the past two decades, such as the\u00a0SARS outbreak\u00a0in 2002-04, which was concentrated in southern China and Hong Kong, the\u00a0swine flu pandemic\u00a0that originated in Mexico in 2009, and\u00a0H5N1 avian flu\u00a0in the 2000s.<\/span><\/p>\n

While all of these epidemics were serious, they weren\u2019t on the same scale as COVID-19. This may well have led to business and political leaders focusing their attention on what they perceived to be more pressing priorities in recent years. In the US, for example, the Trump administration\u00a0cut funding to disease security programmes\u00a0as recently as 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

The behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have developed the idea of the\u00a0availability heuristic, which suggests that people overestimate the probability of things that are high profile and memorable, such as terrorist attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the reverse is also the case, and the sustained absence of a pandemic such as COVID-19 \u2013 a high-impact, once-in-a-generation event \u2013 has led people to underestimate its likelihood and impact. A number of think tanks and consultancies provide\u00a0early warning services\u00a0about low-profile, high-impact events, such as conflict in the South China Sea. However, if they feature events that are considered far fetched,\u00a0they risk losing credibility\u00a0among their clients and readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Out ahead<\/span><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s probably no accident that a number of the countries that have responded effectively to the COVID-19 outbreak are in east Asia, where the SARS outbreak and H5N1 scares are relatively recent memories. For example,\u00a0Taiwan\u00a0has been praised for taking early action to contain the potential spread of the virus, and\u00a0Singapore\u00a0has been able to keep down infection rates through widespread testing for the virus, enabling effective quarantining and treatment of cases.<\/span><\/p>\n

One key lesson that can be taken from the response to the pandemic so far is that companies and countries that are able to respond quickly, and change strategies in response to rapidly changing events, will do well. For example, videoconferencing software producer\u00a0Zoom\u00a0has made premium versions of its system available for free to educational institutions that are forced to teach online. This will expose large numbers of students to the company\u2019s platform and brand, as well as generating significant positive publicity, which is likely to prove beneficial once normal life resumes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scenario analysis and some of its related underlying principles can offer some tools to prepare for and deal with highly disruptive events. However, they cannot predict where and when such events will take place, nor can they completely overcome the psychological traps that cause us to underestimate them, and as a result be underprepared. Perhaps our best hope is that by being more aware of these issues, and the fact that uncertainty dominates so much of our lives, we might be a little bit better able to respond to unexpected events, big and small.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Neil <\/span><\/strong><\/span>Pyper<\/strong><\/span>
\n<\/span>Associate Professor, <\/span>
\nSchool of Strategy and Leadership, <\/span>
\nCoventry University<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

* Published in print edition on <\/em>1 April 2020<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The Conversation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":25848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[21808,22005,17359,23142],"class_list":["post-25846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic","tag-scenario-planning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Pandemic-2.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-6IS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}