I want us to focus like a laser on the circumstances under which we start putting people back to work. (If you are already there, go above and click on “Changing how we work during the first COVID-19 Cycle,” review it, and contribute your ideas.)
The medical experts will tell us when to go back to work. My idea starts there.
Moreover, given what we view, hear and read every day and what we have come to know it seems that the CDC rules of social distancing, exceptional hygiene, and an uncompromising principle that you do not enter a physical workplace, or you leave immediately, if you have the slightest sense that you are not perfectly well, will stay in place at least throughout this year. Bill Gates thinks that, by summer, maybe we could be where China is now. Dr. Fauci and the CDC warn us that this can circle back if we are not meticulously careful.
So, a really big question is how do we go back to work and continue to meticulously conform to the CDC social distancing guidelines? This is Andrew Cuomo’s “walking and chewing gum at the same time.”
Our purpose needs to be to identify very specific job functions in a wide array of jobs, covering a wide spectrum of industries, and imagine how that job, that critical process could be conducted consistent with the CDC guidelines. This is what we are now asking people to think about.
Pick your industry: product manufacturing, software development, professional sports, health care, customer service, light manufacturing, transportation, public transit, food services, banking and finance, legal– everything else we do. Pick where the work is performed: big companies, small businesses, governments, independent contractors, academia, other forms of public service, schools, and more. Then imagine your job, or jobs you know about, or critical processes in your work and let’s develop a compendium of examples of how jobs, functions and processes could be altered, adjusted, or redesigned to meet the CDC guidelines. We could generate ideas and act as a catalyst for those returning to the front lines, where they will face a much wider set of burdens.
You say, hey, they already know this. No, they don’t. A few do. You could really help. If you think hard, you have expertise on this. And if you don’t, you know someone who does.
Do not feel constrained by a productivity measure. When given the go-ahead, we need to get people safely back to work, at 50%, 60%, 75% of productivity. That gets our economy restarted and we will work from there.
Think of the details. You know what the job must accomplish. Now think, how can we do it differently. What processes can we change? What assumptions can we abandon.
So, what’s my game plan?
First, let’s focus on the content. You surface an idea from your own life experience, or draw from your daughter, or your father, or your son, or you best friend, or your smartest colleague, or what you have read or seen/heard on TV. For our younger friends, location independent technology and processes are a way of life.
Just listen to what people are talking about. You are going to hear stuff. A half paragraph here. A reference there. A case example shared with you by a friend who just explained how he got his people working. We are looking for process adjustments, but also paradigm shifts. Think of us as the gatherers of ideas.
Second, how do we get our collective content out there? I have created a web site that can deliver this content, www.4thqtr.com. If you send content to me, I will review and edit the content and integrate it into a master compendium. There will be one document, but many authors. Your name will not be specifically tied to your idea. This should free you up. (If I get your permission, I will create a list of names of people who contributed and publish the names in the compendium.)
Each day during this crisis I will post a new version, and hopefully, a thicker and improved version of the compendium, based on new ideas and also constructive critiques of ideas already published. So, this document will live and breathe until it has served its purpose.
You have already made it to the Coronavirus Diary. When that comes up, click on the essay, “Changing how we work during the first Coronavirus Cycle.” (It is the center piece posting on this page.) Read as much as you need to get perfect clarity. Think about it. Then slide down to the comments section. This is where you will post your ideas. We are now two weeks into this effort and have already collected some wonderful ideas. Take a look at them. Some contributors have offered brief thoughts and others more detailed ideas. You can write directly in the block or you can compose your ideas on your computer, copy them, and then paste them into the block. (Your thoughts will be delivered only to me. No one else will see them. I will then read, edit, reshape, and integrate into the master compendium.)
Trust me! This is something we can do. We can make a difference. You can contribute sitting at your desk, working your mobile, searching Google, networking with others stuck at home. It costs you two things: time, which you may have in excess right now; and belief, that crazy notion that maybe this could work.
How will we make use of the compendium? You can send people to the site to read it. (Right now, there are no controls on the site. Access is obtained simply by keying in www.4thqtr.com.) You can copy the document from my site and use it anyway you want. You can put your name on it. You can send it to your working family members and friends. It can be sent to business owners, or business executives. You can post it on a social media site. You can start a conversation with colleagues. You can send it to a university business school to get them thinking. If you have contacts, you can send it to a newspaper or a TV news channel. I think there will be a great hunger for this kind of information.
Today, April 10, Good Friday, you can feel the pressure growing to restart the economy as soon as possible. Hopefully, this will be an evolutionary process, guided by the medical/scientific community. But we need to be thinking NOW! We don’t want our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, fathers and mothers, and grandkids going back into an unsafe work environment. And perhaps most importantly, we don’t want to be suckered in by people who say, hey, in ten weeks everything will be back to where it was. I interpret this as sheer nonsense. Do you know of anyone smarter than Bill Gates? He’s implying that we will need a paradigm shift, at least until we get through this first cycle, which experts forecast will take most of this year.
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Because of the COVID-19 crisis, I decided to accelerate making my www.4thqtr.com site publicly accessible.
What is 4thQtr.com? It is a concept that I have been working on for years. I wanted to build a place – an information resource – where discerning people could create a shared dialogue on important questions and share these thoughts with as many people who are attracted to this information. The essay writers are recruited. The dialogue is be built around facts and judgments, centrally, from people who are in their fourth quarter of life.
Here’s the deal. The site is already set up to publish essays. The site can retrieve comments, as short or as long as a visitor cares to write, on specific posted essays or blogs. I referenced that above when I wrote that you can supply core ideas, or you can build on ideas already supplied by others with constructive commentary. I will do the integration.
The COVID-19 crisis has sharpened my focus. I am going to temporarily repurpose www.4thqtr.com and focus it on the crisis before us. You are on a new forum category titled Coronavirus Diary, which I just built. The compendium is being built under the title “Changing how we work during the first Coronavirus Cycle.”
I built www.4thqtr.com for discerning people who have things they want to say or read on a variety of life critical subjects. I am giving you an opportunity to say something about the post COVID-19 work environment. Long term, 4thQtr is intended as a place to go for content rich information on a variety of subject matter. For now, I want to focus of this subject.
