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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

My all-time favorite editing gaffe garbled a column I wrote about Y2K.

What I wrote: “The money saved dwarfed that spent on remediation.”

What InfoWorld printed: “The money saved the dwarfs that spent on remediation.”

I felt like Thorin Oakenshield with a corrupted database.

Speaking of Y2K, my recent column on COVID-19 and what you should do about it (“When Corona isn’t just a beer,” 3/2/2020) included a reminder of the KJR Risk/Response Dictum: Successful prevention is indistinguishable from absence of risk. I used the global, effective response to the H1N1 virus as an example.

Several correspondents reminisced with me about another, even better example: Global IT’s astonishingly effective response to the Y2K bug, and the ensuing certainty among the ignorati that it was all a hoax.

Y2K’s outcome was, in fact, a case study in what David Brin calls self-preventing prophecy. In the case of Y2K the problem of using two digits to represent the year in date fields, with the 19 prefix assumed, was indisputably real. The potential impact should the world fail to correct the problem was, in the aggregate, unknown and probably unknowable. Concerns ranged from the mundane — employees and customers who, according to HR and CRM systems, would have had negative ages — to the alarming but unlikely possibility of computer-controlled elevators plummeting down their shafts.

For a more in-depth account, read “The Lessons of Y2K, 20 Years Later,” Zachary Loeb, Washington Post, 12/30/2019.

Pre-COVID-19 we knew the overall risk of a viral pandemic soon enough to be worth investing in advance preparedness was high. Which virus, exactly when, exactly how contagious and exactly how virulent? Of course not. The Y2K problem was definitive. COVID-19? The lack of in-advance specifics made, for some decision-makers, the fourth risk response (hope) attractive.

About all we know about the risk of future pandemics is that it’s increasing. That isn’t in any doubt because (1) a pandemic only needs one sick person to get things started; (2) every year, Earth has more persons who could become that one sick person; and (3) every year, more and more people travel to more and more destinations, and “more and more” means a higher likelihood that the one sick person could cross borders to spread their disease more widely.

But never mind all that. Observing the global response to COVID-19, we in IT should be busily patting ourselves on the back again … washing our hands before and after we do, of course.

We deserve the back-patting because if it weren’t for IT, and specifically if it weren’t for our investments in: electronic mail; internal chat; file sharing technology; web conferencing systems; secure remote access to business applications; along with, I hope, broadly available training in their use, coupled with, at this stage of our evolution, peer pressure to master at least the basics coupled with peer knowledge-sharing to provide informal support … if the world of commerce hadn’t embraced these technologies and the idea of remote workers they support, your company’s Business Continuity Plan, sub-section Pandemic Response Plan, would be pretty much worthless.

And right now, if it weren’t for these business innovations that quietly took hold over the past decade or so, the current pandemic’s impact on the world economy would be quite a lot worse.

It’s only ten years ago that I wrote “10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting” for InfoWorld (3/30/2009). Some readers got the joke. Even those who thought I was serious recognized that telecommuting was far from universally accepted among business leaders and managers.

Among evolutionary theorists, this sort of thing is called a “preadaptation.” It means a species develops some heritable trait or behavior because natural selection favored it for an entirely different reason. Sometime in the distant future the species makes use of it in some entirely different way that gains an entirely different advantage.

For example, fish developed swim bladders to control their buoyancy. Long, long afterward the swim bladders they had as fish evolved into the lungs they needed as amphibians.

Likewise what we used to call telecommuting and now call remote work. Organizations didn’t embrace it because it would make them more resilient in the face of a global pandemic. They embraced the practice because it reduced the cost of business infrastructure, gained access to a broader pool of talent, and let companies construct project teams out of a broader array of employees.

The moral of this story: You can’t predict all the ways a new technology might create value. So don’t let your governance committees stifle experimentation. You never know when an experiment might turn out to be a preadaptation.

What you do know: If you prevent the experiments then they won’t.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2009, business managers had to deal with the H1N1 virus. Then, as now, the two great unknowns in the early stages were contagion and virulence — how easily the virus passed from a sick person to healthy ones and how sick it made people when it did.

Then as now, business management had to prepare for the threat in spite of these unknowns.

Fortunately for all of us, adults — principally the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) — were in charge of the response, and the actual rates of contagion and mortality were quite a lot lower than we all originally feared.

The KJR Risk-Response Dictum states that successful prevention is indistinguishable from absence of risk. And so, predictably, instead of giving those coordinating the risk response credit for a job well done, much of the commentary blamed them for inflating the size of the problem.

Early indicators suggest COVID-19’s virulence, as assessed by its mortality rate, is significantly higher than the flu — 2.3 percent vs 0.1 percent, although on the opposite end of the virulence scale it appears 80 percent of cases will be mild or entirely asymptomatic.

Its relative level of contagion hasn’t yet been determined, although one epidemiologist predicts shockingly high numbers: a 40 to 70 percent infection rate by the time the current wave has run its course.

The risk of willful ignorance is not, on the other hand, in doubt, and will inevitably result in the two worst threat responses: hysteria and minimization.

And so, before I continue, here are links to four must-read articles to help you prepare for the current threat.

I’ll immodestly recommend two H1N1-oriented articles from Keep the Joint Running: “Threat management — the political plan” (10/12/2009) and “Issue Management: What the methodologies leave out” (10/19/2009).

I’d also advise you to review an excellent business preparedness guide developed and maintained by the CDC: “Interim Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), February 2020.“

And, share this useful article from the WHO with those you work with: “Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Myth busters.”

What else should you do to, if you’ll forgive the self-reference, keep the joint running in the face of the COVID-19 threat?

First and foremost, list what, from a purely business perspective, COVID-19 threatens. Recognizing that I’m not an authority on threat assessment and response (if you are, please add your knowledge in the Comments), here are three of the most serious consequences:

Productivity loss: More employees will be out sick than your current plans factor in, and for more days. Adjust your business plans accordingly.

Knowledge loss: You should already have made sure that between documentation and cross-training, your organization can continue to function should anyone “call in rich” or fall prey to the proverbial bus.

With apologies for sounding morbid, COVID-19 could prove lethal to a team member who contracts it. The need to prevent knowledge loss isn’t new to the COVID-19 threat, but the virus does accentuate it.

Fight or flight response: “The only thing we have to fear,” FDR famously said, “is fear itself.” With all due deference to FDR, fear itself isn’t the only legitimate COVID-19 fear. Contagion and virulence surely belong on the list, too.

Take out “only” and FDR was on target. Inevitably, some employees will display the usual fear-itself threat response: Anger. Anger makes people stupid. And, inevitably, angry people need someone to attach their anger to. They’ll have a strong need to find someone to blame. And if blaming that someone for the direct threat is completely implausible they’ll find something related to blame them for.

The most likely “thems” are, sad to say, racial and ethnic, but they’re hardly the only ones. Very high on the list of Those-Whose-Fault-It-Must-Be will be everyone who subscribes to a competing political affinity.

Then there’s the ever-popular hobby of finding fault with company management and its response to the situation.

What makes the fight-or-flight response most dangerous is that, even by COVID-19 standards, it’s highly contagious.

But, unlike COVID-19, you can do something to reduce this contagion. First, be armed with facts and when you hear misinformation, correct it.

And second, when you overhear fight-or-flight conversations about COVID-19, stop them.

You can do this and you should do this. It’s easy. Just ask, “Don’t you have work to do?

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