COVER STORY • 6

HInterview with Dr. Gary Hamel, Co-author of the book Humanocracy

ow Can We Revive
Organizations as Innovative
as the People Inside Them?

By Japan SPOTLIGHT
During the Covid-19 pandemic, innovation can play a key role in helping businesses navigate the crisis.
Restaurants, retail shops and other service sectors need to change their face-to-face business with clients
due to social distancing, and the managements of these businesses now face the critical need to enhancetheir innovation.
Dr. Gary Hamel, an influential business thinker and long-time faculty member of the London Business
School, is co-author with Michele Zanini of the recently published book Humanocracy: Creating
Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). He strongly
advocates in this book for management to unleash an individual employee’s creativity, energy andresilience from the control of a hierarchical bureaucracy as a key to innovation. Dubbed a “management
innovator without peer” by the Financial Times, Dr. Hamel offered us his insights in the followinginterview.
(Interviewed on Aug. 20, 2020)

Motivation to Write
Humanocracy

and their passion to work every day.
We know from other surveys that only one
in five employees believes their ideas matter
JS: Humanocracy is a very
at work, that only one in 10 is free toenlightening book that provides
experiment with new methods and solutions,many good ideas for saving
and only one in 11 believes that they cancompanies from inertia or lack ofinfluence decisions that are important to their
enthusiasm to innovate or raisework. It seemed that many organizations
productivity. What motivated you towaste more human capacity than they use.
write it?
And think about the challenges that ourorganizations face – they are inhuman, they
Hamel: The motivation came as I observed
are incremental and quite dispiriting – theseorganizations from all over the world
are things that human beings know how to
struggling with the same disabilities.
fix. So as human beings we are resilient, we
Whatever the country, whatever the industry,
go through difficulties and tragedy. We areit seemed that large organizations had somegoing through an immense global crisis rightcore incompetency, and most of them
now and we are extraordinarily resilient and
Dr. Gary Hamel
struggled with proactive change. Often deep
able to reinvent ourselves and to adapt tochange is crisis-driven; it is episodic and often convulsive. Typically,
difficult experiences. As human beings we have this quality of
it takes a change in CEO to set an organization in a new direction
resilience, but our organizations are inertial. As human beings we areafter much ground has been lost. I also saw that many organizations
immensely inventive and creative; every day 500,000 hours of new
are incremental – they are not very good at changing using thevideo content goes up on YouTube, and 1,300 new apps get
fundamentally new business models that come from relatively young
launched on the Google play store, and 40 million videos go up on
companies which are unencumbered by the machinery of
Instagram. So there is no shortage of creativity in our world, but ourbureaucracy. And finally, I could see that large organizations wereorganizations struggle to be truly innovative. And finally, humanwasting an extraordinary amount of human capability. Gallup – whichbeings are filled with passion – we care about the environment, ourdoes a global workplace survey – reports that only 17% offamilies, perhaps our sports teams, and yet our organizations are
employees around the world are fully engaged in their work. That
often passion-free zones. So I was struck by this strange difference,means the other 83% are not bringing their ingenuity, their initiative,
this divide between our capabilities and the lack of capabilities in our
https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2020

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COVER STORY 6

organizations.
So I wrote the book because I believed that organizations need to
become as resilient and as inventive and as spirited and daring as
the people inside them, and today that is clearly not the case. The
book hopes to change that. I would just add one more thought tothat. As a species, today we face an array of daunting challenges:
besides the pandemic we face cyber threats, deep social fissures,climate change, geopolitical conflict, mass economic migration, andthe potential of job-destroying effects of automation. Against thosechallenges, we need to be able to muster every bit of human initiativeand ingenuity on the planet. So we can no longer affordorganizations that are hierarchical, that are rules-bound, and that failto use this immensely valuable human capital.

Individuals & Organizations
JS: Our next question is about hierarchy. You seem tobe saying that hierarchy is the main culprit for low
productivity and less creativity of each employee inorganizations. Could you elaborate on how hierarchy
hampers individual creativity or passion?

Hamel: First, I would want to distinguish between two types ofhierarchy. There is one hierarchy that we inherited from bureaucracy.
Literally, the word bureaucracy means the “rule of desks”. That is the
traditional management structure in which you have a hierarchy ofadministrative positions, typically of department heads and businessheads and vice-presidents and senior vice-presidents and so on,where your authority depends on the position. You are a vicepresident and now you have that positional authority. And yes, I
believe that is quite often quite destructive.
The other kind of hierarchy is the natural hierarchy. On theInternet, there are some people who have more followers than others
on any social platform. On the Internet, I have influence only if
people choose to follow me; I cannot compel them to follow me. So
the problems with that traditional positional hierarchy are several. It
is important to remember why we have those formal hierarchies andwe have managers at all. If you go back to the early industrial era andeven before, information was very expensive to acquire and move.
The best way of doing that was through a hierarchy with theemployees talking to customers and sensing changes, and theywould report up to a manager. Then at that level you would
consolidate the inputs and the data from the managers and thatwould be reported up again. So in that period, that hierarchy was inessence an information-handling machine. And of course, in that old
world, the people at the top were the only ones who could see thewhole picture, the only ones with the entire view. Now, of course, we
can share information immediately, everyone can see the same
information instantaneously, and so this hierarchy is a relic ofanother age when information was very expensive to move.
Also, in the early industrial and pre-industrial age, most people atwork were illiterate or very poorly educated. And they needed a
26 Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2020

particular breed of employee – a super employee called a “manager”
to tell them what to do. Now today, most employees are quite welleducated, and they do not need someone to tell them moment by
moment what they should be working on. And so, that hierarchy andthat managerial control are artifacts of a time 100 years ago andmore when information was expensive to move and when mostpeople did not have the skills to be self-managing. And yet thatbureaucratic structure has persisted. This causes damage acrossmultiple fronts.
In that traditional hierarchy, we make the assumption that thethinkers are at the top and the doers are at the bottom. Hierarchybuilds a kind of organizational caste system that distinguishes
between thinkers and doers, between managers and workers, andbetween the clever and the compliant. When you treat people as
doers, when you deprive people of autonomy and freedom in theirjob, they will not bring the best of themselves to work. That is why
only 17% of people are engaged in their work, according to Gallup.
And when you look deeper at that, it’s quite interesting because 89%of people around the world – at least in the Gallup poll – are satisfied
with the task. They don’t mind the physical thing they are doing.
What they object to is the work environment that infantilizes themand treats them like children.
In a typical company, an employee may be able to buy a car or anapartment in their private life but at work they cannot even buy an
office chair without someone else’s permission. So that hierarchy is
by definition disempowering because it is a hierarchy of authority
and that means those at the bottom have almost no authority, andthat is what the evidence says. It treats a large amount of employees
as second-class citizens. If you think that I am perhaps exaggerating
a little bit, I will share an example that appeared in the Harvard
Business Review a couple of years ago. This was said by one of the
managing directors of one of the world’s most influential consulting
companies: “The CEO, the CFO and the CHRO will shape business bylooking at the big picture, while others have their heads buried inoperations.” So he is saying that 99% of the organization does notneed to look into the future, they should just have their heads down,
doing what other people have told them. This is an extraordinary
waste of human capacity.
The second problem when you have a hierarchy with all thoselayers is that it takes an extraordinary amount of time to get things
done. If you believe that you need senior executives to make themost important decisions, that means that nothing changes until you
change the minds of people at the top. In my book I talk about two
decades that were lost for Microsoft. Between about 1993 and 2013,
Microsoft missed almost every new opportunity in the digital world
because their leaders were operating under the old mindset where
the personal computer was the most important digital device, andthe most important customers were CIOs in large companies. So
they missed the opportunities for smartphones and for tablets andonline music and so on. Now they are slowly catching up, but theylost two decades there. That is not a criticism of Microsoft, but it isan inevitable result of these hierarchical organizations because

COVER STORY 6

inevitably for leaders at the top with a long tenure most of theiremotional equity is invested in the past. They feel that they have todefend decisions that were made 10, 15 or even 20 years ago. They
are insulated from the latest trends by the layers of managers who
are trying to package up the data and make it palatable to the leaders
and are often unwilling to challenge the biases or the prejudices of
their superiors. Because of that, there are long lags between sense
and respond. So typically, by the time an issue is big enough orurgent enough to get the serious attention of the CEO, it is alreadytoo late.
And often today, the organization will never catch up. So my firstproblem with formal hierarchy is that it turns off a great quantity ofhuman capacity. The second is that it makes organizations very slow
because people on the front lines cannot act, they cannot experimentand move forward. Let me give you an example. The Chinesecompany Haier, which I know quite well, is now the world’s largest
appliance maker. I think they bought the appliance business of Sanyoin Japan and General Electric in the United States and are now a
global presence. When I first met Zhang Ruimin, the current CEO ofHaier, in 2011, he came to my office in California and we worked
through a translator. He had read my book The Future ofManagement and said that he wanted to build the kind of company
that I describe. He said, “We are going to encourage our employees
to become entrepreneurs, because people are not a means to an end
but an end in themselves. Our goal is to let everyone become theirown CEO, to help everyone fully realize their potential.” So what
Haier did was to reduce eight organizational layers down to three;they broke the company up into 4,000 micro-enterprises, small
entrepreneurial businesses, and they got rid of 12,000 middle
managers. They didn’t fire most of those managers, most of themwere re-deployed into these new entrepreneurial units, but thosejobs will never come back in a flat, highly networked organization
where individual teams have the freedom to make important
decisions, are accountable for results, and have the financial upside– you do not need legions of managers directing their activities.
In my book, I describe bureaucracy as a massive multi-layered
game that is played for the prize of promotion; it is played for the
prize of positional power. So if I play this game well, I get promoted
and a bigger salary. Unfortunately, the game of bureaucracy is notvery well-aligned to the actual challenge of creating value forcustomers, because the way you win in such an organization is you
learn to manage up, you learn how to massage your bosses ego, toshow great deference and not to argue. You learn how to negotiate
targets and how to manipulate the internal financial systems so thatyou have a chance of beating your numbers. You spend timedeflecting blame, learning how not take responsibility, learning how
to elbow rivals out of the way. So these behaviors are destructive
often, but in many organizations an enormous amount of energy
goes into these non-productive behaviors.
What you end up with is a hierarchy of people who are still
bureaucrats, not necessarily a hierarchy of people who are
distinguished by their courage, their imagination, their creativity andtheir leadership ability. So I think that the traditional idea of
positional power and bureaucratic authority is going to have tosurrender to something that is more dynamic, that better correlates
confidence and influence and is more open to ideas and suggestions
from people on the front lines.
JS: We think today that it is very important for

employees to feel happy in their work, and your ideas
in Humanocracy seem to be very helpful inencouraging an employee’s happiness. Would you
concur?

Hamel: Happiness is a difficult word, but I think yes. As humanbeings, we are at our best when we feel we have control over ourown destiny. You have seen protests over the last few months andyears in the US, but this is not just an American phenomenon. Firstof all, you saw a large group of disaffected voters in the Midwest partof the US who were left behind by deindustrialization. Those voters
put Donald Trump in power. I saw in Britain 17 million British citizens
voting to leave the European Union because they didn’t think that
distant political energy was alert to their needs. You see the Yellow
Jacket protestors in France and the 5-Star movement in Italy, andcoming back full circle to the US, it is not only people on the right
who voted for Trump – there are millions of young people, many ofthem college educated, who do not see a future for themselves. If
you look across the OECD, and this includes Japan, in every
generation since World War II the percentage of people making it
into the middle class has gone down. So we have immense
frustration on both sides of the political spectrum today and that
frustration is understandable. Every human being wants dignity. They
want to believe that their life matters and their vote matters. They
want opportunity and the ability to enlarge their skills, to enlarge
their contribution and to benefit from that. Finally, they want equity –they want the rewards of success to be fairly distributed.
The data says that millions and millions of people do not finddignity and opportunity and equity in the workplace, and if you don’t
find it there it is going to be very hard to find enough of thatanywhere else. So people go to work, and they are loyal and work
hard, but they find very little fulfillment there – they find fulfillment inplaying video games and distractions, and binge-watching shows on
Netflix. But the emotional returns from work for many people arequite low. We do need to change that, and there are three levels of
the argument in our book.
There is the economic argument that says, “We will not reversethat declining productivity growth until we find a way of turning on
the individual worker’s capacity at work.” So if you look at the data,
what we have seen since 1983 in the US is that the number ofbureaucrats working in the economy – the number of managers andsupervisors – has grown by more than 100%. It has more thandoubled. All other job categories have grown by less than 50%. Mostof this is not an artifact of government regulation; most of thiscomes from the natural human desire in organizations to win at theJapan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 202027

COVER STORY 6

game of bureaucracy and acquire more of the trappings of positional
authority. So bureaucracy self-replicates in our own organizations.
As bureaucracy has been growing, productivity has been slowing. I
do not think those things are uncorrelated because bureaucracy puts
a tax on the entire economy. We calculate that for the OECD, if we
could reduce the bureaucratic load by half, and we know this ispossible because we see some companies that have done this, itwould raise economic output across the OECD by more than $10
trillion. That would more than double recent productivity growth, justthat single move, if we could achieve that over the next decade.
There is a competitive reason as well. If I look at many of the greatcompanies in Japan, many of these have struggled to keep pace withchange as the pace of change has accelerated. So today the biggest
risk to any company is not that it becomes inefficient; it is that it
becomes irrelevant. Many CEOs are now learning a very hard lesson– that you cannot win in a networked world with a hierarchicalorganization.
Finally, there is a social reason, because people have a right todignity in their work, they have a right to grow at work and to have afinancial upside, and for many employees that is not possible. As
consumers, we understand now the idea of radical innovation. When
you think about how the way we pay for things has changed withmobile payments, when you think about how we consume news andinformation – these are radical changes over the space of a decade.
So I would argue that just as today we could at least contemplate
and think about radical innovation in business models, now we needto think about radical change in management models, because this is
the only way of building locally competitive companies and building
a society in which everybody has the chance to win.
JS: We believe that digital technology could reduce

the negative aspects of bureaucratic organizations orhierarchies. Would you agree?

Hamel: In traditional organizations, most of the relationships andinformation flows were vertical. That is, command and control.
Today most of it is lateral. We are already online and using Microsoft
Teams and so the reality is that our organizations are already morelateral than they are vertical. And yet we are using these newcollaborative technologies mostly to make white-collar work more
efficient. So many of the new collaborative technologies do for teams
what Microsoft Office did for individuals 30 or 40 years ago. But that
does not change the structure of the organization; very few
companies are using these collaborative platforms to set strategy.
They are not using these to ask thousands of employees what theyneed to change in that bureaucratic model. We are doing that insome companies – we have a platform using our software that webuilt that is now being used by 70,000 people in Apple to collaborate
and share ideas in a way that was simply not possible a few years
ago.
The technology could harness the collective wisdom andimagination of many people, but the people at the top still have to be
28 Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2020

willing to listen. They have to be willing to empower people and to
give them a voice in these conversations; otherwise those people willtake their ideas somewhere else. They will be talking offline, they will
be on Facebook, they will be talking about something else, but you
won’t be harnessing them at work. So it is wonderful having these
new open platforms, but first of all you need an open mind to be able
to use them.

Management in “Humanocracy”
JS: Our next question is about managers. We need to

select wise managers in order to achieve the purposeof “Humanocracy”. How do you think that would bepossible? Meritocracy might be the answer
mentioned in your book, but could you elaborate on
this argument.

Hamel: Let me start with a little anecdote. In the book I talk about aDutch company called Buurtzorg. This is the leading provider ofhome health services in The Netherlands, and this is a growing
business around the world as we have an ageing population. So
Buurtzorg employs around 16,000 nurses and nurse helpers. They
divide those 16,000 employees into teams of 12 caregivers. Eachteam has somebody who is responsible for finances, somebody whois responsible for staffing, someone responsible for winningcustomers. Each of these teams operates as a little business. They
have to find their own office space, they recruit colleagues, and they
win customers. All of those teams are tied together by a social
platform. So if I have a problem with a patient I can go online andsearch the collective wisdom of 16,000 colleagues about thisproblem. The performance of every team is visible across the entire
network, so I know exactly how my team is doing against all the
typical parameters of patient satisfaction and nursing utilization.
Nobody wants to be at the bottom of that league table. So given all of
that, they run a company of 16,000 people with only two managers.
Two managers. That is a span of control of one to 8,000 people. And
when they built the company, one of the founders said, “I want tocreate a company that values humanity over bureaucracy.” I told thisstory because I am not sure how many managers we need – maybe
we don’t need any.
We certainly need less, so if you look at the companies we profilein the book, another example is Nucor, one of the world’s mostinnovative and profitable steel companies. It is a company with
20,000 employees, and they have roughly one-third the number ofmanagers of their competitors, because they have frontline
employees who are taught to think like business people. Blue-collar
employees who know how to read a profit and loss (P&L) statement
and calculate return on capital, who have a natural upside if they
improve those metrics, and every day they spend thinking about how
to build a more successful business. So when you have people at thefront lines who have been trained to think like business people andwho have the authority to make important decisions and who have aCOVER STORY 6

financial upside if they do well, you do not need a lot of managers
because these people are self-managing. How do we select wise
managers? I think we are going to need a lot fewer managers.
Let’s go back to the early industrial revolution. When you had allthese people coming to work, many of these people were illiterateand so you needed a manager to tell them what to do. The firstbusiness school gets established in the 1890s. All of the leadingbusiness schools get established around 1890 and 1930 or 1940 andthen the rest of the world follows suit. The business schools werecreated to train this new breed of employee called the manager. At
that time, it was a very rare skill set – it was like a data scientist
today or a geneticist, very rare and very special. That was true formanagers 100 years ago. No more! Interestingly, our companies arestill hierarchies of administrative expertise. What distinguishes one
layer from the next is just the size of your headcount and the size ofyour budget, not that you are adding more value, but you get paid
more and get a better title because you have a bigger organization
beneath you. Which is why people want to build a biggerorganization beneath them – whatever the role, you try to add staff
because that is how you get power and authority.
But I think that today, with information instantly available and very
educated employees, the number of managers we need is much less.
In 1988, Peter Drucker said that 20 years into the future we would
have half the organizational layers and one-third the number ofmanagers, and that did not happen. He should have been rightbecause with better-educated employees as we went from anindustrial to knowledge-creative economy, and as we got better
communication, it should have been possible to reduce all of thatbureaucracy, but it did not happen and we have to ask why. The most
likely explanation is that people with power are pretty good at
hanging on to it and can give reasons why they need to. That is thenumber one challenge in busting bureaucracy. I think of Pope Francis
when he became the pontiff in 2013. He declared that he was goingto cut through the Vatican bureaucracy – he wanted to create achurch that was more responsive to the needs of the world and lessinwardly focused. He was asked last year how it was going withdismantling the bureaucracy, and he said that it was like trying toclean the Sphinx with a toothbrush.
So if you want to bust bureaucracy you have to evolve the wholeorganization. This will never happen top-down – you cannot ask
bureaucrats to remove bureaucracy, as a rule. Coming back to yourquestion, I think that what we are going to have to do is todistinguish genuine leadership from management. That is hardbecause what we do today is talk about senior managers as if they
are leaders, whether or not that is true. You hear people talk about“the leadership team”, but my experience is not all of those people
are leaders, and usually it is not a real team. They are usually fightingwith each other, have very different views and perspectives, and yet
we call them leaders. People refer to themselves as being in the“leadership ranks”. I think that be a leader is not about yourpositional power. Today, with young people coming to work, if you
have to rely on bureaucratic power to get things done you are

actually eroding your leadership capital. You are losing the respect ofyoung people because they have grown up in a world where power
trickles up, not down. If you have influence on the Internet. it isbecause people have chosen to follow you. People need to ask
themselves – assume for a moment that I have no title with my nameand no positional authority, what can I accomplish in myorganization? If the answer is “not very much”, then you areprobably a bureaucrat and not a leader. What we have done is that
we have completely conflated and intermingled these terms. My viewof leadership is very simple – a leader is somebody who makes acatalytic contribution to collective accomplishment. That could beanybody at any level. And so I think that in some of the companies I
talk about in my book the teams chose their own leaders. Leadershipshould be the reciprocal of followership. You are only a leader if
people will follow you if they have the choice. That is the otherquestion you could ask – if people had the choice, would they
willingly follow?
At Haier, every year at every one of those micro-enterprises, theyelect a leader. And if they miss their performance targets for threemonths in a row, it triggers a new leadership election. You can evendo a hostile takeover if you see a micro-enterprise that is not doing
very well and you know that people are anxious to do better, you cango and make your case and say, “I think I can lead your team better.”
And if the team says yes, you are the new leader. The reason that
Haier can trust this kind of system is because every employee has afinancial stake in the business. They are quite willing to tolerate aleader who is maybe not the easiest to get along with if they help
them to achieve amazing results. So I think that we are going to have
many fewer administrators in organizations; the work of managing
will be more distributed to the periphery. I think that leadership willbe less about mastering administrative tasks and will be much more
about your capacity to drive meaningful change in a hostileenvironment with other people. We need to be very careful about
conflating these terms “leadership” and “manager” as they are quite
different.

Future of “Humanocracy”
JS: Our last question is about the future aspect of“Humanocracy”. Do you think it will turn shareholder
capitalism into stakeholder capitalism all over theworld? Also, what is your view of the role ofleadership recommended by “Humanocracy” in theage of the pandemic?

Hamel: I think that we already live in a world of stakeholder
capitalism. Businesses have many responsibilities and not only toshareholders. Businesses do not have any innate rights. As humanbeings, in my way of thinking about the world, human beings haveunique and inalienable rights, but I don’t think companies do.
Leaders need to remember that, because if you are not attentive tosociety’s needs, then they will take away your freedoms and you may
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COVER STORY 6

end up having less latitude on many issues. So it is better to beproactive than reactive in meeting the demands of society. We are
already in that world and that is happening. However, around theworld, capitalism is in crisis, which is quite extraordinary when you
think about it. There is no other system that has lifted so many
people out of poverty as capitalism. It does not have a single
intellectual rival – so why are people so frustrated? There was a
recent poll across the 28 OECD countries, and 56% of people
thought that capitalism does more harm than good – that is
extraordinary. The reason is that capitalism has allowed itself to beperverted in some ways; it is not something inherent in capitalism,
but it has allowed itself to be perverted and I think we have toseparate two ideas here – the idea of capitalism from corporate
power. In my country, more than 80% of Americans say that big
companies have too much power, and it is hard to argue against this.
They have immense power. I am sure the same is true in Japan,
where you see more and more industrial concentration and smaller
numbers of firms competing for customers. We know that pricing
power is going up – economists tell us that a greater share of thegains is going to corporations versus employees.
There is an estimate in the US that $400 billion a year is goingfrom consumers to producers who have more market power. Thenyou see a lot of financial engineering – companies spending trillionsof dollars on share buybacks, loading up on debt, imperiling thebalance sheet to give the illusion of superior performance whensimply what they are doing is reducing the denominator in theirearnings-per-share calculations. So I think there is a legitimate
reason why people are upset with concentrated corporate power andthe interference of large companies in the political process.
Let us not mistake abuse of corporate power with capitalism; that
happens because the people who are supposed to be defending us
are asleep at the switch. That is what we pay governments to do –not to kill capitalism but to point it in the right direction. I am in favorof more vigorous competition policies, and in favor of incentives forlong-term shareholding, and in favor of CEO pay. All of that makes
sense. But here’s the deeper challenge with capitalism – as I said
earlier, most people want a chance to run their own business, tohave that sort of freedom. In the US, 77% of millennials want to run
their own business. The number one subject area in most MBA
programs is entrepreneurship. Many people will not have thischance.
When I look at Haier or other companies, I think you could createa league of owners; you could create a company where you divide it
into small teams, everyone has a real P&L, not a top-down
performance target, has the freedom to make business decisions,and where you can invest in your business and get a dividend. Thereis no reason to have a company that is just managers and employees– instead you could have a league of owners that share platforms
and assets and compete together in productive ways. I think that for
at least 30 or 40 years management experts have said that there is
no way large companies can be entrepreneurial – that is completely
wrong. Every employee needs a real financial stake in the business, a
30 Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2020

real upside, real decision rights, because that brings dignity into
work, and most people would like that chance.
Secondly, regarding the role of “Humanocracy” in the age of apandemic, in most organizations over the last 30 or 40 years
centralization has brought more and more power to the center, andthere is good data for this. What happens in a big crisis is that power
moves away from the center. In a small crisis, if you have a financial
scandal at a company or something else, power moves to the center,somebody steps in to correct it. But when the crisis is big enough,power moves to the periphery because the center does not knowwhat to do.
In most countries around the world at the beginning of the crisis,
the bureaucracy struggled. Public health authorities struggled,
certainly in Britain and in the US and so healthcare providers at the
periphery stepped up. Nurses talked to nurses online, looking at thedata, trying to figure out how to save patients. So you have these
instant learning networks of physicians and caregivers, searching forbest practice and learning from each other. In a crisis, when you arefacing problems that are both novel and fast-moving, there is nohierarchy that allows you to deal with that solution.
The good news with the current coronavirus crisis is that itallowed a lot of individuals, under the worst possible circumstances,to dust off their initiative and ingenuity and to really make adifference. We need to give enormous thanks and gratitude to thepeople who did that. Looking ahead, I am not so optimistic because
as a crisis wanes authority moves back to the center. If you look atwhat happened after the 2008 financial crisis, for a couple of years
actual bureaucracy comes down. It took out some layers of
bureaucrats but in two years it was back on the same trajectory as
before. Unfortunately, Covid-19 is not lethal against bureaucracy. It
may give leaders a nudge, because it is another reminder that we live
in a world of unprecedented challenges, and to cope with that weneed organizations of unprecedented capability. This will give a lot ofleaders a nudge, and will create an inflection point in remote working
which is probably a good thing, and maybe it will give a little nudge
to say, “This is not the only crisis we face as human beings – weneed to get better at harnessing the capability of everyone and wehave to move away from these structures that are part of a world thatno longer exists.”

Written with the cooperation of Joel Challender who is a translator, interpreter,
researcher and writer specializing in Japanese disaster preparedness.