And once TV and film production does begin to fill the pipeline again, we’ll see different kinds of content because the world will be different. Because, well, 2020 has been a different kind of year!

Film production considerations

TV and film production closed down quickly in mid-March due to state and local government mandates and the impracticality of social distancing on set. After all, who wants to see their favorite actors wearing masks or blowing kisses?

Post-production work was able to continue of course, but to what end? Movie theaters were shuttered and quickly became nothing more than anchors threatening to sink suburban malls.

Production companies faced the option of delaying releases for as long as a year or biting the bullet and sending their work directly to streaming services. Both happened. As a result of locked theaters, Netflix has millions of new subscribers.

At this time, production has begun again with many safety precautions in place. Experts say that for the foreseeable future there will be smaller crews on sets, fewer shooting locations, fewer cast member extras, and more reliance on virtual effects.

A new era for making movies

But what’s really interesting to me is not how or when TV shows or movies will once again be made and released, it’s the kind of content and themes we’ll see. Will our experience with COVID-19 change content? Yes, but probably not in the ways you’re thinking.

Have you noticed how jarring it is these days to see a pre-2020 filmed scene with a crowded bar, a packed arena, or close-talking groups of people? That’s because it doesn’t reflect the reality of our life at this moment in time. But when we finally get the all-clear to shed our masks, and when social distancing is once again by choice and not necessity, those kinds of scenes on film won’t seem odd anymore.

Film reflects everyday life, and our life will not always be about avoiding respiratory droplets or worrying about invisible aerosol particles. Accordingly, the only masks we’ll see on the big screen will be in scenes with doctors, caregivers, or bank robbers.

Our shared COVID experience, though, should and will change movie content in a much more fundamental way. When we come out on the other side of this pandemic, we’re going to have to reflect on what we went through and what it all means. Movies and shows can help with that internalization process. For people all over the planet, the COVID crisis has been a deeply personal experience, and we’ll be looking to storytellers to help guide our thinking and even help us formulate some newly calibrated life priorities.

A new era for content

Of course, COVID isn’t the only challenge we’ve been confronting as a society in the last few months.

We’ve seen the emergence of a new level of social consciousness on matters related to diversity and equality. In light of that, have you noticed how many episodes of our favorite television series or movies now feature cringe-worthy scenes or plots with noticeable stereotyping?

Moving forward, movie and television show themes, plots, portrayed relationships, and dialog will be forever changed, reflecting a new awareness of racial and gender equality and related sensitivities. The general public will be super-attuned to these themes, so filmmakers and script writers will need to be very careful to stay on the right side of the shifting boundaries related to these social issues.

Would these areas of social conscientiousness have emerged as strongly had we not been in a COVID-induced state of vulnerability? That’s for others to decide. I would simply say that our global consciousness changed in 2020 and this is the perfect time for a new breed of storytellers to pave the way in healing our psyches and even helping us understand some new social norms.

Pay Attention, Hollywood!

The old ways of thinking in Hollywood just won’t cut it anymore. We’re in a new age, and script writers will need to take heed. Our definitions of heroes, success, and achievement are changing. So are our thoughts on villains, fairness, virtue, passion, and our quest for accomplishment.

If film and television producers don’t realize this and if they fail to seize the opportunity to give us what we need and want, they too risk becoming irrelevant in the post-COVID world.

Decisions, Decisions

Each of us is faced with a unique set of problems, circumstances, challenges and opportunities, and let’s be honest, we’re not too good at making decisions about them. Very few of us feel like great decision makers, and yet that’s exactly what we spend most of our time doing – making or contemplating decisions!

Should I buy a house, sell a house, find a new job, stay where I’m at, go out to eat, cook at home, drive across town, or stay where I am? Add life variables like children, financial stress, illness, wealth, or a myriad of other circumstances, and the complexities of our decisions skyrocket.

We all approach life-changing experiences differently, but, ideally, we should have the mindset that for every problem we face, there is an equal and opposite life-changing opportunity waiting to be discovered. Our ability to discover and leverage those opportunities is tied directly to the way we frame our thinking.

Our decisions shape our future. But conversely, and circuitously, we make decisions today based on our understanding of what the future holds – imperfect information at best. So, what if we could change our vision of the future, get past inactivity biases and preconceived notions, for example, to improve the decisions we make?

That’s my role as a futurist: To change a person’s vision of the future. Much of that happens by tapping into fresh insights and information we uncover inside ourselves. In a moment, I’ll introduce a technique to help do exactly that. We’re not quite there yet, though!

We’re Guided by Our Inner Vision of the Future

Your inner vision of your future is the internal steering wheel that your subconscious relies on to guide you through your daily life. It’s on automatic pilot – even though you’re not always conscious of its role or how it works, your inner vision is overseeing many actions and decisions every day. That’s not always bad, but it can be limiting.

Here’s how your inner vision evolves. If you come across a new way of looking at the future, you’ll instinctively compare it with your current inner vision of the future. If there’s a discrepancy between the new insight and the current roadmap, you’ll begin a point-by-point comparison of how the new perspective is different from the official version. If the new information is credible, you’ll start the process of reprogramming certain aspects of your inner vision for the future.

This is a process we all need to encourage – it’s how we grow wiser and, yes, make better decisions. It’s a process that’s nurtured by Foresight Journaling.

Foresight Journaling – A Tool to Open Your Mind to a New Future

Every day, we wake up to an entirely new set of issues, confrontations, confusion, interruptions, panic, hope, and opportunities. Sometimes even our finest successes are tinged with chaos. During challenging times, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us are searching furiously to find something solid to hang onto.

Foresight Journaling is a contemplative exercise that allows us to find the answers we’re looking for and take control of our destiny. It’s based on a process called contemplative inquiry, a powerful tool for reprogramming the inner vision. With contemplative inquiry, you relax your body, calm your emotions, and quiet your mind, so you can begin to master the fine art of leveraging your own intuitive wisdom.

Our weekly Foresight Journaling Newsletter will help support this process.

Every week I’ll pose a series of five provocative questions, and it’ll be up to you to struggle your way through them to find the answers!

Keep in mind, the struggle will be the source of your growth – the expanded access to the insights and truths within you. The Foresight Journaling Newsletter is an investment in your future for only $9.98USD per month.

The Foresight Journaling Process

Each contemplative inquiry question is designed to help you dig deeper, to find the untouched regions of your being, and unlock the secret truths.

Start by finding a quiet place. Clear away both internal and external distractions. You’ll need to be in a high-energy state, fully hydrated, listening to the right kind of music at the right volume. Some experts say this technique works best if the music is a repetitive type such as techno, classical, new age, or trance.

During this process, nothing is straightforward. There are no one-size-fits-all formulas, no repeatable processes, and no certainty about what you think you know … until you know it.

For some, the exercise will make sense right away. For others, it’ll be as chaotic as it sounds. You’ll discover exceptions to every rule, new ways of defining every situation, and countless new perspectives as you try to determine the answer.

I encourage you to take notes and jot down ideas, phrases, and quotes. Make list upon list until you feel comfortable with all the options you need to explore. The universe isn’t linear, and neither is your mind, so feel free to let your randomness, spontaneity, and impulsive whims guide your thinking.

At first glance the questions may not appear to relate to the most pertinent matters of the day, but rest assured there’s an important method to the randomness. Each exercise will push you to engage with your larger mind map, and that’s the key to triggering the inner you.

Each set of five questions provides a week’s worth of contemplation, probing, musing, deliberation, brooding, deep thinking, and reflection. One question will lead to another, and another, until a light bulb turns on in your head. If the light bulb doesn’t turn on, you’re not done.

You won’t be graded on whether your answers are right or wrong. This is your process, and these are your answers that will lead to your seismic breakthroughs! If you stall out, take a break and come back later. But never, never, never give up. Your future self is counting on you!

A Final Thought on Contemplative Inquiry – It’s Time to Get Uncomfortable

Our inner vision represents our comfort zone. We all tend to be very protective of what we think we know. Engaging in Contemplative Inquiry will pierce your comfort zone and force you to rethink, reexamine, and reevaluate. Your inner vision needs far more adjusting than you may think, but when you approach the process purposefully, through Foresight Journaling for example, you can literally change your future for the best!

We are on the verge of an explosive transformation!

Futurist Kevin Kelly is often quoted as saying, “The future happens very slowly, and then all at once!” This happens to be one of those “all at once” moments!

We live in an incredibly fragile society on an incredibly fragile earth. And to many of us, it feels like it’s breaking apart at the seams.

As I said months ago, it is impossible to have this many top-down decisions without having a huge number of unintended consequences. And we’re seeing the first of many. But much like an earthquake with countless aftershocks, many more are sure to follow.

The year 2020 will go down in U.S. history marked by two pivotal events (so far), the Covid-19 pandemic followed by the gruesome murder of George Floyd.

One of the reasons the George Floyd murder struck such a nerve is because it tapped into people’s growing fear of “big brother,” and getting trapped in a system, with endless legal proceedings that make no sense, costing boatloads of money that no one can afford.

As with all of my columns, my role is not to debate what’s right or wrong but rather to take an objective observer position to focus on what the future holds.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just a pandemic erupting into a race war, but rather a one-two punch forcing an overhaul of countless systems.

As a first step, this will force a total revamping of the U.S. Justice System. My sense is that if it doesn’t happen this time around, the next aftershock will be exponentially worse.

Based on century old thinking, justice in the U.S. has been portrayed as a locked prison cell with thousands of police, lawyers, DAs, jailers, bail bondsmen, prison guards, and judges feeding off the penalties and hardships of the accused.

Incarceration is a one-size-fits-all form of punishment that takes a huge number of people, that don’t fit well in society, and forces them all together into tiny spaces.

This primitive way of thinking, coupled with a highly contagious pandemic, creates a series of impossible situations – impossible rules and impossible tools for managing impossible expectations.

Four “Impossible” Problem Sets

Throughout history the hallmark of a great nation has been its ability to resolve conflict, and virtually every nation struggles with this fundamental role of government.

The four aspects of U.S. government that make it an “impossible situation” are:

1. 90,000 Forms of Government

The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. Every city, county, state, and special taxing district has its own governing body with its own elected officials. Taking on many of the characteristics of a living, breathing organism, these governmental organizations are constantly fighting for influence, control, and survival.

Each of these governmental entities has an ability to create and enforce its own laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited number of tools at their disposal, governments have resorted to using laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The sheer volume of laws emerging from these 90,000 rule-making bodies is truly staggering.

2. 18 Million Laws

Rest assured, 18 million is only a guess. But the U.S. currently has the greatest number of laws of any country at any time in history. No one knows exactly how many laws there are simply because there is no central repository for them.

Lavrenti Beria, the infamous head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” In the Soviet Union, they could always find some crime to pin on anyone they chose to target. With 90,000 forms of government all creating new laws on a monthly basis, virtually no one can feel like they’re completely compliant.

3. 17,985 Law Enforcement Agencies

There are currently 17,985 U.S. police agencies in the United States. These include City Police Departments, County Sheriff’s Offices, State Police, Highway Patrol and Federal Law Enforcement Agencies.

Under the control of these law enforcement agencies; are 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

4. 2.3 Million Prisoners

There are nearly 2.3 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails, which represents a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population and accounted for 23% of inmates.

Beginning in 1980, a series of law enforcement and sentencing changes launched the “tough on crime” era causing a dramatic growth in U.S. incarceration rates. Since the official “War on Drugs” started in the 1980s, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,964 in 2017.

In 2008 the United States had around 25% of the world’s prison population.

Harsh sentencing laws like mandatory minimums, combined with cutbacks in parole release, kept people in prison for longer periods of time.

Research has shown that incarceration is particularly ineffective at reducing certain kinds of crimes like youth crimes and drug offenses. Also, people tend to “age out” of crime. Studies indicate crime starts to peak in the mid- to late- teenage years and begins to decline when individuals are in their mid-20s. After that, crime drops sharply as adults reach their 30s and 40s.

Four Possible Solutions

The U.S. currently has too few check-and-balance systems for impeding the excessive law-writing now taking place.

For this reason, here are four possible remedies for both limiting and correcting the current systems:

1. Public Access Requirement

Mandate that all laws be posted on one central website that everyone can access. Any laws not posted on this website should be deemed unenforceable.

2. Sunset Provision

Mandate that any law that has not been enforced over the past 20 years must be removed. Archaic laws become irrelevant and should again be deemed unenforceable.

3. Simplification Requirement

Mandate that all laws must be written on an 8th grade comprehension level. Any law not certified as being on this comprehension level should also be deemed unenforceable.

4. Code of Government Ethics

Mandate that no governmental entity be allowed to profit directly or indirectly from the enforcement of its own laws. The control of wealth is just as insidious as taking ownership of it. Whenever there’s a direct profit motive linked to law enforcement, the nature of government changes, and our humanity becomes compromised.

Ten Predictions

Part of my role as a futurist is to read the weak signals and assess their implications. Here are ten predictions based on today’s far-reaching current events.

1. Mass exodus from the inner cities.

In only a few months, the inner city lifestyle has been drained of all its energy. High-density housing is now bad, and the advantage of walking to work has lost much of its appeal.

2. Poor neighborhoods get poorer.

As money becomes increasingly digital in nature, it will tend to flow to where it is most easily managed.

3. Mass exodus of personnel from police forces.

Suddenly being part of a police force is no longer viewed as an honorable profession.

4. Many inner city retail stores will never reopen.

Both entrepreneurs and insurance companies will view the uncertainty of storefronts in specific neighborhoods as far too risky.

5. Government agencies will become more fortified.

Violence scares people. The people in government that people most rely on for support will become more insulated than ever.

6. Tiny homes are out, the “home fortress” is in.

Most will move towards a “home fortress” way of thinking, complete with fortified home security, home office, home schooling, home entertainment, and in-home cooking-dining-entertaining.

7. “Contact phobia” will continue to permeate our thinking.

Social distancing is becoming a new way of life in the minds of architects, meeting planners, real estate developers, city planners, and more.

8. The biggest job transition in all history.

Business interruptions are extremely messy, and temporary layoffs are being replaced with permanent ones. Some will view this as a great time to switch careers, while others will think about starting their own business.

9. Conspiracy theories become the new reality.

With so many conflicting reports, contrary statistics, and opposing opinions, all happening against a backdrop of fake new and purposeful hacker distortions, perception becomes the new reality.

10. The next system implosion will be the U.S. tax code

With a tax code ill-equipped to adjust to our wild economic roller coaster coupled with emerging technology making many tax provisions irrelevant, such as electric cars not paying oil tax for road maintenance, a complete rewriting of the tax code is long overdue.

Every day we view the world through a different lens!

Final Thoughts

We are entering a period of great turmoil. During this period of massively distorted truth, the pawns become almost indistinguishable from the chess players.

While the age of heavy guns and hardware is ending, a new age of bio, cyber, and mind wars is just beginning. The concept of imminent risk and menacing danger is being reframed around non-intuitive, non-visible, and non-obvious threats.

Most countries are amping up their AI detection networks designed around making invisible threats visible. Every border crossing, international terminal, and port of entry will have growing levels of sensor, video, and audio detection and we will see an explosion of drone fleets, quickly turning into swarms to add coverage.

Border walls will become simultaneously visual and physical, audibly acoustic, digitally obvious, aromatically distinct, and tactically discernible.

The goal will be that no germ, virus, bacteria, fungi, or protozoa will have the power to cross a border undetected.

At the same time, with Europe taking the lead on the “right to be forgotten,” we’ll soon see a number of similar causes, driven by tech innovation, like the “right to be digitally invisible,” the “right to be physically invisible,” and the “right to be totally undetectable.”

Anyone crossing a border should expect the equivalent of a full cavity search, done imperceptibly, and without the human touch, using remote scanners, swarmbots, and AI networks.

So what am I missing? These are certainly challenging times and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

While it’s easy to focus on the negative, the true opportunities lie in the positive side of life!

For most, summer was filled with outdoor activities like going to sporting events, concerts, swimming, parades, festivals, and farmers markets.

Those things won’t be happening this year.

The same goes for all of our nightlife activities like dancing, fireworks displays, nightclubs, family gatherings, going shopping, and dining out.

Virtually every activity that we’ve come to enjoy over our entire lifetime has come to an abrupt stop, and business as usual is no longer business as usual.

So what is it that will fill the void?

We can only watch so much television. Our backyard barbecues lose their appeal when they happen every night. And everything we had planned for summer vacations has been delayed until next year.

While a few things can be delayed, others cannot.

Many churches have begun hosting drive-up church services with pastors, priests, and ministers speaking to the crowds through FM signals going directly to the car radio.

Restaurants in Michigan are experimenting with drive-up fish fry events for Lent.

It will be interesting to see how the Republicans and Democrats manage to host their big election-year conventions in advance of the Presidential Election.

Those of you who still have a job consider yourself either lucky or trapped, or both. Even the work-from-home crowds are hugely distracted by stress and anxiety of their surrounding communities.

For this reason, we’re seeing some great opportunities emerging from the woodwork for people who have the talent and creativity to sync up with the mindset of those needing a lifeline. If we were to make a list of all these opportunities, it would include substitutes for:

1. Sporting events – baseball, football, soccer, golf, basketball void
2. Entertainment, movie theater, gambling, trampoline park,
3. Shopping, farmers market, garage sale, lemonade stand void
4. Nightclub, dance club, casino, theater void
5. Concerts, rockfests, musicals, live performance void
6. Waterpark, playground, miniature golf, carnival, and swimming void
7. Convention, meeting, grand opening, expo, open house, events void
8. Parade, festival, street performer, magician, comedian void

Innovative people are now staring at a blank canvas trying to imagine ways to solve a pent up demand for finding new ways to interact with others.

So what does that look like? We’re part of a very creative culture so some of our future thinking involves questions like:

• Instead of car racing, will people become more interested in drone racing?
• Instead of boxing matches, will we see a surge in popularity of robot boxing?
• Instead of video games, will people start playing conspiracy theory games?
• Instead of fantasy football, will people start playing fantasy politics?

One fascinating example is the Getty Image Art Challenge, which sprung to life when the Getty Museum created a competition where people browse its online collection and recreate famous images, but with a modern day twist!

Joseph Ducreux, “Self-Portrait, Yawning” (1783), Recreation by Paul Morris
with British redcoat and twisty towel (courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum)

8 Opportunities to Reinvent our World during the Coronavirus

We’re already seeing examples of virtual birthday parties, virtual funerals, virtual dinner parties, virtual workouts, and virtual happy hours. But each of these are but a stepping stone to what comes next.

1. Drive-Up Events

“Storytelling After Dark” would involve a simple stage, maybe in a shopping center parking lot, with a dramatic reading, comedy show, or theatrical performance, telling ghost stories, melodramatic mysteries, or historical tales to entertain crowds in a new and unusual ways, all transmitted through the FM radio on people’s cars. These could be sponsored by local businesses, libraries, or a city.

A variation might be “drive-up concerts.” With all of the musicians out of work, this becomes an interesting option for them. Once again, these events could be sponsored by neighboring brewpubs, restaurants, cannabis dispensaries, and retail shops. Phone numbers would be posted up front or handed out for people to order. Those attending could listen through open windows, FM radio, and even some strategically placed outside seating.

2. Competitions

When the whole world goes back to normal, many businesses will push hard to regain their customer base. For this reason, finding sponsoring companies willing to offer promotional items as prize packages could be relatively easy. Future events such as gambling weekends, train trips, cruise get-aways, and flight packages are just a few of many possible options. For this reason we will see a wide variety of new competitions ranging from treehouse designs, to pranks, situational photo contests, one-minute comedies, home office design, plant wall design, blank-wall painting, mowed-lawn-messaging, and, of course, a drone-spying competition, just to name a few. The range of these competitions is only limited by our imagination.

3. Parades

The idea of a megaphone parade is rather interesting. With no one on the streets, only people waving from doors and windows, a megaphone parade would involve an endless line of people in cars saying crazy things from their megaphones. Perhaps a variation of this idea would include a kid-and-puppy parade, kazoo-band parade, flashlight parade, or a scarecrow parade.

4. Reinventing Business

For those paying close attention to the changing nuances of human behavior, this is a perfect time to launch a new business. Virtual startup teams are now able to loop in all the top talent from other ventures, most of whom have been recently sidelined or laid off as the dangling carrot of stimulus money makes its way through the pipeline. This is a rare moment in time to think deeply about business models that have the potential to redefine life on planet earth.

5. Reinventing Funerals

– The funeral industry has not been one to instantly jump on the latest craze and experiment. However, with bodies stacking up in makeshift facilities everywhere, and virtually no one interested in traveling cross-country to attend a wake or funeral, we have an instant need for something new. The traditional grieving process has always involved crying, hugging, and human-to-human contact. So is there a way to duplicate this outlet for highly emotional feelings virtually? Keep in mind, it’s not just people dying from COVID-19. It is also people dying of heart attacks, cancer, liver failure, car accidents, domestic violence, gang wars, malaria, suicide, and every other cause imaginable. There’s a huge opportunity waiting for the person who can come up with a good solution.

6. Reinventing Childcare

Until now, most parents have acclimated to their own version of work-life-parenting balance. For many, being thrust back into the role of full-time parenting, coupled with homeschooling, lingering work obligations, phone-calls, Zoom meetings, grocery shopping, paying bills, filing for unemployment, and dealing with heightened levels of media hysteria has most young parent teetering very close to the breaking point. At the same time, virtually every one of them feels they have their hands tied as traditional daycare, babysitters, and grandparent options have disappeared. This is the perfect time for some ingenious person to reinvent child care altogether.

7. Learning New Skills

We’re shifting into an entirely new gear. Society is changing faster today than ever before in history. Once business returns to our next iteration of “normal,” we will find ourselves struggling to keep up. At the moment, it is up to us individually to decide what new skills will make us the most adaptable, resourceful, resilient, and marketable in the future. While others are sleeping in late, playing video games, and binge-watching movies, aggressive people everywhere are choosing this time to leapfrog ahead and become a whole new version of themselves.

8. Storytelling in the Post-Corona Era

Pay close attention. Our definition of heroes, success, and achievement is changing. So are our thoughts on villains, virtue, passion, and our quest for accomplishment. We’re desperately seeking new forms of leadership, decision-making, ways of setting priorities, and ways of getting things done. Our global consciousness has changed, and this is the perfect time for a new breed of storytellers to pave the way. We no longer feel comfortable with our old sense of morality, purpose, pursuits, and relationships. And it will be our next generation of storytellers who guide us towards our next-gen humans and next-gen human nature.

Final Thoughts

We live in great fear of the unseeable, unknowable, unmanageable forces of nature.

As a futurist, I’ve spent considerable time thinking about wild card scenarios and all the ways things can go wrong. And yes, the possibility of a global pandemic was certainly on the list.

But the piece that everyone missed was the unusual ruleset that came with this pandemic.

The way a disease is transmitted is hugely important, because there are literally millions of variables that come into play. Is it a sexually transmitted disease? Does it hide out in hair follicles? How does heat, light, and water affect it? How long will it live in our sewer systems? Will it pass from mother to unborn child?

At the same time, there are also millions of possible solutions that need to be considered. Can it survive under water, in ice, acid, mold, or underground? Is it affected by radiation, beams, waves, high frequency and high intensity of sounds,

How many deaths are considered an acceptable loss? Much of the thinking surrounding the actions has to do with the idea of bearable death-rates. How much is a human life worth? When does the death rate from economic loss start to exceed the death rate of the pandemic?

We are a long way from having all the answers. For this reason, I’ve created a new subscription service called “Foresight Journaling – Unlocking the secret truths to your hidden future!” to help you take control of your life during these uncertain times.

As always, please let me know your thoughts.

How do we stop the panic?

Whether you think the coronavirus is a festering pandemic or an overhyped version of the common flu, there are many things we can learn from how the world is responding to the news of the coronavirus and what indicators may signal a permanent global shift.

While Warren Buffet said, “The market collapse in the fall of 2008 was much more scary, by far, than anything that’s happened here,” it’s too early to understand the full impact and both short and long term impacts.

Several factors make this different than past crises including our heightened levels of awareness, the speed with which companies and countries are reacting to it, and the long term effects that will permanently change humanity.

The good news is that the speed used to form a panic, is the same speed with which it can be defused!

Please don’t misread this as trying to brush off the dangers of our quickly escalating pandemic. Rather, the goal should be to find a way to recalibrate our response in a method that will cause the least amount of damage.

Every bad decision sets a precedent for more bad decisions as they charge forward!

The Speed of Panic

As we move into a world where the accelerating speed of bad news can be measured in exponential adoption curves, and the speed of panic is even greater than the risk of coronavirus itself, we are faced with some very hard choices.

Everything is a balancing act. Is the risk of alarming people greater than the risk of not informing them? Is the risk of destroying the economy greater than the risk of being under-protected? How can anyone know if they’ve struck the right balance in protecting employees at the same time trying to protect the companies and jobs they’re depending on?

Most crises in the past have followed a similar pattern. As our level of awareness grows, an accelerating problem leads to accelerating panic, and that leads to an accelerating financial crisis, followed by massive layoffs, and a huge number of bankruptcies. This is a lose, lose, lose, lose pattern that has been repeated time and again throughout history.

The truth is, this is on a scale unlike anything we’ve seen in the past. This is the first time we’ve had to deal with anything globally, simultaneously, and exponentially all at once. Our digital landscape has become far more pervasive, faster, and reliable than ever before, making it a particularly unique challenge to contend with.

While most feel the need to err on the side of caution, the unintended consequences of every drastic action is beginning to feel like we’re all crew members aboard the ill-fated Titanic with no lifeboats.

Yes, our hearts go out for everyone affected by COVID-19 today, but it’s still a long ways from being our biggest problem.

Biggest Death Risks (2016 data)*

It is highly unlikely that the risk of death from COVID-19 will even break into the top 15 leading causes of death this year:

1. Cardiovascular disease – 17.65 million
2. Diabetes, Blood and Endocrine disease- 10.4 million
3. Cancer – 9.6 million
4. Smoking – 7.1 million
5. Respiratory diseases and infections – 6.5 million
6. High blood pressure – 6.5 million
7. Air pollution – 4.9 million
8. Obesity – 4.7 million
9. Driving fatalities – 1.24 million
10. HIV/AIDS – 942,000
11. Suicide – 800,000
12. Influenza – 650,000
13. Malaria – 620,000
14. Homicides – 464,000
15. Medical errors – 440,000

* Sources: UNODC, WHO, the Global Health Data Exchange of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

Understanding Exponential Growth Curves

In the startup world, it’s every entrepreneur’s dream to unleash a super scaleable product and have it go viral. But there’s little concern for the back end of the curve in the consumer products world.

However, in just two weeks people in Italy went from saying “It won’t hit here!” to having the whole country locked down. Yes, this is an incredible teaching moment about what exponential change feels like, but this is different.

While it’s a great case study in accelerating growth strategies, it’s important to differentiate how the exponential curve of panic is far different from growth curves of the disease itself.

Every country in the world has now pushed the panic button.

Decisions affecting literally billions of people are being made in the heat of the moment with little to no understanding of how to find a way back to normal.

Shutting down the economic engines of society does little to solve the problem; it simply compounds the issues.

Any decision made without resistance will be done in haste, without consideration of consequences or repercussions.

Resistance is a powerful tool. It forces well-meaning people to refine their intentions, deliberate over possible outcomes, and be held accountable for shallow thinking and ill-suited arguments.

Final Thoughts

This period of time represents a significant turning point in human history, and understanding the full impact of everything that’s changed will take months, maybe years.

Very likely we will be rethinking personal space in light of “social distancing.” But it could work just the opposite, creating a stronger need for intimacy where we crave human touch and social contact.

We may see the proliferation of businesses helping you “pandemic-proof” your life.

With massive layoffs coming from drowning businesses, we may see coaches offering ways to “bankrupt your way to health and happiness.”

Over the coming months, we’ll be searching desperately to reengineer our strategies around a “new normal.” Is extreme complexity the new simplicity? How does our changing need for personal space change the human interface? Where are the opportunities?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What am I missing, overlooking, or not paying attention to? Take a few moments and let me know what you’re thinking.

Are our leaders making good decisions about managing the coronavirus?

In 1998-1999, the world was being gripped by fear. It wasn’t the fear of war, famine, uprisings, or a coronavirus-like pandemic, instead there was a growing anxiety over Y2K.

Today, we tend to laugh at how the world was festering over something as trivial as the time clock limitations built into our computer hardware and operating systems, but at the time, it was anything but trivial.

This isn’t to say that there was no underlying problem with Y2K, but it quickly got blown out of proportion and the news media was very complicit in the fear-mongering, with disaster scenarios being played out on the six o’clock news and being repeated by politicians who didn’t want to be viewed as do-nothing officials.

That was only twenty years ago. Today we’re seeing a similar set of challenges unfold surrounding the coronavirus. And virtually every elected official is being gripped by the “fear of doing nothing.”

History has a way of treating officials harshly for making bad decisions, and no one wanted to risk having their legacy ruined because “they did nothing.”

As a result, any work order that came across a manager’s desk saying it would make their system “Y2K-ready” or “Y2K-compliant” was instantly rubber-stamped and given the green light.

To be sure, there were a lot of snake oil salesmen hovering around the tech world at this time, but very few wanted to risk being caught with their pants down.

Few people realize this but all the money corporations freed up to ensure they were Y2K compliant is what fueled the economic boom of the late nineties. This is the money that drove Silicon Valley through the first boom and bust bubble of Internet 1.0.

While Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan referred to it as “irrational exuberance,” the available money floating around the tech world was truly staggering.

We are now caught up in global fear mongering with no end in sight!

The Fear of Doing Nothing

Today’s headlines were dominated by Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordering all schools to be closed in Japan for the next month, even though it doesn’t appear to affect kids.

Virtually every headline is about how fast-moving and dangerous the coronavirus is, even though the basis for these claims seem flimsy at best. So far the coronavirus has killed 2,814 people, while a recent study shows the flu kills 291,000-646,000 annually.

In fact, if I’m reading the definition right, the only true pandemic we have in the world today is cancer. The leading cause of death worldwide is cancer, with an estimated 9.6 million people dying annually. Yet nobody is referring to cancer as a pandemic.

Yes, the death rate for coronavirus is estimated at 1-2% while the flu is only 0.1%, but the fear being generated appears to be far more devastating than the disease itself. And let’s be honest, the death rate for cancer is somewhere around 50%.

The latest wave of headlines is being dominated by public officials wanting to “do something,” and the only safe thing to do is to restrict travel and have people avoid other people.

Unlike Y2K, the fallout from the fear surrounding the coronavirus doesn’t seem to come with any type of silver lining, at least not yet.

Complicating things further, there doesn’t seem to be any reliable source of truth about the outbreak.

Information coming from the U.S. government is a mixed bag. The CDC has situational updates that are noteworthy, but not particularly useful, and the CDC states its assessment in rather ambiguous terms: “It’s important to note that current global circumstances suggest it is likely that this virus will cause a pandemic. In that case, the risk assessment will be different.”

For medical advice, the CDC’s says you should wash your hands with soap and water, and to not go near people who are infected. One important factoid is that hand sanitizers are most likely not strong enough to replace thorough hand washing as a preventative measure. So slathering your hands with Purell, in all likelihood, is a giant a waste of time and money.

While all this is interesting, the fact remains that millions of businesses are going bankrupt and people’s lives are being destroyed by the news media’s constant push to sensationalize headlines and drive the number of pageviews.

Global Businesses Collapsing

Most of the world relies on Chinese manufacturing for the products they buy. With over 604 million products sold on Amazon and over 46 million sold at Walmart, a huge percentage of them are made in China.

Millions of companies across China are now in a race against the clock to stay afloat.

A survey of small- and medium-sized Chinese companies conducted over the past month showed that only a third of them had enough cash to cover fixed expenses for one month, with another third would be running out within two months.

With the coronavirus dominating headlines, only 30% of them have managed to resume operations due to a complicated local government approval procedure as well as a lack of employees and financing.

China remains the manufacturing engine for the world!

Despite accounting for 60% of the economy and 80% of jobs in China, private businesses have long struggled to tap into the funding they need to expand and contract during the normal boom and bust cycles. About two-thirds of the country’s 80 million small businesses, including many mom-and-pop shops, lacked access to loans in 2018.

Since the outbreak, the support from China’s banking giants has been piecemeal, mostly earmarked for directly combating the virus.

Many of China’s businesses were already grasping for lifelines before the virus hit, because of the trade war and a lending crackdown that sent economic growth to a three-decade low last year.

Those most at risk are the labor-intensive catering and restaurant industries, travel agencies, airlines, hotels and shopping malls.

Airports have turned into scenes straight out of the zombie apocalypse!

Killing the Travel and Tourism Industries

The global response so far has been isolation, isolation, and even more isolation. 

The only known prevention for coronavirus has been to isolate people from any contact with other people. Except, even that is no longer good enough.

U.S. health authorities said they’ve identified the first case of coronavirus that doesn’t have known ties to an existing outbreak, a worrying signal that the virus is circulating in the U.S. despite all the precautions.

The hospital where the patient is being treated at UC Davis in California is described as one of the more serious cases of infection so far in the U.S.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control said the patient doesn’t appear to have traveled to China or been exposed to another known case of the coronavirus. Health authorities are increasingly concerned about what’s known as community spread, where the virus begins circulating freely among people outside of quarantines or known contacts with other patients.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown,” the CDC said in a statement. “It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of Covid-19.”

In the meantime, the fear is causing the travel and tourism industries to collapse.

• France has seen a 30-40% drop in tourists.
• More than 40,000 hotel bookings on the Indonesian island of Bali have been canceled.
• China has experienced a 70% drop in tourists over last year.
• Facebook cancelled their 5,000 person Global Marketing Summit scheduled for March in San Francisco.
• The Tokyo Marathon has been reduced to elite runners only, cancelling the race for 38,000 other runners. 
• North Korea has canceled its Pyongyang Marathon scheduled for April.
• Mobile World Conference canceled its February event in Barcelona.
• British rapper Stormzy postponed concerts in Japan, China, and South Korea as part of his world tour.
• Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader announced he would postpone all ordination ceremonies for new monks and cancel all his public duties until further notice.
• Fashion weeks in Beijing and Shanghai, both set to take place at the end of March, have been postponed.
• Venice, Italy canceled its carnival, one of the most popular in the world.
• The Saudi government announced it is temporarily banning foreign pilgrims from entering the country, which is home to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
• At risk are massive failures in airlines, cruise ships, theme parks, hotels, trains, conferences, conventions, and much more.

Have we reached a crossroads in human existence?

151,600

151,600 is the number of people that die every day in the world.

Some die from old age, infectious disease, car accidents, cancer, childbirth, heart attacks, suicide, gunshots, or any of dozens of different causes. The ending of human life is a sobering reality, happening relentlessly, every second of every day.

Whenever I get lulled into a false sense of “this will never happen to me,” I realize this same number begins its countdown every morning of every day. There are no exceptions.

“What’s the role of our healthcare and governmental systems in this number?”

Is it simply to rearrange the dead, to change the order of how and when some of us will die?

Every baby that’s born into this world comes with an expiration date. We don’t know when anyone will die, but so far, no one has managed to live forever.

As a society, we grieve all of our losses but we abhor premature deaths, all of the ones that could have been prevented. We go out of our way to guard against disease, mending wounds after an accident, and protecting against those who wish us harm.

In the future it will no longer be good enough to just be healthy. We will demand ways to be physically stronger, more alert, super resilient, exceptionally durable, intellectually brilliant, and so much more.

Final Thoughts

I normally don’t go off on a rant, but every approach to the coronavirus I’m seeing seems wrong on so many levels.

It’s Y2K all over again but with a demented twist.

So we isolate people for a while… and then what? Every day we’re hearing about new cancellations and postponements… and then what? We’re on the verge of destroying our global economy… and then what?

Are we really waiting for someone to discover a cure? The healthcare industry has a terrible track record when it comes to finding cures. They are far more motivated to find a solution for the symptoms rather than the disease itself, but maybe this time will be different.

Furthermore, isolation does not work. It goes against human nature. Instead of separating people from people we need to start working together and ask the tough questions.

If we have an outbreak of the coronavirus in a large prison, how do we manage that? If we have an outbreak in a refugee camp, how do we manage that? If we have a massive outbreak among the 1.2 billion people that live in Africa, how do we manage that?

Recently, Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch stated, “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

Lipsitch goes on to predict that within the coming year, anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses.

It seems inevitable that we will all come into contact with it. But today’s fear about the coronavirus is exponentially worse than the disease itself. Why do we have no checks and balance systems for the hysteria being created?

That said, I’d love to hear your thoughts.