Spanish Flu: here's some signals from crises past
Yes, this is about COVID-19.
It was hard to write about anything else: it’s less the elephant in the room, than the elephant taking over the entire planet. The article I’ve been most interested in this week was sent to me by my dad. He’s 76, in the UK, and has bad asthma at the best of times – and now he’s facing weeks of isolation.
Why am I bothering you with this personal detail?
Because while you might not care about my dad, you sure as hell care about someone.
COVID-19 is terrifying for our industry and jobs and society, but it’s also terrifying on a personal level. Pretty much every person in the world has a story like mine, with people they love in dangerous, uncertain or uncomfortable situations.
It helps to acknowledge that among all the ‘thought leadership’ – which really matters –the personal, the fear, the love, and the sense of community matter too.
And what’s common across all corners of the community is that we’re all looking for ways to cope, to survive, and to thrive.
Like many defining moments in time, history can help. Specifically, what’s piqued my interest is comparisons between COVID-19 and Spanish Flu 1918.
Key points:
- The first is a series of soap ads from the Guardian 1918-1919, the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic in which approx. 50 million people died.
- To ‘fess up, I love a bit of history and I also love ads (helpful in this role…) – so these are interesting as cultural artefacts, as well as having a similar emphasis on the importance of Washing. Your. Hands.
- From Wired, there’s an interesting look at data and the role it plays in comparisons between the past and present. There are plenty of articles finding parallels between the two pandemics: this one illustrates some of the differences.
Part of looking forward is looking back. We need to use clues from past experience, because managing a crisis might just be our new normal.
Six weeks ago we were talking about floods. Eight weeks ago we were talking about fires. Before that it was Ebola and SARS. Far enough back and it was the Spanish Flu.
We need to better use clues from these past experiences, both lived and learned, to help create our roadmap through COVID-19 and beyond.
Flight Centre has made use of their experience during the SARS outbreak. While closing 100 stores isn’t great news, we’ll never know the greater impact if they hadn’t taken such decisive action early.
The long AND the short of it
Crises make it harder, but more imperative, to look long-term. Apply the 60:40 rule to the measures you or your brands are taking through COVID-19. Working remotely for example has short-term challenges, but long-term how will you capture the learning and benefits? Can you implement the innovative and creative approaches on a more permanent basis?
LVMH has given their perfume production capability over to making sanitizer to support the French public health system. That proactivity (versus waiting for the capability to be requisitioned by the state) is not only morally right, it will likely have long-term brand benefits.
Successful ‘business as unusual’
Surrogation tendency means we use metrics as surrogates for the strategy we’re putting in place. It isn’t ‘business as usual’ for the moment, but it can be ‘successful business as unusual’. Measuring ourselves, our colleagues and our output by the same metrics as usual might mask not only what we need to get better at, but what might actually be working well.
The 1918 Boots advertorial puts it best:
“our national health is our truest national wealth”.
