They inspect and adapt through tough times
Scrum is founded on empiricism. All rules, artifacts, and events exist to support it. Empiricism is a radically different way to create products because you acknowledge that many things are unknown. You need to inspect and adapt. Many of us have been struggling to explain empiricism to our stakeholders. Now, however, we see empiricism all around us in how our leaders fight COVID-19.
COVID-19 has the world in its grasp. It’s a pandemic of unseen magnitude in our modern world. It impacts or will impact all countries in the world, and there’s no simple solution. Every country needs to tailor a response to its specific situation.
In many countries, politicians have acknowledged that they aren’t experts in this field. Virologists and medical specialists are the beacons who guide everyone through these tough times. When they speak, the country listens.
This is why the Dutch government makes decisions based on the advice of the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), whose tasks is to determine the best response to the developments involving the pandemic. This OMT has all the people to achieve their goals, like the country’s prominent:
virologists;
statisticians;
pulmonologist;
intensive care specialists.
Together they have extensive knowledge on the topic of viruses and pandemics. They are the best people to guide the country. Still, many unknown factors make a response to the virus increasingly complex. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
the contamination degree of the virus — how fast does the virus spread;
the incubation time of the virus — how long does it take until people develop symptoms of COVID-19;
the number of people that need to be hospitalized;
the number of people that need to receive intensive care treatment;
the number of days that people need to be in intensive care;
how people will respond to their recommendations to help slow the virus from spreading.
The experts don’t exactly know what will happen. They have to make decisions based on what is known to uncover the unknown. They need to work in an empirical way.
Establishing the goal
The OMT knows that a vaccine takes generally more than a year to be available. They also know that the virus can’t be exterminated. It is a cruel truth, but the world will not work together to lockdown for several months to achieve that. This means that a Wuhan scenario — locking down the country for many months to beat the virus — is sure to fail. As soon as a government lifts the lockdown, the virus will return. With that, the premise is that many will die from COVID-19.
The OMT then looked at how an unhindered spread of the virus would impact the country. They identified that the biggest issue would be with the hospitals. These would be overloaded, especially intensive care. According to the information at hand in early March, thousands of people would require intensive care. But The Netherlands only had a capacity for 1100 beds.
With that, the OMT established their goal: Avoid Intensive Care capacity overload.
The Outbreak Management Team goal became: Avoid Intensive Care capacity overload
To achieve this they established three objectives:
Flatten the curve, slowing down the pace of the virus’s spread;
Increase the Intensive Care Capacity to be able to help more COVID-19 patients;
Protect the Dutch economy from collapsing;
While flattening the curve, the following is pivotal:
Protect vulnerable people from the virus.
Inspecting and adapting
Every day, the OMT determines its course of action based on the latest information. This information can come from many different places, like:
Number of people infected;
Number of people hospitalized;
Number of people at the Intensive Care;
The way the people respond to the advice of the OMT and the government;
Duration of hospitalization;
Duration of being in Intensive Care;
Best-practices and lessons learned from other countries;
New developments on the treatment of COVID-19.
All this new knowledge is input for the OMT to determine the effectiveness of the measures.
In the past few weeks, we saw the OMT recommend increasingly strict measures. At first, the OMT and the government asked us to wash our hands often and avoid shaking hands. When reports came in that more people were infected than expected, they inspected and adapted and asked people to consider social distancing and avoid having contact with vulnerable people who are seriously ill or above 70 years of age. This included the closing of nursing homes.
Inspection and adaptation continued. When it became apparent that many didn’t follow the measures accordingly, they asked people to work from home and only leave the house when needed. As a next step, they enforced the closing of cafes and restaurants. Finally, (until now) groups bigger than three were forbidden.
To limit the impact as much as possible, some things were still allowed. Shops could remain open if they would enforce social distancing. Restaurants could turn into food takeaways. People working in pivotal industries were still allowed to go to work when symptom-free.
Sometimes the OMT adapted due to new data, often though they to did it because a group of people didn’t follow the less strict measures sufficiently.
Following the trends, they also worked to increase intensive care capacity. First, they ensured that 1600 beds came available. Then, when there was a threat that the curve wouldn’t flatten as fast as hoped, the OMT ensured that the number of beds rose to 2400.
Another important factor susceptible to inspection and adaptation was the way to address the nation. When it appeared that large parts of the public didn’t listen to recommendations, the prime minister addressed the nation — a rare event in our country. Later the king did the same.
Stakeholder involvement
The OMT and the government recognized that it was important to involve the most important stakeholders: the parliament and the people. To accommodate this, every week the head of the OMT briefs parliament. This is broadcasted live. This briefing includes the latest insights on the spreading of the virus and on the impact it has on hospitals and society. On top of the update, the OMT suggests the goal for the next week. This ranges from increasing the number of intensive care beds to a specific response to changes in the curve.
Members of parliament have the opportunity to ask questions and suggest alternative measures. Occasionally the OMT follows these suggestions, like the closing of schools. While the OMT suggested that schools could remain open, mainly to allow those that need to fight the pandemic to work, the Dutch people didn’t agree. Therefore OMT followed the suggestion to close the schools.
Embracing complexity
COVID-19 caught the world off-guard, and no one knows the best way to deal with the crisis. Some continue to demand long term certainty where this is absent. Most people and parties, however, understand that they are faced with a complex situation in which many things are unchartered waters.
Time will tell how this will impact people’s view of other complex topics, like software development. For years many have been holding on to false senses of security, planning for many months upfront, ignoring new insights. Even when companies adopted Agile and/or Scrum, it ended up being a bad type of waterfall in disguise. Perhaps the tide will turn with what we have learned from the COVID-19 crisis:
Even with a matter of life and death, “In complex environments what will happen is unknown.” — quote from the Scrum Guide 2017
If we accept this notion when thousands of lives and the economy are at stake, it shouldn’t be too difficult to accept it for topics in our daily work too.