Conquering Coronavirus Chaos

Applying Leadership Theories from the Army War College to Battle Coronavirus

By Jake Wood, Team Rubicon

When COVID-19 arrived in the United States, parts of the country quickly became overwhelmed. Our stock market collapsed, our public health system was overwhelmed, and many levels of government failed in their efforts to coordinate a response to the pandemic—and worse, to communicate.

While the coronavirus was going to be disruptive regardless of proactive measures, it didn’t have to cause the kind of disintegration seen across every aspect of society. Our institutions failed to prepare for, respond to, and adjust with the unique circumstances of COVID-19. The coronavirus caused massive chaos in the U.S., and it didn’t have to.

At veteran-led disaster relief nonprofit Team Rubicon, we’re familiar with chaos. Chaos is what we do. Our methods for conquering chaos were born on the battlefield, where experience in the “fog of war” helped an entire generation develop the tools to navigate situations like a pandemic.

As veterans, we’ve used this knowledge to build one of America’s most efficient disaster relief nonprofits, all while responding to the world’s most chaotic situations — from the Haiti earthquake to Hurricane Harvey. When COVID-19 hit, we leveraged the lessons learned over a decade spent managing chaos to pivot to coronavirus relief efforts.

While not all chaos is alike, a construct developed by the U.S. Army, VUCA — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — can help define it.

Each element of VUCA sounds somewhat terrifying, and that’s what chaos tends to be—an unnerving scenario that stresses our systems and injects fear into decision making.

COVID-19 is chaos incarnate, and many elements map directly to VUCA. The disease is volatile and spread quickly. Its ‘novel’ nature led to massive amounts of uncertainty, including around transmission. Uncertainty leads to inaction as people become paralyzed by indecision and fail to act until they have all the information—a recipe for disaster.

The complexity of trying to track disease vectors led to the nations experiencing outbreaks, while contact tracing became a tangled web. Adding to the complexity is the fact that infected people can be asymptomatic. Without rigorous and aggressive isolation and quarantine procedures threat vectors traveled across the globe. Done effectively, communities could have quarantined quickly, halted further spread, and “flattened the curve.”

Finally, the condition most concerning to the U.S. in the early months of the coronavirus was ambiguity. We simply did not know what we didn’t know. The result was a self-inflicted wound.

Another kind of VUCA — one that stands for Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility — contains the four keys to conquering chaos.

If we are to fight our way out of the coronavirus, our leaders must establish a clear, coherent, and credible Vision for protecting U.S. citizens, and articulate that vision.

At Team Rubicon, we did this early on: our vision was that we would act to protect the communities we serve, the volunteers who serve them, and the communities our volunteers return to. That simple, clear vision guided every action taken and decision made, even as we overhauled longstanding policies, practices, and procedures. It allowed us to pivot quickly to serve communities impacted by COVID-19.

Then, we established understanding. Shortly after COVID-19 was identified in the U.S., we established a cross-functional task force comprised of top executives and key staff that met twice a day for three weeks.

By investing time consolidating facts, listening to perspectives, and generating ideas, we achieved understanding and we were able to develop contingency plans and action strategies based around our vision. As the pandemic metastasized, we were able to activate those plans and move forward, even while peer organizations were trying to react.

Hope was not a strategy. VUCA is.

Our nation’s leaders had the potential of a two-month head start on the global pandemic. Had we taken advantage of it, we could have prepared our country for its onslaught by readying our medical facilities, producing test kits, aggressively quarantining individuals repatriated from infected countries, and launching a public awareness campaign that was proactive rather than reactive.

Instead, we merely hoped COVID-19 wouldn’t jump the Pacific. Meanwhile, misinformation flowing from official channels sowed public skepticism for the dangers posed. Masks were disregarded, social distancing poo-pooed, and just as it seemed we were getting a hold on the coronavirus, it flared again.

Leaders across society must provide clarity to Americans. They must ascribe the facts as they’re presented by the scientific community, filter out misinformation and noise, and focus our teams on the problem as it stands, not as we hope it to be. They must make our nation, medical systems, and relief organizations more agile by empowering front-line leaders to make crucial decisions. Those leaders will prove to be our most resourceful assets, helping us iterate quickly as we move through ambiguity and toward stability.

Hopeful thinking got us in this mess, and it won’t get us out. Hope doesn’t win battles, but a combination of VUCA — vision, understanding, clarity, and agility — can.

To put your military skills and experience to use helping those in need, visit www.teamrubiconusa.org/volunteer.