By Rafeeq Bosch
Introduction
This paper describes the deliberations of a group of nine Foresight practitioners in our consulting firm’s Strategy practice. In the wake of the transition to working from home, a number of us in different cities around North America decided to come together virtually to use the four layers of the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) method to examine the COVID-19 pandemic.
The intent of the exercise was to identify some themes at each of the four layers of CLA and to surface some lessons about how to facilitate foresight work in virtual settings.
After some initial comments about how the exercise was structured, this paper is organized along the lines of the four CLA layers viz. litany, systems, worldview/discourse and myth/metaphor (see Figure 1). We also proposed an alternative myth from which to respond to the outbreak of COVID-19. Finally, we present some learnings and insights emerging from the process.
Process
The process started with a chat thread in the company’s internal Microsoft Teams site. This asynchronous round of collaboration surfaced initial observations at the four layers of the CLA method from various team members. These were then carried forward into the subsequent live collaboration sessions using the Miro virtual collaboration tool.
The discussion group also identified the set of participants for the live collaboration sessions, as everyone who had contributed to the chat was invited to the live sessions. The live collaboration participants had varying exposure to the CLA technique. One had come across CLA as part of a postgraduate Futures Studies program while four others had encountered the technique in a corporate training event on Strategic Foresight. The remainder of the participants were engaging as observers to see how the technique may be applied.
This group attempted to build a CLA model in two live sessions using the content from the Teams discussion as a starting point. A loose collaboration structure was adopted, with no-one functioning as a designated facilitator.
Observations were generated at all four layers during the two live sessions. However, none of the items identified at the Litany layer were explicitly taken down through the successive layers as prescribed in the CLA method.
A final live retrospective session was conducted to reflect on the process and the application of the four layers of CLA. The outcomes of those discussions are captured below.
Litany Layer
At this surface level, we noted plenty of discussion in popular media, print media, podcasts, news channels, etc. about the outbreak.
Most discussion was characterized by panic and fear. Litanies included death and disease (as seen in televised daily government ministry briefings and tracking statistics on government health websites), economic disruption (loss of value on stock markets), and varying degrees of social disruption (from voluntary social distancing to total lockdown).
The aggregation of the news stories and personal experiences led to the emergence of an overarching theme that “we are all experiencing the pandemic virtually”. What this means is that while the pandemic was ostensibly about the outbreak of a disease, the effect of the pandemic was to drive a lot more of our day-to-day experience into the virtual realm (moving to work from home, contacting family members in quarantine via telephone or video conference etc.)
Systems Layer
Two key observations were made at the Systems level. First, is the characterization of the pandemic as a “Black Swan” event by some commentators. This was viewed as an interesting proposition to advance because it implies an element of unpredictability of the pandemic.
This characterization is at odds with warnings about the inevitability of such a pandemic in the past decade since the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus (Hoffower, 2020). The motivation behind this characterization was called into question, and it was noted that this characterization started within the investment fund management fraternity (Sequoia Capital, 2020). It was speculated that this narrative was possibly a damage control move in advance of economic fallout and associated stress on the investment fund management fraternity.
The second observation was the holding forth of a vaccine as the countermeasure against the virus. Language about “flattening the curve” and “buying time” all seem to culminate in a “success” scenario in which a vaccine is finally available to protect humanity from the ravaging effects of the viral spread (World Health Organization, 2020a). This narrative implicitly advanced technological solutions to a biological problem.
Alternative narratives advancing social behaviors, hygiene practices, good health promotion, and resilient public health systems as enduring solutions seemed curiously absent. There seems to be little discussion (yet) about permanently increasing the capacity or improving the resilience of healthcare facilities (ventilators, beds, PPE). And a prevalent paradigm of “revenue per square foot” militates against the adoption of social distancing as a permanent new social etiquette. This paradigm is reflected in the configuration of restaurants, airplanes, schools, and other places where people gather in groups.
Although some discussion was observed about the power of (natural) human immunity mechanisms (World Health Organization, 2020b) (Altmann et al., 2020), these were not imbued with the same prominence and hope for deliverance as manufactured vaccine options.
Worldview/Discourse Layer
At the worldview layer, three themes were observed. The first is viewed through the lens of our observer group, all based in North America. The worldview discernable from the above layers was that the virus was something “out there”, and making its way “over here”. The notion is one of inevitable and impending disaster. At the root of this discourse was the notion of disconnect between humans in different parts of the world. What is absent from this discourse was the impulse to assist the humans suffering “out there” and rather focus on preventing the problem getting “over here”.
The second discourse observed was around the existence of “wet markets”, which are understood to be the source of this outbreak (Infection Prevention and Control – Canada, 2020). This discourse is somewhat related to the previous one because it separates humans on the basis of cultural practices. The group was not particularly au fait with the origins of eating exotic animals but found the characterization of certain animals as “exotic” to be interesting and invertible depending on the observer. The discourse around safe and hygienic nutrition in general is surrounded in various presuppositions about industrial capacity, cultural beliefs about eating live animals, relative aggregate health outcomes associated with outputs of industrialized food production systems e.g. the population health cost of artificial food and sugar-rich diets fostered by industrialized food production or the climate price of massive industrial-scale cattle farming.
Third, there seemed to be a worldview about preserving the status quo, especially the economic status quo. Social interventions like social distancing, work from home or full country lockdown were seen as temporary measures to be endured for a time until “normalcy” could be resumed. In the initial weeks of the pandemic, there was still very little discussion about how to entrench the benefits of a world operating in a fundamentally different mode.
Allied to this was the remarkable demonstration of government power to curtail the free movement and interaction of people. Some enforcement was required, but by and large whole countries complied to a large extent with calls to make highly inconvenient changes to their personal daily patterns (Human Sciences Research Council, 2020) (Smyth, 2020). These compromises were all made against the backdrop of daily statistics awaiting the bending of curves as indicators that we could return to the way things were before the outbreak. This return was invariably a return to economic- and consumption-based activity.
Myth/Metaphor Layer
Finally, at this level, we discerned two operative myths. One was the “hostile world” myth. In this story, the world outside us is always trying to destroy us. Danger lurks at every turn. The person next to us may unwittingly be the porter of the seed of our destruction.
There was a second myth advanced which is of the “human superiority”. Viruses, although devastating and always mutating, were no match for human ingenuity. Humans have claimed their place as the apex species. Viruses crossing the “barrier” from animal to human were somehow flouting a law of human primacy but will be taught a lesson when humans bring to bear their formidable technology to obliterate the threat they pose.
The two myths are lightly linked and play into a larger myth about competition between species for dominance at the expense of each other. We proffer an alternate myth to form the basis of different discourse, systems discussion, and ultimately litany. That myth is a “system of life”.
In this myth, the existence of viruses, animals, and humans are all seen as co-existing components of a broader system. The system is one in which humans indeed occupy a privileged position, but that privilege arises because of, not despite, the presence of other categories of species. For the price of the odd viral infection, the human herd achieves viral immunity. Mutating viruses keep this system constantly engaged and therefore optimized. The aggregate outcome is a flexible “life space” able to accommodate all species.
With this as the myth, we believe focus will shift away from panic and anxiety, to preparation and graceful management of the expected. Society will embed a learning capacity, somewhat mimicking the body’s immune response to these epidemiological events. Freed from the fear associated with myths of hostility and superiority, human society can turn its energy and attention to more productive responses. The increasing risk of pandemics brought about by the evolution of human society (globalization, air travel, longer life expectancies) demands the optimization of those attentions and energies.
Ascending the CLA layers from this metaphor, we can expect to find a worldview that sees the outbreak of viral pandemics as a natural consequence of the interplay between species in the system of life. Crucially, in this worldview, the incidence of epidemics is truly anticipated. This means that mechanisms and systems capacity exist for detecting and responding to early signals that potentially epidemic infections have occurred. A good analogy for this kind of sentinel function can be seen in the weather monitoring systems which warn of hurricanes, tornados and other large-scale weather or seismic events. Within this worldview, we anticipate much less of the recrimination we see today that result in victimization of people of certain ethnicities or the proliferation of conspiracy theories about viruses deliberate developed in shadowy bio-tech laboratories.
An additional alternative worldview-level idea is the interconnectedness of all of humanity. The notion that the occurrence of a virus in one part of the world or in one community is not likely to affect all of humanity is thoroughly broken down in the context of the new metaphor. In a world interconnected through globalized commerce, communication, and travel, the idea that something like a potentially lethal virus is not a global threat should inspire a much higher level of cooperation about epidemiological response than we have observed in the case of COVID-19.
These worldviews should give rise to health systems that are much better prepared with procedures and capacity designed to absorb the additional burden of disease and decrease the exposure of vulnerable sectors of the population. In this instance, it was the elderly and immune-compromised who were most at risk, but well-prepared systems would be versatile enough to identify and protect whoever is most at risk from a particular threat.
The other shift at the system level is to place more focus on good health practices i.e. those behaviors which boost human immunity and consequently the ability to recover from viral infection. This notion would see an expression in food production systems, placing more emphasis on good, wholesome nutrition. Work habits that postpone regenerative rest and recovery or promote excessive, continuous stress would also fall away without the systemic reward for such immuno-destructive behaviors.
Process Learnings
The consensus view on the CLA method was that the process of using the four layers was a good way to grasp the nuances of post-structural critical enquiry (as held forth by Inayatullah in his early writings on the technique in 2002 and 2003). We did feel that the scope of the CLA we pursued was very wide, and one thought was to keep the target of a CLA more focussed to avoid too much discussion at the Litany level.
A key learning in the group using the four layers of CLA was to allow time for the themes to emerge. These may not always be apparent during the discussion and involves some creative contemplation by participants who excel naturally at detected themes in a wide array of facts.
There was an expectation that the virtual whiteboarding tool would naturally facilitate collaboration, but the learning was that the tool does not replace the need for skilled and prepared facilitation. What the tool does solve is the challenge of co-location (or lack thereof).
We were also intrigued about how much further we may have gotten with the aid of an expert CLA facilitator. An expert facilitator would have encouraged deeper vertical enquiry and the creation of connections between items in the various levels (as prescribed by the CLA method).
Conclusion
In using the four layers of CLA on COVID-19, the group identified two driving myths which propelled the discussion at the litany layer. An alternative myth was proposed which was intended to refocus the response of society. It is anticipated that pandemics will be a more regularly recurring phenomenon and hence a better response is necessary to mitigate the societal fallout from such events.
This paper represents only a portion of the observations and insights that emerged during the exercise. Figure 2 is a snapshot of the very busy Miro virtual whiteboard on which we recorded our observations at the various CLA layers. This snapshot is intended to show that a large proportion of ideas generated during this process, are unrepresented in this write-up.
We recognize that even this is not an exhaustive or conclusive analysis of the pandemic. Another exercise, with perhaps a different group of participants, and applying the CLA method—rather than just using the layers—would likely generate a different set of insights, especially at the deeper levels of the analysis where the interpretation of observations occurs.
About the Contributors
The contributors to this article are all consultants at Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Learn more at slalom.com.
Contributors
Alexandra Reese, Portland (alexandra.reese@slalom.com)
Boris Vishnevsky, Seattle (borisv@slalom.com)
David Ontaneda, Vancouver (david.ontaneda@slalom.com)
Jeremy Pollack, Hartford (jeremy.pollack@slalom.com)
Michelle Senkiw, Toronto (michelle.senkiw@slalom.com)
Rafeeq Bosch, Vancouver (rafeeq.bosch@slalom.com)
Rahul Shankar, Seattle (rahul.shankar@slalom.com)
Shane Mikes, Seattle (shane.mikes@slalom.com)
Tamarah Usher, St. Louis (tamarah.usher@slalom.com)
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