Responding to the Unknown with Collective Action

10-يونيو-2020

By Mahmood Qannati, Chief Corporate Communications & Marketing Officer, BisB

When the first wave of COVID-19 struck countries around world, many things were suddenly in short supply as masses scrambled to stockpile necessities - antibacterial gel and wipes, gloves, masks (and toilet paper, apparently)- and another essential tool to keep in our medicine cabinets, which health officials suggested to keep handy as a ‘self-health check’: thermometers.

What became painfully clear was the other vital thing that was in short supply - sufficient and accurate information on the nature of the coronavirus itself. To meet the rising demand of panicked google searches, misinformation came in full force attempting to bridge the gap of the unknown.

Do you need to wear masks? Do I need to wash my produce using detergent? How long does the virus last on surfaces? How long do I need to wash my hands for?

But we’ve learned to be wary of misinformation, or at least I’d like to think so. The Government of Bahrain and National taskforce took swift action. Social distancing and staying at home became our most powerful tools.

But what has this entire pandemic taught us, really? Beyond becoming an expert on how to be productive while working from home, and being collectively entertained by COVID-themed memes?

I’d like to believe that it has taught us the true power of collective, coordinated trust. To overcome this, we needed to trust that as we each stayed at home, others would do the same. We understood the power of the impact of our own actions, and acted as part of a larger group, realising the exponential positive impact it would have on flattening the curve.

It all boils down to preventing failures - in empathic coordination - against an unknown enemy, to avoid reacting in panic and instead taking a more informed stance, calmly. Take the classic example of Bank runs, which escalated during the Great Depression. People started panicking, withdrawing their deposits, the banks ran out of reserves and failed. But solutions came out of this – in order to ensure we avoided this happening again, we learned, we put the procedures and insurances in place. Similarly, people learned they don’t need to stockpile groceries to fill a bunker.

With any difficult situation, be it a pandemic, a Great Depression or a recession – it helps us understand how we can better work together - in better, more innovative ways - to reach better outcomes. It’s a healthy mix of preventatives measures, and implementing lessons learned. To push ourselves to a new way of working, and drastically improve the future by finding new solutions we hadn’t thought of before, from a new angle to new problems we never knew we had.

The Chinese technology giant, Huawei, developed a fantastic solution for the post COVID-19 world – they built a thermometer right into their latest smartphones, with a nifty infrared temperature sensor. Essentially, you can hold up the phone to someone’s forehead, from a safe distance, just as easily as you might have once taken a selfie alongside with them. Still, even when the threat of this pandemic passes, and you find yourself in search of a thermometer unable to remember where you placed it, you’ll have it right in your hands. It’s a sustainable solution for COVID-19 and beyond. And that’s exactly the mentality we need to be adopting.

In fact, it’s the mentality we’ve had at BisB, all along. Being future ready, by working together, ready to solve tomorrow’s problems using innovative solutions for a future we don’t yet know - just as we have learned to quickly adapt to a virus we still quite don’t fully understand.