Taking ideas off the shelf

"Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same.

To hell with more. I want better." - Ray Bradbury

BBC News website front page graphic: April 6th, 2020

Szeming Sze was born in China in 1908, and became a doctor.

His father was Chinese Minister to Great Britain. So whilst resident in the country, Dad took the opportunity to install the young Szeming at Winchester College, and from there he went on to study medicine at Cambridge.

"To understand the man" said Napoleon "you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.". And for twenty year-old Dr Sze that meant treating patients at St Thomas's Hospital in London.

St Thomas' is a hospital with an intriguing history. Built originally in Southwark, it was founded to provide treatment for the poor, sick, and homeless long before the NHS was founded. When it relocated to Westminster, on the opposite bank of the Thames to the Palace of Westminster, it became the closest hospital to the British Parliament.

At the very end of the 19th century, Somerset Maugham launched his writing career from the springboard of working as a medic at the hospital. He observed how men and women from the slums "lived and died, bore pain...saw what hope looked like, fear and relief".

We can't really know the effect working at St Thomas's had on the thoughtful, sensitive young Szeming, or the impact of seeing ill health and poverty in the wealthiest (but most unequal) city on Earth. What we do know is that, for the rest of his life, he dedicated himself - in a quiet, understated way - to improving the health of the poor. And being from a privileged class, with education and connections, he had the advantage of being able to think in more global and idealistic terms.

In modern parlance, he considered changes in healthcare systems that could improve people's lives at scale.

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The Coronavirus pandemic is the biggest challenge facing the world since the Second World War, and we are all struggling to come to terms with it. Along with the physical and economic disruption, just wrapping our heads around the dramatic changes that have taken place in just a few short weeks has been tough.

I started this blog in April 2020. Even then, it was beginning to dawn on people that there would be no easy 'return to normal'. Returning to normal would mean neutralising the virus with a vaccine or widely accessible, affordable drugs. Even if the unprecedented global hunt for a vaccine does deliver it in record time, that's still many months away (particularly when you factor in its ability to be delivered at scale, not to mention an army of weaponised anti-vaxxers poised to disrupt the politics and logistics).

Which means we are stuck between a rock and very hard place: keep lockdown in place to prevent our healthcare systems being overwhelmed but create economic damage and hardship (which has its own health cost), or try to force some sort of 'return to normal' and risk a second wave of the virus. There really is no easy option.

But there is an opportunity.

'Returning to normal' implies looking backwards, and carries a lot of baggage. Many of us - whilst reacting with horror at the human cost - have suspected that, whilst the economy is on 'pause', there may just be the chance to address some of the asymmetries, injustices and global problems that were proving so intractable before the pandemic hit.

In short - we shouldn't waste a good crisis. We need to start looking for ideas, resources and technologies that are already lying around. And we need to start inserting them into the economic and power structures as they stutter back into life.

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Which is what happened in 1945 to Szeming Sze.

Having returned to China with his wife and family, he moving to the United States after the outbreak of the Second World War. His connections and mastery of the English and French languages meant he found himself as personal secretary to a number of high-ranking Chinese officials. Often he escorted them on terrifying missions, flying from India over the Himalayas in tiny aircraft to shuttle between the Allies and China's wartime capital of Chongqing.

Which is how he found himself working for the Chinese foreign minister T.V. Soong, attending the conferences in San Francisco that eventually led to the setting up of the United Nations. Health was definitely not on the agenda - this was about power and the post-war order. Many pre-war health initiatives had been disrupted, and Great Britain and the United States had explicitly excluded health from any post-war planning discussions.

Szeming understood how the levers of power operated better than most. Working within a network of representatives who had medical backgrounds, the polite and erudite Dr Sze, quietly yet deliberately, worked out how to subvert the mechanisms by which motions could be put to the conference organisers.

So it was that he found himself writing the declaration - later adopted at the San Francisco conferences and embedded into the United Nations - that led to the founding of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

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For better or for worse, society is rewiring at the moment, and there will be winners and losers. As the great marketing consultant Roy H Williams wrote recently, what we are beginning to see is "the big fish quit eating the small fish. This is when the fast fish eat the slow."

To survive and thrive, we need a mindset that starts looking at the longer term and refuses to go 'back to normal'. The long-term mindset allows us to look at processes and systems that can be put in place to rebuild the economy, society and make life better for everyone - from dialling down climate change and improving health platforms, to building resilience into our communities and establishing colonies in space.

And to do any of these things, we need to look around for the people, the tools, the technology and mental models that exist to plot a sustainable course into the future.

In short, what can we take off the shelf?

Here's some ideas from the worlds of retail, science, technology, space and storytelling. Occasionally I smash them together and see what happens. I hope it inspires, and I hope you'll share with me ideas that work too.