Saul Kaplan -- 10 Ways to Survive This Next Lockdown

Saul Kaplan -- 10 Ways to Survive This Next Lockdown

It’s hard not to see another temporary lockdown in our near future. Lockdown seems like the only viable option left to safely bridge to mass vaccination without an unthinkable loss of life.  This week’s promising news on the vaccine front is encouraging and hopefully we won’t have to hunker down for long. But hunker down we must.

Ten ways to make it through another lockdown to mass vaccination:

 

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1) Revive our shared springtime mantra and commitment to “flatten the curve”.

 

2) Accept mask mandates and tighter constraints on gatherings. Epidemiologist, Michael Osterholm, makes it clear when he admonishes us to, “stop swapping air”.

 

3) Transparently, equitably and apolitically allocate and distribute enough free vaccine until EVERYONE, who wants to be, is vaccinated.  

 

4) Advocate for significant federal and state stimulus to soften the impact of another lockdown, especially for those that have been hardest hit and are least privileged among us.

 

5) Wake-up to recognize and take action to address the long-term systemic racism and social injustice that is hurting so many in our community.

 

6) Be kind to each other, these are stressful times.  We are all on edge.   

 

7) Reach out every day and connect with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Loneliness might be the biggest epidemic we face.

 

8) Avoid “The Rubber Band Effect”, a human tendency to want to spring back to the way things used to work before the crisis. What if the best crisis workarounds can accelerate our path to a better normal?

 

9) Just because we weren’t ready doesn’t mean technology isn’t critical to transform our important social systems.    

 

10) Resilience is a collaborative community act. We have to catalyze something bigger than ourselves.

 

I thought I had learned something about human centered design over the last 15 years at BIF.  Turns out it took a crisis to really learn what it means to imagine and design new human-centered models and systems with equity and inclusion at their core.  We will get through this crisis if we act together, support each other, and optimistically get to work to create a stronger more resilient community.

Saul Kaplan, founder and chief catalyst of Business Innovation Factory.