The one thing stopping Ebola requires

A guest post by Marc Maxmeister.

Ebola is a threat, but not for the reasons you might have heard. It won’t wipe us all out. It won’t topple nations. And there are no actual zombies, despite early reports to the contrary.

The story of our response to Ebola over the past four months paints of stark picture of two approaches: An expert-led paralyzed effort to impose “standard” solutions, and an agile local effort to find solutions that work.

unnamedMy latest book takes a realistic look at Ebola with an emphasis on what the local response can teach us all about better ways to run projects. Check out “Ebola: Local voices, hard facts.” on Amazon here.

I started out just listening, and from then curated stories from people directly affected, or those acting within their home communities. I then infused these stories into better answers to the top most-asked questions GlobalGiving and some Liberian nonprofits had on a recent reddit_AMA about Ebola.

It evolved into lessons about what makes a community resilient, offered in plain language, wonk-free stories. In the context or trying to understand an immediate crisis, where making one wrong decision forces us to make even worse ones later, I found it much easier to talk about the solutions. Behavior change, agile organizations, positive deviance, data interoperability, rapid learning and experimentation, and local accountability to do something, even empathy, all make an appearance.

The book brings out a deeper message about systems and leaders: Leaders are not created evil. They just slip into a downward spiral each time the choose the easy way out, kicking the tough decision down the road, ensuring that they’ll need to choose from even worse options at the next juncture.

The implications for our world are obvious.

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I’m hosting a book release event this week in Washington, DC.

Where: Open Gov Hub, 1110 Vermont Ave, 5th Floor

When: Thursday, Dec 11, 5:15 – 6:30pm

What: Beer, chips, games – and a discussion

As an illustration of some ideas in the book, at the event we’ll play a boardgame called “Pandemic” with new rules to model the 2014 Ebola epidemic. For anyone who’s familiar with the game, I’m adding two new actors for WHO and the US army. Instead of being able to make the usual four moves, these actors are limited to only two moves. The army does have the special ability to instantly jump to any place in the world where an epidemic exists, but they cure disease at half the rate, because they’re not trained to fight it. 

WHO gets no special abilities. They’re merely a liability, because in this game, the virus spreads at the same rate regardless of each actor’s capacity to fight it. In a battle with bureaucracy, nature wins.  

The other rules change is adding a few “quaratine” cards. When a player tries to quarantine Ebola, it creates three invisible spots on the board where the virus exists undetected. This is pretty much what would happen if the world tried to impose a full travel ban on the affected countries. The virus would still spread, but now invisible and untracked. 

Our world needs leaders, and increasingly, it is turning inward to local people to be those people. Are we paying attention?

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