It’s becoming very clear now that there is no “new normal” just around the corner.  The situation we are in now is the future – messy, uncertain and threatening both for individuals and businesses.  Now is the moment for choices and for facing reality.  For businesses this is going to be very hard.  we are going to have to make some hard choices both as individuals, as a nation, and as a global family.  Now is the moment for leadership, for those who can communicate the facts, lay out the choices and lead teams, companies, communities and nations forward. The choices are hard, but they need to be made.  At the moment we have chosen to ignore them.  Our elderly politicians say: “every human life is precious” and so we shelter and live in fear, and the next generation loses out of education and opportunities.  We have not always done this, nor can we continue to do.  We would never have come out of the cave without the willingness to face the sabre-toothed tiger.  We need to find our ability to live with risk again and decide what price we are prepared to pay as a society for the way we choose to live. 

Risk and death are fundamental to human life.  In the last hundred years we have become used to our lifespan expanding, to disease receding, and to the much maligned “Health and Safety Rules” making our lives less risky.  Yet we are still prepared to tolerate 1.35 million deaths world-wide from road traffic accidents, and good luck to any politician who thinks they might take cars off the road to save lives.  We allow diseases such as malaria, which could be eradicated with money and political will, to kill hundreds of thousands of children.  We see pictures of the starving and we give a little cash and do nothing to change the systems that allow them to starve.  We continue to sell the arms to stoke the wars, because the alternative would mean a loss of jobs in our own country.

We choose risk for others, we choose death for many, because it suits us and supports our way of life. Covid19 has brought some of these choices into stark relief.  We have made the choice to damage our economy to save lives from Covid, yet we are prepared to tolerate the certainty of increased deaths from stroke, heart attacks and cancer as if those deaths are less important than the Covid deaths.  We have destroyed businesses and imposed long lasting poverty on many to shelter those who are over 70 and those with pre-existing conditions. 

 Perhaps it is now the time to make the hard choices, to learn the lessons, to manage the risk and to embrace living (and our friends and family) and go forward.  For that we need leaders with courage and capability to tell the unvarnished truth.

Pat Chapman-Pincher  - January 2021 

Defy Expectations Founder, Futurist, Technologist, Business Leader