Lessons from COVID-19 Crisis, a Reflection
[This reflection is from Keli Armann, User Experience Specialist, Office of the Vice Provost for Technology & Learning, Stanford University. She is a current participant in the MOR Leaders Program. Keli may be reached at [email protected].]
As you might imagine in this time, I’m reflecting on some of the inspiring stories of leadership at all levels that are emerging from this crisis, and how they relate to some personal experiences and our campus. Here are three themes I’ve seen:
Put the call out and people will step up:
On March 16, California Gavin Newsom put out a call to the state’s CEOs for masks, gloves, and ventilators. Ten thousand ventilators were going to be needed over the course of this crisis; we had 4,000. Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cells, had experience with pumps and hoses, so when Newsom tapped the CEO directly the following week to ask if they could refurbish ventilators, that question made its way to engineer Joe Tavi. That night he made a pot of coffee, downloaded a 300 page pdf; by 4 AM he called his boss and said yes they could do it. So when 170 broken ventilators arrived in LA last Friday from the national stockpile, they put them on a truck to Bloom and were back by Monday. They expect to refurbish 1000 ventilators this week, not just in California but in Delaware as well.
In the face of an emergency, many people who are able to want to help, but they often don’t know how to direct their energy. It is a blessing when someone steps forward to get the ball rolling and set a direction. I know this from personal experience, not from work but from my personal life. Nine years ago, Barbara, a classmate from high school, was in need of a bone marrow donor. She was not a close friend but there was something about her being a mother of two boys that struck a chord. I reached out to friends in the Bay Area to see if we could do a drive to register people for the Asian American Donor Program because this is a demographic that is not well represented in the national bone marrow registry. In a few weekends, there would be a summer festival at a local Buddhist temple that would have a high attendance of Asian Americans. I contacted other friends who knew the leadership there and was able to get a table. People volunteered to run the registration table all weekend, even people who never met this woman. While not directly through our efforts, Barbara found a match and is still alive and we got cheek swabs from 50 individuals who could help others down the road.
The importance of psychological safety
On Thursday March 5, our group had our first situation room meeting around COVID-19. We were briefed as to what was happening at a higher level by our CTO for VPTL, Richard Webber: finals would need to take place either from residences or from homes, depending on how fast the situation moved. The final week of classes would not be able to meet in person either.
You might hear in movies that “failure is not an option.” But instead our CTO said, as best as I can remember, we need your ideas and it is mission critical, we are not necessarily going to be able to do it all, we may need to triage and we might make mistakes, but we are going to share what we know with each other and talk about it and we are going to do our best. With that, he let us know he would have our backs, that we would need to have each other’s backs, and inspired us not to fail. It created an atmosphere of psychological safety where we could propose ideas that might fail but would not be blamed.
The answer is in the room (and outside it)
I’ve never given much thought to the phrase, “The answer is in the room” even though MOR veteran Rick Fredericks said it all the time when he came to our campus. I think he meant we should start talking to each other because through our collective knowledge and collaboration, we’d find we have what we needed.
But “the room” of course is much bigger than the people physically there if those you talk to are moved to leverage their relationships. Now more than ever we are asked to solve problems we never anticipated; either you need a breath of knowledge or you better know people who do.
Our group, Learning Spaces and Technology, run some of the key assets: Canvas, all the computer clusters and their associated software. We are a part of the Office of the Vice Provost for Technology and Learning and until last year, so was the Center for Teaching and Learning. But because we had those relationships, we have been working closely with CTL (which ran the iPad loaner program, Gradescope, and Panopto), as well as people in UIT (University IT) around Zoom.
Because we had a Slack channel that was reporting on feedback to the website UIT/CTL/VPTL collaborated on (teachanywhere.stanford.edu), our Canvas support specialist spotted a trend of students wondering how they would “shop” courses before registration in 3 weeks, and we designed a fast way to advertise Canvas courses that had been opened to the institution that we built and deployed within a week. Some of this leveraged prior relationships, others leveraged ones we had to build on the fly.
One closing article on the importance of relationships. James Cai, a physician’s assistant, was the first COVID-19 patient in New Jersey. He might have saved his own life by activating a network of relationships around him in healthcare both in China and the United States.
None of us is alone in all this and I feel blessed to be in the higher education community today.
Stay safe and healthy and don’t hesitate to reach out,
Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Office of the Vice Provost for Technology & Learning, Stanford University
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/magazine/first-coronavirus-patient-new-jersey.html