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The Best Thought Leadership of 2020 is Swiss Cheese
An appreciation of Coronavirus: The Swiss Cheese Strategy by Tomas Pueyo.
This is the first of a series of reviews of thought leadership.
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis how ideas have real-world consequences. For instance, the “warp speed” approach to vaccine research and development didn’t come from out of nowhere. It echoes the concept of agile software development (also known as “sprint and scrum,”) which in turn hearkens back to the “challenge-driven leadership” concept in place at MIT. You could probably trace it back to the U.S. Navy during World War II (as recalled by Admiral Hyman Rickover), or for that matter to the Gordian Knot.
At heart, the concept is not really about speed. It’s about focus. When you have a serious problem to solve, put an intensely focused team of driven people in place, and let them work without distraction on it, instead of relying on an established, formal, waterfall-style innovation process. Without that concept in place, and its proven history of success, it’s unlikely that so many pharma researchers and enterprises, working within their highly structured system, would have had the confidence to act so quickly.
Demonstrating the “How” of “Why”
Some very high-quality thought leadership has come out of the pandemic. (Thought leadership is clear, influential narrative work that helps show the link between concepts and practical results.) There are, in my view, four criteria for great work of this kind: timely originality (the writer sees what needs to be seen now, that others have mostly missed), conceptual clarity (the writer makes sense of a complex situation), explanatory power (the reader learns not just what’s going on, but why) and a natural constituency (people are ready to hear what the writer has to say).
Explanatory power is Tomás Pueyo’s strength. His recent Medium article, “Coronavirus: the Swiss Cheese Strategy,” is a great demonstration of the “how” of “why:” how to marshall a stream of logic to make a rationale clear, so people feel confident acting on it.
Pueyo is a vice president for growth at the learning platform Course Hero. His Medium article “The Hammer and the Dance,” published March 19, received more than 20 million hits. That article…
