In the early noughties I’d fly over from London to Chicago for periodic business trips and, burdened with jet lag during the the first week of any stay, I would flick through my hotel room cable TV options at sparrow fart o’clock. would alway stumble upon Chuck Norris & Christie Brinkley, or the local ambulance chasing lawyers (whom I dislike enough not to even name by person here in this article). The commercials would stack in such a way as to form connections in my mind:
- commercials for chemical water purifiers would be followed by those for dry skin moisturizers
- property investment seminars were followed by debt relief support mechanisms
- an abundance of food preparation and consumption adverts were followed by a multitude of home fitness options
It almost seemed a requirement that every business selling a benefit must give rise to a problem, which had to be solved by a different business. My cynical and less than objective assessment of life in the U.S. was that capitalism would wither in a culture that prioritized prevention over cure. It was a notion reinforced by one of my U.S. managers at the time who would pop Tylenol like it was candy rather than dealing with their underlying ailment.
I can’t help but wonder if this apparent preference for the curative over the preventative is what is playing out as the U.S. navigates the coronavirus pandemic. The comparative reluctance of some people to change their behavior (e.g. by wearing a mask and socially distancing) over the stronger preference to wait for the cure, are regular topics of discussion on middle-of-the-road, and left leaning news stations. [I ought to broaden my outlook and hear what everyone else saying?]
I don’t kid myself that this is a peculiarly American problem. I think it’s a human problem.
Two years ago I heard an interview with a gentleman trying to secure funding for fresh water distribution projects in poorer parts of the world. He spoke about how much money he could secure to address problems, and how much less money would be required to prevent them from happening in the first place. But he couldn’t secure funding to avert something from happening. It was easier to secure more money to address a disaster than to find less money to avert one. It seems we’re just reactive creatures who are more inclined to address situations when we can see feel and touch the issues to which they give rise.
Around the same time I was flitting back and forth across the Atlantic I was working under a very insightful Director of IT. She instituted a time recording practice for everyone in her technology department. It wasn’t well received, but she was a respected leader, and after a little grumbling everyone just got on with it.
About three months after she instituted the change I was speaking with her at a social event. I asked her how the time recording was helping her manage our IT projects. She laughed before replying because I had totally misconstrued her motives. She explained that selling shiny IT projects was the easy part of her job. The problem she faced at budget time was facing down the owners of the business pressuring her to cut back on the operational costs, i.e. the preventative work. The IT projects were delivering visible benefits to the owners; they saw the operational costs as an expense, and not as insurance, or an investment.
Recognizing this is a problem is the first step. The next is to devise some kind of tactic to address it, even if those those tactics are flawed – the data on time recording mentioned above could only support a part of the story.
The pressure to quickly pivot our human nature from reactive to proactive is building with the changes to our climate. If we wait until the full effects of climate change are upon all of us – and not just the most vulnerable nations, who are already feeling them – it will be too late. Maybe it already is.
