Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 04

W hen the financial crisis his in 2008, Jonathan McMahon was a director of the Central Bank of Ireland, giving him a front- row seat in the efforts to keep the economy afloat. As we face another economic challenge, interlocked with a health threat, he has looked back a decade for lessons that might help us in the years ahead. “Crises are disruptive. They complicate life. In the middle of the pandemic, we longed for it to end and for the economic damage and social restric- tions to be over. But we should not be hasty to re- turn to business as usual. The question we should now be asking is what can be done to escape the effects of the crisis in an enduring way. We should want to build a more resilient social and economic system. We should seek to strengthen the financial system. We should not want to kick these and other problems down the road for future generations to solve,” he writes in Post-Pandemic. The 12 lessons he gathered from the 2008 experi- ence, reflecting on them amidst the current crisis, are: 1. No one knows what is going to happen: It is human to want to see the future. But if we have learned anything in the past two decades, it’s that political and economic predictions are rarely correct. In the early day of the COVID-19 pandemic, no one knew how the virus would spread. Crises change how we think about the future. “Those leaders who accepted the inherent uncertainty, and did not pretend to know what might happen, had already made the emotional and intellectual leap required to solve the problem,” he says. “In a crisis, it’s is dangerous to pretend things might be more certain than they are in reality.” 2. Get out of your bubble: Well before the 2008 financial crisis, he was listening to taxi drivers, and through them developing concerns about the frothy housing market. In the pandemic, he turned to social media, in particular following people outside his own network. It was imper- fect research, of course, and did not provide any crisis-altering revelations. “But this is not the point. The alternative is to remain within a bubble, and this will reveal nothing you do not already know,” he says. 3. Imperfect decisions need to be made im- perfectly: Leaders who prevail or thrive in a crisis find it within themselves to address the altered circumstances. They quickly under- stand that continuing past practices won’t work. This is not easy, however. From an early age, we have learned that doing things in a prescribed way is encouraged and finding alternative paths discouraged. Crisis management, however, is an art. And art involves creativity. “Creativity in- volves trial, error, and mess, and it involves tak- ing risks. No one knows precisely what they are doing in a crisis, nor is there a right way out of a crisis. It is an imperfect, imperfectible process,” he says. 4. People who agree with you are not always helping: During a crisis, it is vital to have people willing and able to disagree with their leaders and colleagues. That’s because decisions made quickly on significant issues are inherently risky and need to be challenged to be improved. You need people who have thought through the is- sues from first principles and are willing to give their opinions. “A mute sage is of little use in a crisis,” he notes. The search for better answers, he adds, never ends. If the people offering un- comfortable truths start to become a distraction, channel their energy into something else pro- ductive rather than demotivating them. 5. Talk about the real issues: During the global financial crisis, Ireland shifted from telling one story about itself to a very different one. That didn’t come from a conscious or planned pro- cess. Serendipitously, ideas given short shrift in the previous decade gained new legitimacy. The business of talking about things nobody has been talking about or wants to talk about is integral to crisis management. “During the pro- cess, I came to recognize that as soon as nobody wanted to talk about something, we were prob- ably talking about the right issue,” he notes. 6. Don’t just understand the numbers; under- stand their meaning: A crisis not only exposes the limits to the explanatory power of econom- ics and finance but reminds us of the importance Post-Pandemic By Jonathan McMahon The Liffey Press, 256 pages, $30.10 26 / Canadian Government Executive // September/October 2020 The Leader’s Bookshelf By Harvey Schachter Post-Pandemic