The Italian government’s rules about who you can lock down with and who you can’t, and who can visit you in hospital and who can’t, reveal long-embedded official views about the nature of the family unit and people’s sexuality that are surely no longer relevant, especially for a modern, global city like Milan. They have been the cause of much unnecessary suffering during lockdown. It's clear there is a need for new rights and the recognition of additional types of relationships. This is obvious to us at the city level, maybe less obvious at the national.

Why has Denmark done so well? First of all, Denmark has a healthcare system which is for free for everybody. And that make you feel safe. Because I normally live in US I can just see the huge difference. I‘ve felt so safe being in Denmark during the pandemic. It also has a very strong social system. From very early on the government began to email Danes around the world daily saying, "You should come home, and if not, you need to let us know why." That was as an eye-opener. I felt, “This country takes care of their citizens!” Denmark is also a country where, compared to US, it's very fact-based. When you get information, there's absolutely no drama. It's fact-based, so it’s trustworthy.

I think this disease has disclosed our vulnerability as a society. We are now required to wear masks to protect ourselves and others, but at the same time, this disease is forcing the invisible masks that as a society we have been wearing for centuries to fall away. We are able to see lots of things that we weren’t seeing, or pretending not to see. Our vulnerabilities were hidden somehow. You are now able to see them. It's particularly true when we talk about the ‘invisible people’. Domestic violence is becoming so obvious now, too, it's something that people have been ashamed to talk about. There is a campaign that says, if you hear someone screaming, don't be afraid to invade privacy, because it might be saving someone. A major retail magazine for lower income women consumers has put a button on its site, so you can pretend that you are buying something, and then you click there, ask for help and the police will contact you.

Over the past five years we've made a lot of investments in various IT systems, despite some of those being tough investment choices. This included investing in some digital products and services, which lead to remote solutions for clients, and upgrading our whole IT stack and everybody's laptops. On the digital remote services what we've found is that some clients are saying, "Yeah, I'm ready for this," even though one of our colleagues was saying "I thought it might take three years to persuade them this was a good way of working!" Meanwhile with all our back-office processes now cloud-based, we’ve been able to work from home, supporting clients and staff. So overall, although we'd never really tested it, and culturally we may not have thought we were ready for it, our business resilience and remote working has been excellent. And we're recognizing that everything doesn't need to go back to how it was. We've identified a target that says that at least 30% of our future operations will run remotely.

We learned that everyone in the community needs a basic level of internet access, and the internet cannot be a purely privately run commodity. And then there's hardware - what about families of four locked down with only one laptop?

In any emergency, but especially if you've got COVID on top of a hurricane, you've got so many moving parts. You can't manage if you don't know where they all are: equipment, supplies, your workers and also evacuees, etc. You need a tracking and asset management system. Florida apparently has an antiquated one that’s not being used because it's not helpful. We've developed a system for our own use in emergencies. For example, when we deploy hundreds of generators and people to service those generators, parts and fuel trucks, we barcode everything and you can scan it with your smartphone and then once you do that it geo references and you can see where everything is on a map in real time. All this at your fingertips. So when you're doing briefings as a government official, or you just want to have meetings with your team and figure out what to do next, you have all this real time information. It's a real communication tool to reassure people that you're on top of this and say, "Here's what we're offering to you as citizens. Here’s where you need to go and here's where other people are.” And you can show it all on maps.

One of the biggest missions that we had over the past five weeks was setting up a data led approach to this. It now has an automated component which allows us to work with new data as it comes in, to automatically update our models of city systems and finances, SCM, HR – e.g. 'Where are the service overlays compared to outbreaks of the disease?' It's actually incredible. And that doesn't just emerge. It's on the back of two and a half years of dedicated investment in data science. A corporate data strategy for the City that everyone thought was completely boring at the time has now had to be activated. All of that infrastructure is in place and we are reaping the benefits of it in ways that are just amazing.

Normally Brazil is very bureaucratic and to access official systems you have to be registered to vote, etc. But in order to deliver its emergency cash benefits to the poor, the federal government decided to create a digital ID, which would be given to anyone with a cell phone. The big surprise has been the amount of people that actually emerged to claim this digital ID, people who have been living in informality all this time. There was a layer of invisible citizens who were not in any kind of statistics. They didn't have any social security Last week people started to say the country needs to have a plan for these people, needs to be accountable for these people.

In Italy before the pandemic nobody was producing masks. Now we produce millions, but it took weeks to convert production. If we were planning resiliently, we would make agreements with a few producers that, in time of need, they would switch production very quickly.

I think there will be a fresh focus on supply chains. People will ask, ‘Where does that product or service actually come from? How much do I trust it? How secure is that supply chain? What happens if it's cut off?’ Our work is about keeping critical infrastructure and global supply chains working. We recognize that if we can't work then that means our customers can't work. With Covid-19, we're working across the business to look at how we can accelerate what are very early days in product life cycle services to clients to test and improve them and then how we can continue to grow that. We see that being not just a one-off for this situation, but actually becoming part of our portfolio and way of working.

The thing we now realise we need to have, which we didn't before, is someone to keep a sharp eye on our large networks of suppliers, keep them updated and appropriate for likely emergencies. We used to think that if we handled one disaster, the companies we turned to then would stay on our books and we'd use them in a similar situation. But this crisis has stressed that system and we could do with managing the networks more proactively. 'Just in time' isn't enough anymore.

Worldwide, supply chains have been so severely disrupted, I think there is going to be a global re-think about what constitutes supply chain resilience and how much it matters going forward. Fundamental to that will be the distinction between supply chains that enable critical national infrastructure and those that enable normal commerce. How do cities and national governments ensure that they have the supplies they absolutely need to manage crises? Local manufacture and local supply chains may well emerge as critical once again.

In response to the 'Milan 2020 - Adaptation Plan' that we launched two weeks back, we got over 1,000 emails with suggestions and requests from the public. Many are asking how they can get more goods, services and municipal service and permits more locally in future, having to travel less from their homes. It's clear that, as global supply chains are impacted, there will be pressure to make food supply chains more local.

It’s a critical leadership task to pick up weak signals early on and assess potential risk. ‘Should we act on this or watch closely as others act on it?’ At the end of January, with so many staff members travelling for the Lunar New Year holiday, we saw considerable risk of them bringing the virus back to South-east Asia and Australia, so we insisted on quarantine once they got back and then banned international travel. We have a cultural bias toward caution and care within Arup. At that same time our Global Board was briefed by an eminent epidemiologist, who told us “This is out. It will spread round the world.” That made us sit up and we started planning to limit travel, and so on.

We need to improve the City’s capacity for risk management. We have a lot of risk management for internal procedures, but not an appropriate risk management approach for the cascade effect of the failure of key infrastructures. My own learning is that I have to push more in advance, for the City to be prepared for a crisis. Because risk management is not what you do after the crisis has happened, it is what you have done before, to be ready for the crisis. I need to argue harder for this, saying "Look, this could come, not in 20 years, but tomorrow", and be more strict about it.

What kind of pandemic task team makes best sense for us? One that includes the necessary range of skills & expertise you might need in order to make good decisions for re-orienting and keeping safe a large organization in fast-moving uncertainty. This extends beyond the health and HR experts, communicators, legal and compliance, to include the IT team and cybersecurity, etc. It doesn’t need to represent the organogram. This task team adopted four priorities:

1. Take care of our people.
2. Take care of our business.
3. We're Siemens - what do we bring to the fight? (We are a Business to Society company, solving for megatrends).
4. What do we need to be doing right now to help set up a future that's more resilient?

We cannot regard this as we would a normal portfolio or normal project, where you have a budget, a definite outcome, and your objective is to reach that outcome and spend your budget. Across all of these different planned interventions, what we’ve done is designed a plan and secured resources from Council at the outer limit of what we think is required, which is like creating a portfolio of interventions in a typical budget. Within that, though, we are utilizing a toolbox of interventions, a variable structure that responds to changes across the systems as they are required. It's not a typical structure and it's not a typical project and we need to embrace that level of complexity.

There is no time, when you're in an emergency, for people to try to build the dialogue that would enable a new way of working. It's not possible to build a Resilience team just when the emergency arrives. I think it’s pretty clear, you cannot create something from scratch at the beginning of a crisis.

The best preparation for a management team going into a crisis is for them to have already developed a high level of mutual trust. It takes specific interventions within the leadership team to get them past politeness and self-interest to an efficient place of frankly expressing their own needs and listening to the concerns and needs of other parts of the business.

The 2016-18 Cape Town drought experience allowed us to rapidly spin up an approach and a response in a matter of days and weeks that we would not have been able to do without that previous experience, which was very hard gained. At an emotional level, it has helped to know that, when there’s cause for great apprehension or trepidation, these are not unusual feelings to experience. I have a wellspring of experiences to draw from, not just mentally and managerially, but also emotionally, of what it's like to be in charge in a crisis. The same is true for my team.

We've all felt anxious, angry, sad, but we're Siemens, we have all these capabilities that the world needs right now. We have a responsibility to actually drive through and bring value. This isn't a moment to feel sorry for ourselves. The future is not to be feared. The future is ours to shape. What can I put in place so that the organization can't slide backward? It can only go forward because, like a ratchet, we've now moved the baseline. One of my biggest worries is that people will reach a point where they think “I've got to enhance business results in any way possible, at any cost.” That breaks the ratchet. We get more accomplished together than we would as individuals. This entity called a corporation can do things that no individual or small business, or even a small government can do. The power of Siemens is unique. So how are we going to channel that energy right now?

We are Italians, that is what gives me hope! We are not good in normal times, we are good in a crisis, so I think we will be dealing better than other countries. When they have chaos, they go crazy. When we have chaos, we have fun.

Our CEO wrote to all staff with an interesting approach to the issue of the social protests. “How can you be a good advocate if you're not thinking into the future? If you're only designing a bridge for today, you're not really doing your client a good service. You need to design a bridge for four decades from today.” And so his social message was basically likewise, “How can we say we're inspired by the future and we're future-ready as a company, if we're not looking at this societal issue and what needs to change? Let's design the future together, not just in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of culture. We need to be part of this."

One of the highest tasks of leadership may be to provide a narrative that describes where we are on this uncertain journey and where we must now focus our attention. e.g. ‘We’re digging in for the long haul.’ Barbara recalls the story of Captain Shackleton’s ice-bound crew in Antarctica. We realise we face a long period of danger and uncertainty. We must take what we really need from the sinking ship and leave behind a lot that once seemed important. We’ve sent some scouts out to find a vaccine but they could be gone for a year or more. We must figure out how to survive in the meantime, work out what our daily tasks, challenges and routines are going to be so that we keep our morale up and ultimately achieve our objectives.

A new member of the team joined last week, who’s normally the Oakland Tennis Centre manager but put his hand up for re-assignment in the disaster. On his first day I invited him to sit in with me on some in-person meetings in the Emergency Ops Centre. How we operate normally in the city can be a bit slow and bureaucratic, but then you get thrown into this crisis and it shakes up and accelerates bonds or emotions. He said, "In the one day I've been here, seeing everyone and how they operate and the level of sophistication and intelligence - I really want to be that. I want to live up to that." I think it is a hyper-efficient atmosphere and for the right person who wants to help, it makes you want to be better. It did it for me! You have to step up. It is a privilege to find a way to genuinely help.

You want to be part of this. And I think a part of this is also your own personal journey into the unknown. I would say having those conversations every single day with my team, we have never been a stronger team together. We have never been more thankful because it helps you as a person to go through this, and you know it will take a long time.

Over the years I’ve learned that remaining calm in a crisis and being honest and transparent with my team works best. This is my way of handling uncertainty and modelling it for my people. Treating people like grownups, able to handle uncertainty, yet needing honest interaction with their leaders.

This crisis reminds us that good leaders have experience of making tough decisions and living with the consequences. They have developed some humility about what they know and what they don't know. I think we’ve tried to be honest and we haven't shied away from some tough stuff that we're having to do. We're explaining the logic and rationale where appropriate. While people might not appreciate the message, they recognize they're not being excluded and things are being shared with them.

My style is to be open, to be able to display vulnerability, to be human. And to say when you don't know and don't have the answer. Make sure everybody has as much information as you can give them, even if you and they know that the information is incomplete for now. I'm able to just step back and be objective and not get sucked into the drama and the panic. I don't panic. I tend to find a way to be detached, look at a problem and say, "Right. We're going to calmly figure this out."

Our Mayor has always said “We need to work at what we say. We cannot promise something that we are not able to do.” He says in our meetings, "I cannot say something that I cannot deliver, I need to deliver everything, every single word that I say." So I think it's a commitment of honesty. There is a sense that the administration is serious and strong, and sometimes makes decisions that the public doesn't like, but people know they’ll go ahead with it.

Loss and real sorrow are just getting closer and closer. I think we're going to need to find ways to grieve and support one another as we go through… We aren't living in a bubble. It's a big semi-permeable membrane that surrounds all of us and we've got to acknowledge that these very human things are happening to our employees, in the midst of us keeping our business enterprise healthy and going strong.

We had a very sad milestone yesterday with our first staff member who died from COVID-19 in the city administration. They worked in one of the departments that I'm responsible for. We’ve taken all the steps that we tell everyone to follow in the public, from not just a health and safety perspective, but also an employee wellness perspective, the mental engagements, etc. But some staff have suggested we must close the entire Civic Centre. I said now is not the time to panic. There's a person, they had a name, they had a life, people knew them and there's where they worked…and now they're gone. It focuses the mind. But our job as leaders is to maintain our cool, in as much as we can. The possibility of trauma has been real for me for weeks, but it's very difficult to get everyone focused on the crisis when you are discussing theoretically what is going to happen in the future…until that day arrives, and you realize, heck, it's here!

I had a sudden serious illness at the start of the year and had to stop everything, take time out. Then, as I was starting to come back, coronavirus arrived. It's been an interesting journey, dealing with crisis both on an internal, personal level and now also on an external, societal level. I've been left with the question "What matters?" What I've discovered is that I needed to slow down a lot personally, and in that process my perceptions of some things have changed. For instance, coming back into my department I've wanted to allow my team to keep a lot of the responsibility they took on when I had to be away.  I'm listening a lot more to them, letting them lead.

I was receiving photos of staff on-site who are working almost 24/7, breaking down and extending the cremation facilities. I was excited about the fact that there is really visible progress, with people in their hazmat suits working on a public holiday so that we could be ready. So I shared these photos with my Executive Management Team, highlighting great teamwork and action. Some of them wrote back to say, "We feel a bit awkward about celebrating this, because of the connection with fatalities." And I said, "It's not the celebration of cremation facilities. It's the fact that these are our colleagues, working around the clock to make sure the City of Cape Town is ready, and they deserve to be celebrated for the immense work they are doing."

We had a board meeting yesterday and we set aside three quarters of an hour, and all we did was discuss racism. I said, "I'm not making a proposal, I'm not asking anything of you. My personal position is that I probably don't understand as much as I would like to. I'm a privileged, middle-aged white bloke brought up in a rural part of the U.K., so I haven't got any of this experience." We had a very good debate. A colleague from Malaysia, who's Chinese Malaysian, said, "There's racism in all places”. We've been very clear in saying, "Racism has no place within this firm." We're just wondering what do we do about it? If I launched something, would I actually be doing the right thing? Or am I actually making the situation worse?

Sometimes I would like a politician to say, "This is a really complex problem and we are going to get these people together to answer these three questions. We commit to coming back to you in a week's time, not necessarily with all the answers, and then we'll go from there."

This week I have a feeling, more than before, of “Where are we going, actually?” I don't know if you feel that, where are you going? Kind of more lost, at least here. I can't see a horizon right now. I can't see a pathway.

Nobody on my Executive Committee is arguing that we don’t need to let anybody go, even though there are some parts of the business that are quite busy at the moment, but we want to take the opportunity to just deal with one or two past mistakes. We've grown very quickly and maybe some of the hires haven't quite worked out the way that we wanted them to. There are some people with performance issues, so we have an opportunity to deal with that.

We just did a round of reductions, most of them furloughs. We're hoping we can bring the people back once we get more work, but truth be told, my guess is at least 20% of that team will be permanently reduced because I just don't see the likelihood of enough work coming to bring them all back, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a manager, some turnover from the lower end of the performers is naturally healthy, actually. 20 years ago, I wouldn't talk about it that way, but now I see it for what it is and it's true. We become stronger when these kinds of things happen and I view this the same way.

Before, the conversation about reducing staff numbers has been a bit more esoteric, because we've been talking about broad numbers and percentages and what does that do to the salary bill. We're now into the nitty gritty of names, where it starts to get more difficult. That's when the advocacy begins and the, "Well, I know we agreed to 10%, but I didn't really mean it," conversation. It's one of these times in the economic cycle that I find difficult. I don't think there are many people who would relish doing what we're doing at the moment. But we'll just work through it.

In these times it feels important as a leader to remember that everybody is a human being. Connecting with people at a personal level is so important and can actually make difficult conversations easier, rather than harder.  When you have to have a difficult conversation with someone I believe its important that people feel “seen” as an individual. No one gets up in the morning looking forward to difficult conversations, all you can do is your best. So, you might be saying, “We're going to have to make some redundancies.” If I've really seen you beforehand, then people might not feel they’re just a name on a spreadsheet and you don’t care about them as a person.

What's been really crystallized for me is that the most important thing I've learned to do - and I enjoy doing it - is to let others lead, to recognize that, especially at times like this, people want to step up, they want to be given more to do - so let it go.

If you're really about getting work done, you don't have to get the praise. We want people to get tested but it doesn't have to be the City that's leading the charge. We're not the experts. So we’ve said to the County, "You either need to give us some money to operate and expand these test sites or you need to help us understand what your long term strategy is. Because if the City sites shut down, we are going to rely fully on you the County to help us meet the goals for testing per population." It's going to be an interesting shift for us, as the City, because I know I'm ready, and I’m hoping our political leadership is ready to hand to County what’s been an excellent City story of setting up and operating test sites.

Transformation isn’t really about you and me in our age group. It's about how proactive the middle and the younger generation is going to be. Yes, I'm in power, I can yield a lot of influence and that's nice. But we who are in those positions can actually have a better impact by stepping aside and empowering other people that come behind us. I need to figure out who in that middle and younger generation in the company I need to focus on, doing everything I can to give them some power. I need to set up the right people in the right positions and help them, so they're effective; and then move aside and let them do it.

Early in my career, I had to get out of government because I just couldn't tolerate the bureaucracy. I just wanted to do the good stuff and get it done and not have to deal with all the internal politics. Now, I'm in a position where I'm a bit more patient, still have little tolerance for it, but actually know how to maneuver more too. I'm senior enough that I actually can influence things a fair amount.

It always has been difficult for me personally to recognize someone whose authority over me is just because they got a political position. Sometimes they don’t have the same qualifications that I have – and they are normally men. I started to train myself to be more humble and to try to identify what are the qualities that that person might have, understand why that person is there and work out how I could manage down my ego, my intellectual ego, so that I can connect with that person.

I have faith in my leadership that we can get there. I know it's just going to take some massaging and conversation. And it's harder to do on email or in these quick online meetings. So I am trying to figure out how to write it out and really gel it into a way that folks are getting the message.

We read a lot of tea leaves: “The board won't approve if…” or “The board won't do this if…” or “Our clients won't borrow if we do that.” So we always pull up short by ourselves. Shouldn't we in some cases try and fail? And see exactly how far we can get? And learn by doing?

In a crisis, paradoxically, many people will respond best if you give them really hard problems to solve. This may be particularly true of engineers and technically minded people, but possibly many others. It can channel adrenalin, provide a sense of clear purpose and reduce anxiety. Crises can draw out inspiring responses from one’s people. Devote resources to harvesting and sharing these in real time, particularly internally.

We are doing everything we can to process and broadcast messages of support, messages of appreciation for all of our staff members, and amplifying their stories and interactions and trying as much as we can to make sure that they get what they need.

Our hardest challenge currently is future planning – it’s like the ‘Phoney War’ in 1939, when we were at war but not much was happening. We’ve just had a really good month, revenue-wise, but there are clearly some sectors that are completely flat. And we’re sure it’s going to get tougher generally, but it’s so hard to plan with confidence. In normal times this kind of buoyant revenue picture would have us wondering about recruiting more staff – but we’re absolutely not there yet.

I don't doubt that our systems are going to come under strain, they will. But in as much as we can be prepared for dealing with the pandemic at the operational and health level, I think we are there now, and it's going to come. Whether we are in hard lockdown or not, that moment will arrive. The consequences of the lockdown in terms of food security, in terms of economic and social security are so dire that they create compound problems that just make our response that much harder. From my engagement with the leadership, my sense is that we need to get into it and deal with what comes, without pretending that we can defer this pain, because it's just not possible. Those are very harsh calculations to make, but it would seem to me that they are responsible and mature leadership responses.

How to manage the gradual reopening of our offices? There is a lot of sophistication in reopening successfully. We’re polling our staff for their feelings and expectations. The added complexity of the patchwork of different states' approaches to the reopening. And of the various landlords whose office space we rent - what will their approach be? It really matters to staff to be communicated with often by management, and with a caring approach to their needs. Our plan has been to provide guidelines to staff but then allow them to respond to specific circumstances as they see fit, within some broad guidelines that have been set based on government frameworks - e.g. getting on public transport may be challenging, so allow continued work from home and off-peak commuting. And it was especially tough early on when PPE wasn’t available, yet clients wanted them to go to a site – we do not force those who are uncomfortable to do so.

What the community want, I think, is not really to go back to normal life, but to get back some meaning, to let the puppies play together. But I think that people want to know the rules in advance. So what is important is that we get the rules for the Phase Two, not the day before, but some days in advance, so people can be prepared. At the same time some are asking "Must I go back to work for my boss's profit or can I take care of my health?”

We’re working out when and how we will re-open our own offices and helping clients with re-starting their operations in large buildings. It’s a complex challenge and pivots around the issue of trust. Staff need to trust that coming back to the office won’t put them in harm’s way, either using public transport or when they get to the building or a client’s site. In all cases, we’re finding that communicating openly with staff and asking their views is both much welcomed and yields useful information.

We're making sure that office re-opening is not being handled as just any other office related activity that the office administrator would do, like ordering paper, or taking care of the copiers. This is much more important, so corporate leadership has asked the operational managers resident in the offices to take a leading role as to coordinating amongst those who want to come into the office, when they come into the office, tracking how they're doing in the office, etc.

As we move into the peak fatalities period, I’m comforted that we’ve now got our temporary morgue and the city’s 48 funeral businesses have started using the WhatsApp group we set up, sending us daily data about bodies they are handling. This is giving us a layer of more timely and reliable data than what we’re getting from the clinically-driven Provincial Government models, where a chronic delay in test results renders much of the data meaningless. It’s that test delay that stops funeral businesses from processing bodies as they must await a Covid result, and hence the need for the temporary morgue to provide that additional storage.

Something I thought was very obvious turned out not to be so to government officials. We regularly do digital mapping, but for them that was a game changer. The moment city officials started looking at the mapping exercise and saw they could update details into that in real time, they realized it would actually help them in terms of communicating better to stakeholders, doing proper analysis and managing resources.

Everyone's obsessed with the numbers of people getting tested, and I get it, but zeroing in on the number and not on the ‘who’ is how you get people left behind. We have a huge screen in the Emergency Operations Center and our leadership want to see numbers every day of who's been tested. But it’s not just the numbers of people being tested, it’s also figuring out where they're coming from or what their race ethnicity is, given that the highest vulnerability is in the poorest areas of the city.

The thing we've gotten right is this idea that we're in a period of rapid change. Stop thinking about change as something we're going to get through, but something that we have to master, that we have to be good at. I'm beginning to hear a couple people go, "I'm tired." I'm thinking, "If you're not exhilarated by this kind of change, then you may not be the right person for the role that we've got you in. Maybe we need to look at a different role if you find this exhausting." My feeling is, get yourself in the mindset that, "This is normal. This isn't strenuous. It's not exhausting.” I think differently now. My imagination is a lot more lively at moments like this.

When Covid hit the world there was a lot of unknowing, but because it's now been hitting so many parts of the world there's a trend that you kind of know how to deal with it. But how do we now go from being more or less paralyzed with Covid, to knowing how we navigate it, in an environment where our partners’ economies are continually opening up, closing down, opening up, closing down? I'm a person who loves planning. I love to know what we are doing in the next half year. This is now super difficult. You can't plan anything. You can only take one day at a time.

The renewed lockdown of Melbourne affects a lot of our staff. The general view is quite dispiriting. People feel very deflated. I think there's a lot of the people who have been doing it tough and they were just sensing some relaxation, kids going back to school, thank goodness for that. And now they are having to do it all over again. I think that's hitting some people quite hard. So the work that we've been doing over the last several months around people's wellbeing and personal comfort, we're going to have to redouble all those efforts.

We're still at low infection numbers for Siemens but we're seeing an uptick and we're seeing more frequent closure of facilities. So every time we've got to take a factory down for a shift or a day, that's an impact to the business. I’m saying, “Let's start managing the whole picture, not just focusing on how many sick days our staff are allowed and thinking, ‘That's all we can afford.’ Could you pay somebody to stay home if you knew that otherwise you'd have to shut down the site?” Simple math.

We have a contingency plan to help the private funeral home industry to cope. It relies on a number of drivers to drive repurposed City vehicles to take bodies to where they need to go. We have the vehicles, we have the drivers, who are currently under-utilized because of our working practices at the moment. The problem is getting the drivers to agree to take the bodies, because it's one thing to be moving documents from one city building to another but it's another thing to deal psychologically with taking a body. We always knew we would hit this constraint, but we're trying to work through it. I think we have a viable incentive scheme, which is basically a form of risk pay that we will be willing to give the drivers. I fully believe in asking people to go above and beyond, but I do understand that asking someone to go somewhere to pick up a dead body who has never done it before, that is a bit more than saying, “Can you work a few more hours after five o'clock each day?”

I think Brazilian society is very competitive, even though some people assume we’re more ‘collective’ because we like to live and gather in large groups. But then in the very first moment of this crisis people were very afraid because they didn't know what was going on, yet there was a willingness to help, to collaborate somehow. It was very positive. We could also see this in big companies, even though philanthropy is not as strong in Brazil as in other countries. It was quite powerful. Some very rich people start to organize a movement, organising big companies and wealthy individuals to get together to donate.

To address some historic difficulties in collaborating with Alameda County my team and I have been actively seeking their involvement and showing appreciation for everything they do of a collaborative nature. Even in the just last week the synergy has been different...they're coming to the table more.

I've been working deeply with provincial colleagues and city colleagues on what our approach is to the ‘hot-spot’ areas, which are now our strategic focus. You could boil it down to an intensification of our public health measures in those areas and our resource allocation. But it was quite gratifying to see that, given the time we had spent to get the planning parameters right for general service responses, we are now able to activate them to say, "Deploy in this area." What the payoffs will be remains to be seen, but at least there is good coordination within government and we’re leading thematically and not just across sectors.

What we’ve learned in the first phase is that people were willing to collaborate. For this city and this state, this is very important because politics always gets in the way of things. Politicians are always putting their own before the public’s interest. But this time was totally different. What we saw here was a civics lesson. I hope that the collaboration continues as we reinvent how we manage the city, manage business and manage our lives.

I think during these months, a lot of trust building has happened between governments, citizens, and the corporates. I think the way corporates are functioning will drastically change over time. Since a lot of these corporates and other entities, like educational institutes, were involved in supporting the city, they will play a very active role once the entire curve is flattened and the situation is completely under control. They will actively get involved, especially in aspects related to public health and sanitation. I think the next time something like this unfortunately happens, the government will know the players, and which ones were active.

One change that I hope will last is the state government and the municipalities collaborating a lot. The municipalities are creating lots of protocols for each sector and each activity. But then the governor and the mayor put together the teams to work on this, so the city and the state will announce one single protocol, so as not to confuse people. And both teams are working on the economy as well, to reduce the number of different taxes and make things easier for business. And that’s more than collaborating, it's actually working together. So I think this is very radical.

Crises are best managed by the people who are closest to the action. In the US we have actually gone for hyper-local empowerment. You heard the President say, "Hey, governors, this is yours to go solve." And then of course governors were dealing with city managers. Often the true nature of a crisis is hyper-local, so people close to it solve it, but this is more, "Who am I going to blame for the health crisis and the economic crisis?" It makes you wonder what the appropriate response would be.

When we present to the Provincial government on certain initiatives, it's almost as if they can’t comprehend that the City would be thinking innovatively about something – it doesn't compute. It's like a cognitive bias, perhaps an institutional one. I've certainly believed for so long that cities are where so much attention, public policy, and effort happens. But the Provincial and National government just have no way to register an innovation that comes from the City, to understand that this is something that a local government could do or think about. I do have a very rich working relationship with many provincial colleagues, and it does not impede my relationships or my work, but this is a deeper reflection about the manner of cooperative governance.