I live in a 12-person community house in SF. We bought extra food and supplies a few weeks ago, made a written quarantine plan about two weeks ago, and pulled the trigger on our first level of quarantine last week.
Most of us are lucky we can work from home; another handful work without being around other people, and one helped persuade her work (with lots of kids) to cancel events and end the semester early.
We have been going outside but not to events, restaurants or being around other people. I went grocery shopping today and used gloves. We put a hygiene station at the door where people can sanitize their hands and wipe down their phones upon entry. We bought a LOT more soap.
We are normally a house that makes all decisions by proposals, voting, discussion, delegation, and consensus on high priority issues like values and mediation. We run monthly house meetings where we decide on everything from the food plan to buying a hot tub.
But voting and consensus are too slow to respond to Corona, so we’re switching to something new tonight.
We’re appointing Czars—Procurement Czar, Medical Czar, Quarantine Czar etc. Each Czar has complete authority to make decision about their corona-domain.
We’re appointing Czars—Procurement Czar, Medical Czar, Quarantine Czar etc. Each Czar has complete authority to make decision about their corona-domain.
It is admittedly, scary to entrust my housemate to deciding how to keep us healthy in the event someone gets sick or decide when to move to different types of quarantine.
But it turns out trusting people entirely is the fastest collective decision making strategy now.
But it turns out trusting people entirely is the fastest collective decision making strategy now.
We will see how this goes; we can vote to remove an individual Czar or to re-evaluate the whole Czar system. But we can’t be duplicating work, and there’s a lot to do.
This ‘dictatorship in a crisis, democracy in peacetime’ structure is inspired by Forrest Landry’s paper on small-group dynamics.
magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/sgr…
magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/sgr…
I should also add that by far and away the mst important thing I have been doing personally has been what I think might be called ‘coalition-building’ or simply old-fashioned persuasion within the house.
Knowing what everyone’s feelings and beliefs were about the threat, patiently discussing info like the death rate, infection rate, containment efforts. Pushing back against people staking their whole plan on hoping something would come true (like covid going away in warm weather)
I’m in a group chat for household prep, and getting everyone on the same page re: how much to prepare or care seems far and above the most difficult step in being prepared, particularly for big households full of adults. You need to be united.
I’m now more grateful and admiring of the work of policymakers, CEOs, and anyone whose job involves the bullshit phrase ‘stakeholder management’.
It could be life or death in millions of households worldwide.
It could be life or death in millions of households worldwide.
