What happens when our preparedness plans fail to match the models we’ve based them on?
In a recent post on Monocle, Finnish correspondent Petri Burtsoff reported on a recent incident where a Ukrainian drone flew through Finnish airspace undetected en route to Russia (they crashed along the way). The article comments on the how Finland, long known as among the most prepared countries in Europe for defence, somehow missed this wayward drone. Burtsoff asks:
The practical question is obvious enough. How does an aircraft linked to an active war pass through the skies of one of Europe’s most militarised border states without interception?
The article goes on to point out how Finland — and Europe more broadly — have relied on models of readiness based on often outdated visual cues. These include fighter jets, artillery systems, and missile batteries. These are the visual representations of what it means to be prepared. But as we’ve seen in the Iran war with the United States, small, portable tools can overwhelm and foil attacks from highly sophisticated, technologically superior weapons at a fraction of the cost.
Burtsoff concludes with two quotes worthy of consideration for health systems seeking to understand and respond to the next threats:
Even serious countries can prepare for the wrong version of the next war.
The real lesson here is not that Finland has failed. It is that preparedness cannot be treated as a finished project.
A question worth asking: how does this mirror our preparedness in healthcare and public health?
No One Had This On Their Bingo Card
All we need to do is go back to March, 2020 to see where this kind of thinking is on display. As COVID-19 transformed from a local outbreak to a global pandemic, public health professionals worldwide were reviewing their playbooks for how to address the consequences of the pandemic at the local, regional, and national levels. Time again, public health leaders were telling me (in private) that most of the models they had prepared for suggested that something like COVID was likely to last two to three months with a long tail winding down.
Instead, we had waves of COVID mutations, differences in severity and scope, the introduction of vaccines, and a patchwork of policies and practices that often countered one another. It was a mess and it lasted for years. The pandemic emergency period only wound down in 2023 and 2024. By then, public health workers were exhausted, health leaders often vilified or ignored, and a healthcare system looking to “just get on with it”.
Who saw the massive backlash against vaccines coming? (Who saw the vaccines being deployed as quickly and effectively as they were?) Who saw the diverse ways local, national, and even health institutions, would deal with the causes and consequences of different policies? Did anyone expect the disruption on worklife and how the lingering effects on culture, technology, and remote work has shaped not only where we work, but how we related to work and each other?
Think back to the COVID pandemic and remember all of the different phases, stages, decisions, and activities and it’s almost baffling to believe we lived through that.
The link between the COVID response and the undetected Ukranian drone on Finnish territory is that our preparedness models are incomplete. We can’t, as Petri Burtsoff writes, treat our preparedness plans as finished products.
Strategy Amidst Complexity
The traditional model of strategy mirrors what we see in evaluation, too — take a linear, stepwise plot of goals, activities, and expected outcomes and put them together into a roadmap. Tie it up, set it and execute the plan as described. This approach makes the critical assumption that resources, context, and feedback loops are consistent, predictable, and controllable. There are times where that can work, but for much of what we see in healthcare and public health, it’s something else entirely.
Yes, we do have things that create levels of confidence and stability like physical infrastructure, labour agreements, and technological resources. But the engagement of the public, health human resources, funding from government sources and benefactors, and the risk and threat profiles (e.g., viruses, weather or climate factors, special events) are much more variable. Yet, it’s not just the variability of these different factors, but their intersection that matters. The relationships within and between these variables are what contribute to the level of complexity that the system is engaged with.
Complex systems can be affected in subtle and profound ways by disparate, distal activities. The war in Iran, for example, is causing wild swings in energy prices, which is affecting everything from product and supply costs to food (via fertilizer costs and availability and transportation) to people’s investment portfolios, including those held by the hospital or care centre.
These many changes require strategic plans that are fundamentally adaptive, and evaluation models that are tied into them to provide rapid, ongoing, and actionable feedback. Sensemaking can’t be considered a luxury, but a necessary part of the entire process. These all have to be implementated by design, not happenstance. It can’t be assumed that staff and leadership teams will do this naturally or find the time. As Bahar Karimi writes in the Longwood’s eLetter, strategic thinking has be supported by organizational design. It can’t be left to chance.
Nor can we expect leaders to do this without support and the systems necessary to do it with their teams.
Complexity requires feedback, attention, sensemaking, diversity of perspectives, and systems that recognize this in shaping the directions and tactical flexibility that the rapid changes and dynamic set of relations we find in health contexts. If you’re not creating strategic plans and systems that reflect this, you’re not enabling your organization to do what it can with what it has. We will, much like Finland did with its defensive preparations, find ourselves questioning what we’re doing.
But like Finland, we can see our preparedness as an active journey, not a final destination. But first, we have to see what we might not see right now. Look beyond the shore.
Image credits: Datingscout on Unsplash and Mats Havia on Unsplash