Typically, a government’s response to a pandemic is to deal with the public health emergency immediately. There are many measures that can be implemented, including doubling down on quarantines, restricting gatherings and movement, border controls and hygiene regulations, mass testing and contact tracing. But many of these necessary actions to shut down the pandemic also shut down economic activity, particularly in sectors like tourism, food and hospitality, and aviation.

In Asia, the trend has been to prioritize public health over the economy. Here in Hong Kong, as in many other Asian countries, we have zero tolerance for COVID-19 infection–test positive, and you are sent straight to hospital. Most countries in Asia have imposed stringent border controls alongside mandatory 14 day quarantines. Meanwhile, citizens have been asked to contribute to the effort by wearing masks in public, social distancing and hand-washing, and staying at home whenever possible. (This is no small sacrifice in a city like Hong Kong, where a family home is often only 300-400 square feet.)

In Hong Kong, we have been influenced by the work done by the COVID-19 response team at Imperial College, London, who have come up with the “suppress and lift” concept. This involves slowing the virus spread by implementing public health measures that are alternately relaxed and tightened, depending on fluctuations in the actual conditions. This method is flexible, and helps avoid prolonged economic lockdowns. And by allowing for breaks in social restrictions it also recognizes that maintaining public morale is a crucial component of public health.

If we reframe the problem as a social system crisis and expand the diversity of voices as we search for creative solutions to this most difficult situation, we open up the possibility that aggregating and leveraging our collective intelligence might accelerate our path to a holistic solution that addresses and balances the many concurrent dimensions of what may be the most challenging social system crisis of our lifetime.

The closest business analogy is a firm with a broken business model that is also running out of cash. Fixing the business model will take time: a cash shortage will kill much quicker. The cash problem demands fast, top-down decisions backed by draconian discipline and excellent data. Only then will the enterprise have the time to develop an adaptive response and come up with a new business model.

We see elements of this “both…and” response (famously dubbed “The Hammer and the Dance” ) in the effective handling of the pandemic. At the beginning of the outbreak, before any data, astute leaders realized that a quick response was needed. They conducted an “analogical inquiry”, using the liberal arts. They consulted historians who had studied the Spanish flu of 1918. Some searched for similarities between the virus and other coronaviruses like SARS. Others read Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. The result was lockdowns and “social distancing” that bought enough time for data to become available and knowledge about the virus to accumulate. This would allow them to develop more differentiated, adaptive response that would take account of local circumstances. Now they could claim to be “driven by science” and using “evidence-based strategies”. But it couldn’t start that way: in the beginning, when we faced uncertainty and not just risk, it took (and will still take) good judgment and leadership everywhere.