Happy Thursday everyone,
After taking a week off New Maps to reflect, rest and recharge, I’m back at it.
Today, we’re connecting the dots of New Maps #1-8. Because there’s a consistent theme at play across topics as diverse as our hospital system, middle class, level of trust in each other, and our learnings from SARS
It’s all about how our individual maps combine to form collective maps. Let’s dive in.
-Kapil
There’s a simple question at the heart of the New Maps series: how well have we been doing at making decisions together?
On the eve of COVID-19, the state of our world was worrying:
Our hospital system was near breaking. Most hospitals have been operating at over 100% capacity every single day.
Our middle class was financially under-water. They had barely any savings, even after a decade of economic growth.
Experts had written detailed reports about SARS, yet we hadn’t heeded all their advice.
Half the country didn’t trust business or government to ‘do the right thing’. A huge ‘trust gap’ had opened up based on your relative wealth.
And Toronto (and most major western cities) had been separating into neighbourhoods based on income level – threatening the very kind of opportunity at the foundation of the Canadian Dream.
COVID-19 has magnified these fault lines and accelerated these trends.
Hospitals had to go into emergency mode because they had no slack capacity. The government had to urgently stabilize middle-class families because many had no savings to weather a lockdown. Our emergency response to COVID-19 didn’t take into account all our learnings from SARS. And COVID-19 has struck neighbourhoods based on their income level.
Almost none of us requested this specific state of affairs. Many readers of this newsletter have expressed surprise about the topics I’ve covered.
Yet at the same time, the decisions that led to this state of affairs were made by all of us.
We collectively determine how our politics functions. And we collectively determine how our business community functions.
It feels like a paradox. We collectively decide how these systems function. Yet, most of us aren’t huge fans of our collective decisions.
This is the idea behind New Maps. By looking at the maps we’ve been using to navigate to this moment, and understanding how they’ve led us astray, that we can build better maps for the future.
And it all comes down to collective decision making
We don’t often think in terms of collective decisions. We tend think about our own individual decisions – the things that are firmly within our own control.
But the sum total of our individual decisions is a collective decision.
These collective decisions form a map we use to navigate our journey together. If we want to build a better collective map for the future, we really need to think about the decisions we’re making as individuals. Our individual maps.
How do our individual maps need to change? These last three months provide a great example.
As COVID-19 struck, we were faced with a huge collective action problem. That is, a situation in which everyone needed to act together.
Collective action problems are really, really hard to solve. Climate change is a great example. In order to prevent large-scale climate change, every country needs to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, it’s much easier for any single country to not make these changes and free ride on the efforts of everyone else. As a result, many countries aren’t committed and collective action stalls.
But that didn’t happen during COVID-19. It didn’t happen because we all made the right individual decisions – even if those individual decisions cost us.
A restauranteur has suffered far more economic damage during COVID-19 than a teacher. Yet both decided to stay at home. Some of this was directed by our government. But as the economy opens we’re seeing some (not all, but some) businesses choose to re-open slower. They’ve chosen to make less money in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
In this pandemic, our individual decisions have connected together to form a very powerful collective decision.
How do we take this energy and harness it to make better collective decisions in the future?
It starts by realizing that many of our collective decisions happen bit-by-bit.
There’s a common story to all the topics we’ve explored together. It’s not like we were presented with two buttons to press, one that would lead to today’s situation, and one that would lead to a better outcome. It’s not like we had the opportunity to look at both options, and then decide.
These decisions aren’t one big decision. They’re a series of large and small decisions. As large as how we all vote in an election and where we choose to live. And as small as the kinds of products we buy.
Better collective decisions aren’t about making one individual decision differently. They’re about making a whole bunch of individual decisions differently.
It would be much easier if there was a button to press. But instead, it’s a series of small, individual decisions that sometimes don’t even seem connected to these larger issues.
How do we pay more attention to our individual decisions, and see how they connect to our larger collective decisions?
I think the answer revolves around creating space for awareness and education in our day-to-day lives.
That was my goal in writing this series of articles. Maybe you’ve reflected on the state of our health care system, and want to vote for a party that will direct more money into health care. Or, maybe you’ve reflected on the state of trust in our country and want the organization you work for to take more proactive steps to build trust.
In my spare time, I co-lead TEDxToronto, our city’s local ‘TED Talks’ event. TED is a global movement founded on the belief that encountering new ideas is critical to our individual and collective growth. I’ve learned a lot from my exposure to the TED community.
In order to make different decisions, we need a mechanism in our daily lives that allows us to encounter new ideas. To allow us to zoom out of our day-to-day and see how our individual decisions connect into these large systems. To allow us to pause from the daily grind and reflect.
It’s one thing to follow breaking news. It’s another thing to encounter media that helps explain that news – the forces underneath those headlines, and your own agency in shaping them.
We’re seeing this kind of education happen all around us as a result of the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This movement has inspired people to dig beyond the headlines and learn about the Black experience in North America.
In order to make better individual decisions, we need the time, space, and willingness to learn about the forces shaping our world.
This isn’t an easy path, though. Let’s go back to our pandemic lockdown. For the restauranteur, the right collective decision is to re-open slowly and carefully. But a decision that causes less economic pain would be to re-open as quickly as possible. Individual benefit and collective harm.
There are many cases where producing a better collective decision seems to require some individuals to decide to be worse off.
For example: in order to build the transit we so desperately need in Toronto, someone’s going to have to pay for it.
Another example: in order to build the housing we need to enable a realistic shot at property ownership for the next generation, some people are going to have to see the character of their neighbourhoods change.
But does this make some people worse off?
Let’s step back a bit. Is someone truly worse off if everyone has better access to transit and the opportunity that comes along with it? Is someone truly worse off if the next generation of Torontonians has access to affordable housing?
The collective maps we used to navigate the last decade led us to a worrying state of affairs on the eve of COVID-19. To build better collective maps for our future, we need to examine our own individual maps – our own individual decisions.
To do this, we all need the space in our lives to zoom out of the day-to-day, encounter new ideas, and see how our individual decisions are reflected in the larger whole. The larger ‘us’.
As in ‘all of us’.
As in, ‘all of us, in this together’.
Who is your ‘us’?
And, what do we gain by drawing this circle wider, and wider, including not only our close relations, but also the broader ‘us’ - those that we may never meet in our lives, but whom we share our city, province and country with.