As Module 2 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry draws to a close, memories of that turbulent time have been revived. It’s only been three years since the height of the pandemic, and at the time, it felt like things would never be the same again.
To the many who lost loved ones, livelihoods or their health due to the pandemic, this is undoubtedly true. But on a societal level, the much talked about ‘new normal’ feels a lot like the old normal. Social distancing has gone. Crowded, high-volume events are back. Mask-wearing is minimal. It feels as if we were so desperate to be out of the pandemic that we stopped talking about it.
Lessons to be learned from Covid
In some ways this is healthy. It doesn’t necessarily serve us to live in the past. Distance can be useful. I remember going to a Museums Association conference session in October 2011 where the London riots were being discussed. One museum professional said that they were actively collecting items from the recent riots. However, they wouldn’t even think about trying to interpret them for at least a decade.
They were only now, he explained, starting to interpret material from the Brixton riots in the 1980s. We need distance to properly analyse and to look at an issue with more objective eyes. Distance aids understanding.
But if we are now starting to analyse and understand lessons from the pandemic on a national level, as Baroness Hallett is doing in the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, we must do so on a sector level as well.
Perhaps three years doesn’t feel like long enough; perhaps we’re still unwilling to relive the pain. But just as there are national-level actions around governance, decision-making, communication and procurement that have arisen from the Inquiry, there were lessons learned during the pandemic for museums and visitor attractions too. How long are we comfortable with waiting before these actions are addressed?
Watching the Inquiry sessions has encouraged me to revisit a piece of research I carried out during the pandemic. This assessed how museums and heritage sites dealt with the Covid crisis. Now, three years later, I’m asking: are we any better prepared now?
How prepared were you for crisis?
Despite the odd peeling and ignored social distancing sign, most visitor attractions have, broadly speaking, gone back to normal after the pandemic.
Some took the opportunity to embrace timed ticketing. Some have retained some useful hygiene measures such as ticket desk screens and hand sanitising units. However, many of these have disappeared too.
Many were impacted on a financial level, and dramatically restructured or even closed. But many have built back. Visitor numbers are not where they were in 2019, but they’re not far off. Social distancing measures have all but disappeared. One-way systems have been returned to normal. Room guides and handling objects have reappeared.
But have our crisis management habits returned too? In 2020, I conducted a survey of museum and heritage site staff, Culture in Crisis. This explored how prepared institutions had been before the pandemic. I asked people to rate their preparedness on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being not at all prepared). The average score was 10. 29% of responders said either that their organisation did not have an emergency plan/business continuity plan before the pandemic, or that they were unaware of it if they did. In the plans themselves, 48% said a pandemic was not included in the plan.
As a result, I prepared a report that made some key recommendations. One of these was to review crisis management and business continuity plans so that they were better shaped to cope with crises that were different to the ones that could easily be predicted. Fires and floods are short sharp events with a clearly defined emergency period. The pandemic wasn’t that.
So, has your organisation reviewed its crisis management plans to cope with different shapes of crisis? If not, you can find templates and other useful information on my blog.
The importance of scenario-based training
In his evidence to the Inquiry, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke about a government training scenario called Exercise Nimbus. This took place in February 2020.
Exercise Nimbus was designed to prepare the Cabinet and other government officials for the crisis the oncoming pandemic would create. Although Hancock criticised some aspects of the exercise, for example, that it was too focused on managing deaths and not enough on controlling the spread of the virus, he did admit that some key learning came out of the exercise. Primarily, the Government could not allow the NHS to become overwhelmed.
This example from the Covid Inquiry shows that ‘tabletop’ exercises are only as good as the parameters they are based on, but that important lessons can emerge even if other aspects are missed.
If Exercise Nimbus fell short of the mark, consider that in the Culture in Crisis survey, 86% said they had never done any live training (e.g. incident management exercise, role-playing or ‘tabletop’ exercises regarding crisis managing through a pandemic). Is this something that, since the pandemic, your organisation has undertaken? If not, you can find example scenarios to discuss with your team on my blog.
Leadership and communication
One of the most common threads in the Inquiry has been issues caused by the different enquiries at the top of decision-making in the UK. In other words, issues of leadership and communication. Matt Hancock claimed that former No.10 advisor Dominic Cummings had created a “toxic culture” at the heart of Government which made communication difficult. Cummings himself testified that he regarded the decision-making machine of the Cabinet Office as a “dumpster fire”.
Internal communications in Government therefore impacted the clarity and effectiveness of external messaging. Indeed, my interviews of managers at museums and heritage sites as part of my research revealed concerns over internal communication being more at the fore than external communication. One participant referenced confusing messaging around furlough. Another worried that they didn’t have the time or resources to explain the situation clearly to staff.
Yet, themes of strong leadership also came through in the research, particularly around visibility, authenticity and clear decision-making. In the end, I concluded that “an organisation that communicates well during normal times is more likely to communicate well in crisis”.
This goes some way to explaining what was happening at No. 10 during the pandemic but also provides an impetus for organisations to get their house in order during the good times so that processes and channels are in place when we need them.
Has your organisation changed its communication style since the pandemic? For inspiration, you can read my research on leadership and communication.
Lessons from Covid: organisations should always be learning
Just as the existence of a Government Inquiry isn’t itself an indictment of how the UK handled the Covid pandemic, learning from prior events should be read as a gift rather than a threat. Author Patrick Lagadec famously referred to crisis as “an abrupt and brutal audit”, underlining the opportunity to learn and plan for the future. This is exactly why I advocate building reflection exercises into our crisis management plans.
So, when faced with a reflection exercise, we can go one of two ways. We can go down the route of some of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry testimonials and obfuscate, shift blame and pretend we’ve lost our Whatsapp messages, or we can learn genuine lessons, use those lessons to update our operations and behaviours and be much better prepared when the next pandemic comes around.
