COVID-19's LEGACY

[Published on Newsmax]

COVID-19 is the Earth’s first shared disruptive event since World War II.

There have been collective experiences that were noteworthy: the Kennedy assassination, Moon Landing, 9-11 attacks.  Humans observed and reacted, but were not all individually impacted or forced into new behavior.

COVID-19 will eventually burn itself out.  It will remain a threat until a viable vaccine is found. It will lurk like other diseases, waiting to sicken and kill, but not on its current global scale.

During the current outbreak, every person, in every country, is having to change everything.  The scope is vast.  What and where we eat.  What, when, and where we work.  What we wear. How we shop. How we operate as a family unit.  How we practice our religion (Mecca, Jerusalem, Vatican all shuttered).  How we entertain ourselves. How we interact with friends and associates.  Even the elimination of the Western handshake. This quaint custom began as ancient warriors offered their right hand to prove they were not carrying a weapon and meant no harm.

What happens next can be predicted.

Futurists explain it as the “adjacent possible”.  Stuart Kauffman coined the phrase for evolutionary biology, and Steven Johnson applied it to business and technology in his 2010 pivotal work, “Where Good Ideas Come From”.

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

There are “adjacent possibles” being dramatically accelerated by COVID-19.

The history of work is about to come full circle.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution work was home-based.  The demands of mass production required massing the workforce.  Workers and their families had to congregate in large numbers in factory towns and enlarged cities.  The digital age promised to return the workforce back to the home, or at least to smaller communities. 

Karl Erik Sveiby’s 1997 epiphany, “The New Organizational Wealth”, defined the dawning era of knowledge workers and predicted the vast wealth about to be generated from aggregating data and communication.  He hinted at a world filled with Google, Facebook, and Twitter billionaires.

Returning to home-based, community based, work promised reduced emissions, revitalized families and neighborhoods, and eliminating the stress of commuting.  These promises ran aground on the entrenched “command and control” management culture.  Managers and supervisors held onto old ways, assuming that workers were productive only when they remained under their watchful eye. Workers were part of the machine, as starkly portrayed in movies like “Metropolis” and “Modern Times”. The “white collar” office worker was also considered a cog in larger enterprises. William H. Whyte’s 1956 book, “The Organization Man” defined the soul crushing world of pecking orders and petty turf warfare. 

Cogs in greater efforts were second nature for many of the veterans of World War II and the Korean War.  They survived because the machinery of armed conflict, and its rigid command structure, served them well.  The shift to similar peacetime operations was an easy one.  However, by the 1980s management dogma borne from interchangeable parts and mass production was under assault.  More agile entrepreneurs and their start-up companies proliferated like small mammals scurrying among dinosaurs. 

As 21^st Century technology launched new ways to work, supervisors presiding over “cube lands” filled with people staring at computer screens remained the norm, not the exception.  For all the rhetoric and policies supporting flextime and work from home, the daily reality remained - legions of employees fighting their way through rush hour to sit in meetings that could be virtual while taking calls and interacting with screens that they could do anywhere.

COVID-19 is changing that.  Future aggregating of the workforce will be virtual.  We are seeing the end of 19^th Century work habits before our very eyes.

Education was designed to prepare children to be cogs in the machine - aggregating them at a set time and place.  Learning from a leader/teacher from standardized material to prepare for standardized tests are legacies of the Industrial Revolution.  Like the workforce innovators, homeschoolers, Khan Academy, American Public University, and countless other learning resources are smashing the 19^th Century education model.  Innovation has been hampered by unions, politics, and parents locked into their commute. 

COVID-19 is changing that.  Future learning will be a mix of collective and individual.  There is no going back.

The most impactful and positive impact of COVID-19 is the family unit returning to its pre-Industrial setting.  Pre-Pandemic, most families spent only 3-4 waking hours together during the work week.  Self-isolation may strain some relationships with 24-7 interactions, but many more will be strengthened.  Stronger families, acquiring and adding value on their own terms, is a game changer with decades of ramifications

BRIDGE TO OUR FUTURE

Hall Rifle Works, Harpers Ferry

Published on Newsmax and the Washington Examiner.

In an era when America’s history is being erased and its monuments are being removed, a group of young political leaders did something meaningful.

West Virginia State Senator Patricia Rucker, and WV Delegates Jill Upson and Riley Moore, made sure a bridge commemorates the person whose actions span the ages.

John Hancock Hall was the person who perfected interchangeable parts. His accomplishment, created using water power from the Shenandoah River at Harpers Ferry, made our modern age possible.

Hall was a self-taught engineer. His rise from a ship builder in Portland, Maine to a person who changed the world is inspirational. In 1811, at age thirty, Hall received a U.S. Patent for the world’s first breech loading weapon. Changing the of loading ammunition from the muzzle of a gun to its breech revolutionized warfare. This was just the beginning.

Hall won the contract to create the manufacturing process, and the machines, to produce rifles and carbines with parts that were fully interchangeable. The U.S. War Department wanted weapons that were easy to repair on the battlefield. At the time, all weapons were individually hand made by skilled craftsmen, each one unique.

It took eight years for Hall to create the revolutionary machines and processes that would become known as the “American System”. In December 1826, the world’s first fully interchangeable product, made solely by machines, rolled off Hall’s assembly line.

This moment made our modern world possible. Once one complex item could be consistently made by machines, it was possible to make anything by machine. This was revolutionary - technologically, economically, and culturally.

The impact of Hall’s inventions and processes was immediate, dramatic, and fundamental. The speed and volume of meeting consumer needs made a quantum leap, and continues to speed-up to this day. The cost of consumer goods plummeted, vastly expanding their availability to a broader range of people, improving lives.

The role of the worker was forever changed. For thousands of years craftsmen learned their craft from masters and then spent days, or even weeks, producing individual items. The “American System” changed everything. Younger workers, with limited training, could run manufacturing machines that produced ready made goods in hours. This reinvented the entire work culture for America, and eventually the world.

Hall’s inventions, and his system of mass producing interchangeable parts, was the ultimate disruptive act. His death in 1841, at age 60, meant others stepped forward to promote and adapt his inventions and processes. Hall’s accomplishments faded from memory. Rucker, Upson, and Moore sponsored and led the passage of legislation that makes sure he is memorialized in the Route 340 bridge over the Shenandoah River by the ruins of Hall’s Rifle Works.

History wrongly credits Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, as the father of interchangeable parts. He was not. The John Hancock Hall Bridge establishes Hall’s proper place in world history.

This is what monuments, and the naming bridges and places, is all about. Humans need physical reminders of who we are and why we are. We need places where we can go to understand the events that continue to shape us.

Just like people and events, inventions change things in a multitude of ways. Some changes are immediately tangible, some take generations to comprehend. Hall’s inventions made warfare more deadly and disrupted the role of the master craftsman. Hall’s inventions also made manufactured products affordable, and created employment opportunities for millions.

The actions of Senator Rucker, and Delegates Upson and Riley remind us of why we have monuments. They proved that even a few people can still make a difference.

Monuments draw attention to what shapes our identity, frames how we view our past, and prepares us for the future.

[Scot Faulkner is the President of Friends of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. He served as the Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also served on the White House Staff, and as an Executive Branch Appointee.]