Daniel Pink

Best-selling author; ranked #6 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50

for any leader to say right now is, ‘I don’t THE MOST GENUINE THING know’. We are in the midst of a very complicated set of circumstances, and the truth is, there is a lot we don’t know. And that’s okay. One of the most important things we can do is try to figure out the right questions to ask. Then, we must be humble as we go forward and try to answer those questions.

I think there are a couple things going on right now at a high level. One is what I think of — and I use the term intentionally — as a great ‘unmasking’ of what is going on in our world. When all is said and done, the mask is going to be the metaphor that defines this moment. Part of this is an unmasking of things that were hidden in plain sight but that we are now actually forced to reckon with.

This pertains to a number of things — and I say a lot of this as an American. My country was not ready for this. One of the things being unmasked is that we have built an apparatus to respond to certain kinds of threats, but they were largely conventional military threats. What brought the U.S. to its knees over the last 20 years were eight guys on a plane and a virus that we can’t see. We didn’t have the infrastructure or the mindsets to deal with these threats.

At the firm level, there is an unmasking going on around the future of democratic capitalism. It was already showing its cracks all over the world, through the Brexit issue and the rise of nationalism in the U.S. There is a growing recognition of something Roger Martin has been saying for years now: that shareholder value is not the be all and end all.

The pandemic has unmasked questions like, What obligations do companies owe to individuals? And what obligations do individuals owe to companies? We knew about inequality before, but we largely thought about it in terms of income. What we’re seeing right now is even more profound: There are people who, like me, are fortunate in that they can do their jobs from their home office; but there are lots of other people who have to go out there to do their jobs in person — and they are at much greater risk. Lastly, at an individual level, there is an unmasking around what really matters in our lives. What’s important, and how do we want our life to go? The more we have conversations about all of these things, the healthier we will be going forward.

The leaders who are doing a great job during the pandemic share a few common characteristics. Take the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. First, she has had a real sense of urgency, which in my country we didn’t have. She was also extraordinarily transparent about what she knew and what she didn’t know, and extraordinarily empathetic. Those three qualities — transparency, empathy and urgency — are extremely valuable right now.

Six months ago, if I had said to you, ‘Here’s what’s about to happen: There is going to be a pandemic and we’re going to ask everyone to stay home. We’ll ask people to close their restaurants and shops, and big companies to tell people to work from home. Schools and universities will be shut down and kids will come back to their parents’ houses. People will only be able to go to the grocery store and when you go out you will have to wear a mask. We’re going to ask people to do all this stuff and people are going to go along with it. You would have said, ‘That’s crazy’.

Today, as I look out on the streets of Washington, DC., there are no police officers out there enforcing this shutdown. People are complying because it’s the right thing to do. It’s easy to talk about all the terrible things happening right now, but I think this tells us something very positive about human nature.