Cry Wolf

Leadership is defined as the ability to hide your panic from others

Until last Friday, Honestly Lay Bare had never heard of Dr Jeannette Young.

Dr Young is the Chief Medical Officer in the Australian state of Queensland.

As the worldwide media interest in swine flu erupted last week, Dr Young stood at the podium of a Queensland Government press conference and urged people to stockpile food to reduce the number of times that they have to go to the shops in case there is an outbreak.

“Have it in your house ready just in preparation – some stocks of tinned food and frozen vegetables in the freezer, that sort of thing” she said before adding “there’s no need to stockpile water.”

"We'll be telling people to try and maintain distances from other people use the one-metre rule, because it's the spread of droplets in the air that infect people," she continued.

"So if you stand a metre away from someone else, you're less likely to get infected."

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If Australia was in the midst of a full blown flu pandemic with multiple deaths and hospital wards filling with the insufferably sick it would be difficult to argue with Dr Young’s advice.

But Australia isn’t.

As at the time of the abovementioned press conference last Friday, there were no confirmed cases of swine flu in Australia.

Indeed the Australian Government’s Health Minister needed to come out at odds with the advice of Dr Young.

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Honestly Lay Bare is not scientifically (or come to think of it ethically, legally or perhaps most importantly medically!) qualified to comment on whether we are at the start of the great pandemic of our times or whether it is media hype in a slow news week.

What Honestly Lay Bare is interested in is what the actions of Dr Young teach us all about a pandemic response of a country; a state or an organisation.

Perhaps we at Honestly Lay Bare are naive but we always thought that the first; last and most essential instruction with regards to a crisis is clear, informed and consistent communication that educates and doesn’t panic.

Yet here we have the situation where the most senior medical officer of Australia’s third largest state is calling for – essentially – a run on the frozen food aisle of the supermarket in response to something that was but an image on our television screens.

Similarly, it is hard to imagine why the Egyptian authorities are adamant on killing the entire Egyptian pig population when the World Health Organisation has said categorically that swine flu cannot be transmitted from pigs to humans.

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And therein perhaps lies the lesson of this swine flu episode for us all.

Not that we should all wear face masks as we crowd the supermarket aisle albeit one metre away from each other – but that moments of crisis bring out a guttural need for people to be seen to be doing something.

This is despite that sometimes the most effective thing is to do nothing.

We as a society expect of our elected officials and their appointed representatives that they will be able to give unemotional, clear and consistent advice in times when we most need them to.

In organisations we expect the same of our leaders.

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The most damaging aspect of last week’s news conference is that – when that moment inevitably comes, whether it be because of swine flu or another menace – when the health of a nation or a company is in grave danger, will we trust the advice of those that are there to protect us.

A modern day Aesop fable!