In times of crisis and urgency, when there are fires to put out, looking beyond the here-and-now can seem like wasteful distraction. Indeed, for some, the natural impulse during COVID-19 has been to put their heads down, staying laser focused on what they already have and know. For others, the fervor of the social and political climate has made it feel like the ultimate answers lie either on the left or the right. In these trying times, my team and I from University Hospitals Ventures—the innovation and commercialization arm of University Hospitals (UH) of Cleveland—took another approach: looking up.
We humans have a tendency to look to the skies to better ground ourselves. Whether it was using the heavenly constellations in ancient times to better navigate our earthly world or the lunar missions more recently to capture the imagination of a generation, the cosmos have always fueled our curiosity and inspired us with moonshots and meaning.
Most recently, we looked up and outside by partnering with NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. In particular, we joined forces to develop new methods for preserving and protecting personal protective equipment (PPE). While knee deep in this project, we discussed other ways of continuing our unique collaboration. Both organizations wear the innovator label in our own industries, and in Northeast Ohio, each of us are also major employers, providing significant economic benefit to our community. As such, we launched a ‘voyage’ of sorts for our collective employees and community to explore New Frontiers: Innovating for Systemness & Well-being.
The concept of this virtual summit was to search for common ground between two seemingly different organizations and industries.
For example, the conference highlighted what makes missions like the recent SpaceX-NASA flight to the International Space Station or the landing of the NASA probe on asteroid Bennu possible: a mission control. Taking a page from NASA’s playbook, UH set up a central command center during the COVID-19 pandemic to serve as the brain, eyes and ears for UH’s system response to the crisis. This required a modification of UH’s organizational structure to be pandemic-ready—to ensure efficient transmission of information across the system while preserving the flexibility to nimbly adjust when unforeseen circumstances arise. What has been new for both NASA and UH during COVID-19 is the challenge of incorporating virtual elements to central command operations.
UH took the mission control idea a step further when it launched a remote patient monitoring system to keep a virtual watchful eye on patients who were at home recovering from COVID-19. Clinicians monitor patients’ vitals from a central command and proactively reach out when key indicators like oxygen saturation dip to concerning levels.
Similarly, on the NASA side, the agency has begun reimagining its operations to include more flexibility and remote-work opportunities as it works to send the next humans to the Moon and eventually Mars. These efforts include significant enhancements to information technology infrastructure, allowing virtual participants to contribute safely and effectively from anywhere via cloud computing, collaboration software and other available tools. Importantly, to make true workplace virtualization possible, both space travelers and healthcare workers will need to rely more concretely on human-to-human trust – a key ingredient for meaningful work to get done without being physically present.
Another parallel the conference uncovered involved the idea of being open to serendipity. The ability to innovatively navigate through uncharted territory occurs neither by happy accident nor rigid procedure; for productive collisions to occur, there must be a kind of adaptive or learning system – an environment strategically cultivated to increase the probability of success. We gave a name to ways that organizations can leverage their informal and social networks: “systemnautics,” or literally “systems sailing.”
Much like sailing where the cooperation of the winds and waves are just as much a determining factor as the will and skill of sailors in the successful progress toward a destination, there is a combination of luck and intentional design in shaping social systems. Alluded to earlier, the initial conversation between NASA and UH began when the nation’s healthcare systems, including UH, had a dire PPE shortage and supply chains were constricted. My team was investigating ways to decontaminate N95 masks for reuse by caregivers. We organically connected with NASA Glenn’s leadership via a friend of a friend. Thankfully, NASA – driven by the part of their mission to contribute space travel technologies toward public benefit – was also looking for opportunities to help healthcare workers. They had a potential solution to our problem, a technology that can clean things as large as spaceships, yet as delicate and fragile as artwork. The matching of mutual motivations and opportunistic movements through existing social ties are what propelled meaningful collaborations between UH and a range of external partners amidst the pandemic.
Another commonality we found and discussed during the event focused on a new “third place” within our contemporary lives. Not Starbucks, but a hybrid place of home-work (or work-home) for many, and for some, a lonely and potentially dangerous place of home as a kind of prison spurred by COVID-19. In addition to physical health, there is a growing concern for behavioral, mental and spiritual well-being as many people continue to face social isolation. The idea of spending long periods of time in a confined space, of course, is a skill that astronauts develop as part of their training. There are lessons from space that translate directly to the home environment.
For example, the connection between the psychological and physical can be very direct and should be something that is constantly monitored – depression due to social isolation can lead to detrimental physiological issues on the international space station and certainly at home. However, there are also aspects that do not translate between space and life on earth. Whereas microgravity and inactivity in space typically lead to weight loss, being sedentary on earth commonly leads to obesity and a host of associated complications, including issues tied to socioeconomic status. In this way, life on earth has its distinct challenges that require its own kind of exploration and mission.
The conference taught us another lesson that translates from the home to space. It was reassuring to hear that astronauts do the following to cope with boredom and isolation: stay connected with family, play instruments, write journal entries, exercise, read books, or binge watch their favorite TV show. Regardless of where someone is in the cosmos, it seems that there is something universal in the way we humans seek and find comfort. At a deep level, the parallel pathways of self-care between life at home and in space speak to our core and common humanity.
The conference also honed in on a special class of individuals who exemplify optimal human performance under some of the harshest of conditions: astronauts and athletes. We learned about the rigor of the astronaut training regimen under intentional failure conditions and the kind of training athletes must go through to perform at their peak and recover properly. Panelists also described what life is like once high performers achieve what they set out to accomplish. In this way, they spoke to those of us who are making sense of our new identities as stay-at-home parents, homeschooling teachers, disconnected employees, under-resourced managers, or “all of the above.” The current crisis has shaped us in new ways and many of us are no longer able to perform at the capacity we once did. The key message in this discussion was simple and hopeful: instead of being shook up by these new realities, find joy in helping others realize their own goals and dreams—find reward in becoming the hero in someone else’s story.
Many health systems have innovated at what seems like lightspeed compared to the pace of transformation pre-crisis. For example, the necessary innovation around digital health has been nothing short of amazing. Indeed, this may be the one silver-lining of this crisis for healthcare. How can we not lose this momentum and also sustain a healthy rhythm of innovation? NASA participants reinforced this innovation imperative for their own system and added the following dimension: without the people in an organization, there is no mission. In the end, the two themes of the innovation event – systemness and well-being – were brought together in a symbiotic relationship: systemness depends on the well-being of people served by organizations and well-being depends on systematically caring for and empowering people.
By the end of the summit, I, like many others who tuned in, felt small. Not in a bad way; but in a way that makes the world feel large when human beings come together as a unified system to accomplish great things. It was a sense of feeling small when faced with the sublime. Paradoxically, transcendence and looking to the outside can provide the inner compass and awe that individuals and organizations need to re-center and make life-sustaining connections.
Kipum Lee is Managing Director of the Innovation Center at UH Ventures, the innovation and commercialization arm of University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio.
