The last time my neighbors and I sheltered in place was seven years ago, in April, 2013. On April 15th, two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon; three people were killed, and more than two hundred and fifty injured. As the wounded were rushed to twenty-seven hospitals, people stayed inside, in case of further attacks. The police closed the streets to inspect suspicious packages. A few days later, after the bombers had been identified, a manhunt began. One of the bombers was killed following a shootout with the police, and the other was captured after an extensive chase, which involved a citywide lockdown. The bombers shot three people while they were on the run—an M.I.T. police officer, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police officer, and a Boston police officer. One of them died immediately, and another a year later.
There are many differences between that experience and the pandemic that we’re caught up in now. The lockdown during the hunt for the bombers was short—less than twenty hours—and, considering the scale and surprise of the attack, the disruption was quite small. Although we experienced a sense of vulnerability, the threat we faced was specific and visible, not microscopic and pervasive. The whole event was over within days. But the most striking difference, at least from today’s perspective, has to do with leadership. Back then, for the most part, elected officials spoke with one voice, and there was little squabbling, blame-gaming, or turf-grabbing. It was a week of anxiety, punctuated by false reports and periods of chaos, but, in the realm of disaster response, the Boston Marathon bombing was a case study in professionalism.
A few months later, the United States Senate held a hearing to learn from the event’s emergency response. A team of Harvard researchers began studying it, too. For several months after the bombing, researchers with the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative interviewed key participants. They wanted to know how, in a city famous for its political and law-enforcement rivalries, so many people had worked together so seamlessly, and how that kind of behavior might be encouraged in the future. “We wanted to understand the elements of that reaction,” Leonard Marcus, a crisis-leadership expert and the founding director of the initiative, said. “What is it about humans? What is it that would bring us together?” Eric McNulty, a researcher on the team who was also a birder, came up with an analogy: he said that the behavior reminded him of “swarm intelligence”—the phenomenon in which groups of animals act in concert. Birds flocking, fish schooling, ants creating colonies—each individual knowing what to do.
Marcus and his colleagues ran with the idea. In a series of reports and, later, a book, they proposed that swarm intelligence in people occurs when all the members of a group come together to create a synergy that magnifies their individual capabilities. It’s the kind of unselfish behavior that one sees on the battlefield, when soldiers know that they depend on one another for their lives. Swarm intelligence is more instinctual than coöperation, in which people work deliberately together to achieve a common goal; it’s an emotional and reactive behavior, not a plan that can be written out on a flowchart. Sometimes it happens on a sports team, as with the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the self-described “bunch of idiots” who took delight in the game and won the franchise its first World Series title in eighty-six years. Sometimes it doesn’t: the 2012 Red Sox, despite having some of the best talents in the league, lacked a certain chemistry and came in last in their division. It can happen when there’s no team at all, as when thousands of people mobilized to make masks for hospital workers during the current pandemic. It arises from the feeling that we’re in this together.
The pandemic, clearly, is a medical and scientific crisis; the virus is being fought in hospitals and labs. But our response also depends on social coöperation. Although it’s true that leaders who understand the science will do better than those that don’t, science isn’t all that matters; without unity of purpose, we’ll fail. How can leaders encourage such unity? What can they do to help all of us, as a group, act more intelligently?
Marcus and his colleagues use the term “swarm intelligence” metaphorically, as a way of describing our ability to spontaneously work together in a crisis. The term draws not just on animal behavior but on evolutionary history. The biologist E. O. Wilson has described Homo sapiens as “eusocial”—one of a small number of species whose tendency to coöperate makes them successful. As Marcus and his colleagues see it, swarm intelligence relates to that evolutionary impulse. It’s a latent force that’s ready to emerge, given the right circumstances and leadership.
In Boston, the qualities of swarm intelligence began to emerge almost immediately after the explosions. The bombs went off at 2:49 P.M. on a sunny Monday afternoon, nearly three hours after the first runners crossed the finish line; amid the fear and confusion, medical volunteers and bystanders rushed to the wounded, applying tourniquets and carrying them to the medical tent that had been set up for the runners. That was no surprise: decades of research have shown that people’s initial responses to disaster are almost always altruistic. Swarm intelligence capitalizes on this fact.
What was more surprising was how Boston’s leaders reacted. Hundreds of responders were using the nearby Westin Copley Place hotel as a staging area; in a conference room there, Governor Deval Patrick assembled a command center, where about thirty key leaders, all with different areas of responsibility, gathered. Rather than asserting his dominance or authority, Patrick went around the room, asking each person, “How can I help?”
Almost everyone there had worked together for years, so they trusted one another’s expertise and judgment. Richard Serino, who was then the deputy administrator of FEMA at the Department of Homeland Security, in Washington, D.C., had grown up in Boston and worked for three decades at Boston’s department of emergency medical services; he’d served as chief of E.M.S., and as the “medical-incident commander” for the marathon. Serino had been near the finish line earlier that day, then travelled to Harvard to give a guest lecture; when he heard about the bombing, he raced back. Now, in the command center, he found himself surrounded by people who knew him as Ritchie. At one point, he was on the phone with Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. “Make sure you tell everybody you’re the highest-ranking official from the department,” he recalled her saying. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. But Serino, who had trained with many of the people in the room, running disaster simulations, ignored the advice. “I wasn’t about to pull rank on anyone,” he told me.
Turf battles are common following disasters—everyone wants to be the hero—and the marathon route ran through eight police jurisdictions. Patrick took a quick poll to decide who should lead the investigation and determined that Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the Boston Division of the F.B.I., who was also on the scene, would take the lead, with other agencies providing support. Then he went around the room again, locking eyes with each person in turn. “Are you O.K. with that?” he asked. He didn’t move on until the person said, “Yes.” Like a flight attendant addressing passengers in the emergency row, he wanted each person to affirmatively buy in.
That set the tone. “It wouldn’t be fair to say that everything went wonderfully all week,” Serino said. “But when you step back and look at the over-all response, I think it went very well.”
In these early interactions, the Harvard team identified five elements that lay the groundwork for the enactment of swarm intelligence. The first is unity of purpose: the participants all knew that their goal was to save lives, with all other goals subservient to that. The second is the adoption of a spirit of generosity, in which each participant seeks to help others succeed. “When everybody on your team crosses the line before you, that’s your best day,” Joseph Henderson, a former director for emergency preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control, explained. (He is now a senior distinguished fellow at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health.) The third is “staying in your lane”—respecting the authority and expertise of others; the fourth is “checking your ego at the door”—declining to seek credit or assign blame. Finally, there’s interpersonal trust and respect: “You don’t wait for an emergency to exchange business cards,” Serino said, quoting a maxim of disaster response.
Using this swarm-intelligence scorecard, President Trump’s coronavirus response scores zero out of five. Unity of mission is lacking: it’s unclear whether his team’s mission is saving lives, safeguarding the stock market, or winning reëlection. As he makes clear whenever he mocks his subordinates, he does not lead his team with anything resembling a generous spirit. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself,” Olivia Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force, told Susan B. Glasser, last month. Trump—who has repeatedly contradicted the statements of his own scientific experts—cannot stay in his lane or check his ego at the door. And long-standing trust among team members is impossible in an Administration that hires and fires frequently, and which has hollowed out the government’s scientific institutions.
It’s easy to see how these kinds of actions might result in what Marcus has called “suspicion leadership”—a dynamic in which all parties mistrust one another, defend their turf, and become obsessed with their differences. The dysfunction does not stop with Trump’s inner circle. It trickles out into the population, where it manifests as tribalism, denial of science, and a disdain for altruistic behavior, such as social distancing and mask wearing.
By contrast, in ways big and small, many of the most effective leaders during the pandemic have built the conditions for swarm intelligence in their states and counties. Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, and other governors sent an important signal by agreeing to share equipment and intelligence. “He’s not going to get any votes from Massachusetts,” Leonard Marcus told me, of Cuomo’s decision to send ventilators to that state. “But there’s a sense that our fates are intermingled; that we’re not going to do things that are just about me, but about this interconnection that we’re discovering.”
In Ohio, one of the first things the Republican governor Mike DeWine did in his response to the virus was to convene a task force of experts. He listened to their advice and kept the infection curve low. In his press conferences, which he began holding daily, DeWine, who seems modest by nature, stresses unity of mission, trust in his experts, and generosity of spirit. Usually, after a brief update, he turns the briefing over to Jon Husted, the lieutenant governor. In the pandemic’s early months, they then ceded the floor to Amy Acton, the state’s smart and empathetic health-department director; Acton acquired a large Facebook fan club and had a T-shirt line created in her honor. Doctors, health experts, recovered patients, and local officials from both parties have appeared via videoconference. DeWine sometimes ends on a folksy note, hosting virtual appearances from everyday Ohioans, such as the wildlife officer Bryan Postlethwait, who sang “Rise Up,” a song he’d written to inspire his fellow-citizens. Instead of taking credit or casting blame, DeWine seeks to stake out an egoless middle ground between medical experts and President Trump and his base.
