As we begin to exit this crisis, what have we learned about ourselves that can help us to better fulfill our mission to make UofL a great place to learn, work, and invest? Yes, the crisis forced us to align and collaborate, uniting us to meet the challenges that surfaced in rapidly shifting from an in-person to virtual work and teaching spaces and bringing new risk to our work in caring for patients. However, in addition to uniting our efforts, I believe that the pandemic has served another, a perhaps more important function, to expose what is truly important to us.

A personal or society-wide disaster can drastically impact our landscape, forever changing our world going forward. Think of a personal health crisis like a sudden diagnosis that leaves us or a loved one with only a short time to live. We suddenly see what is important, and it provides us a reason and the determination to let go of the superficial and unimportant things. We are able to focus our time and energy on doing what is most important to our family and to us. Consider the restoration of a centuries-old painting, in which the grime that has accumulated over time is removed to reveal the original beauty of the painting that became less and less visible beneath the dirt and clutter. The COVID 19 pandemic, like most major crises, worked to clear away the superficial clutter in my work and home life, exposing the real purpose for why I do what I do, and work at the University of Louisville.

The pandemic has certainly exposed our vulnerabilities…, to financial strain, to job loss, to disease, and even death. We can no longer feel as safe personally or as a society as we felt pre- COVID 19. This is an undeniable residual effect of the pandemic. Nevertheless, COVID 19 has also exposed our strengths…our agility, our ability to be decisive, to collaborate, and to be resilient in the face of adversity. Look at our healthcare workers that have had to engage this virus head-on over the past three months, putting their personal safety on the line. They are now seen as heroes, equivalent to the firemen and EMS workers who ran into the World Trade Center buildings in New York on 9/11. Did these doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others just become heroes with the arrival of COVID 19? Or instead, has the crisis merely exposed their long-standing heroism for us to see and recognize as a strength in the community?

As we begin to emerge from the COVID 19 pandemic, we should acknowledge the clarity of purpose that it has brought to us. It is that purpose that drives the behaviors defined in the CARDINAL principles we aspire to live up to. These behaviors are cited in the Korn-Ferry article, (Accelerating Through the Turn, 2020) and have happened at UofL and in organizations and countries all over the world.

 “The crisis has tested the acumen of leadership and the agility of organizations in ways never before seen. And they have responded by casting aside bureaucracy and inefficiency and giving rise to positive behaviors that have driven rapid transformational change, becoming more agile, decisive, innovative, collaborative, customer-centric and empathetic than ever before.”

In the next blog, we will talk through what each of us can do now as we move forward toward that “new normal” in the future with a greater sense of who we are, and how we can continue to make progress toward making UofL a great place to learn, work and invest.

As the crisis abates and we emerge to see what is coming next, I now have a clearer sense of why I work in an academic medical center, at a university surrounded by learners. I suspect that this might be true for you, too, as an individual, and for our university community as well. The exposure and re-discovery of that purpose can drive hope for the future… a future filled with possibilities we may not be able to see clearly now.