Proportionality and decision making (in business and with COVID-19)

In business, everything is about goals and measuring success. When setting KPIs, proportionality matters: Setting the right KPIs is crucial. Once they are set, you need to define the measures which will help to reach these KPIs. For example, if you want to make more revenue with your business, you either have to acquire more customers, sell a higher number of products, or make your products more expensive. All roads lead to Rome—it’s on you to find the best and most efficient (= shortest) one.

I believe that all of this—setting the right goals and taking reasonable, proportionate measures is true for life in general. Let’s take the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, which has been having a major influence on our lives for almost two years now, as an example. It takes time to figure out the right KPIs and proxy metrics to fight it.

Besides KPIs, it is also important to work with experience. Luckily in Austria, we don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to COVID-19. We know what happened in Israel, Spain, Portugal or in the UK, and we could (and probably should) have adapted our measures accordingly. It is vital to react promptly, make decisions and not wait until it’s too late. I believe that by taking measures a couple months earlier when we already had experience values (= vaccinating works, see image below), we could have gotten the situation “under control” and, in a best case scenario, wouldn’t have needed the current lockdown here in Austria. 

Source: ECDC, November 2021

Data shows that the higher the vaccination rate in a country, the lower its death rate. In my opinion, the number one KPIs for this pandemic should be the number of persons admitted to intensive care units and deaths. But how do we lower these numbers? 

According to science (and data), we need more vaccinated people to reduce the number of infections and severe COVID-19 courses to reach these KPIs. So, it’s just like in business: First, define your most important KPIs (reduce people in intensive care units and deaths), then take the measures (vaccination) to reach it. Of course, said measures can also have a negative impact on other areas, e.g. on the next elections, but the real question here is: What is your number one goal? Successfully fighting a pandemic, or winning the next election? 

Now, let’s circle back to the importance of proportionality: I am a firm believer that we should have spent (marketing) money on campaigns, or e.g. writing to people (e.g. letters, like they did in Spain) in order to convince our population earlier (already in summer) to vaccinate. Yes, we all know, marketing campaigns cost a lot of money. But that’s what proportionality is all about: Imagine you spend 1 million EUR per week on a vaccination campaign in summer, then save around 1 billion EUR per week by not having to put an entire country in lockdown for three weeks (our current situation in Austria). What’s the better solution? And I am only talking about money here. Of course, we could have prevented many people from getting sick, or even deaths, which is even more important.

You see, it’s all about proportionality and making decisions. In business and in pandemics.