Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was…

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the centre of *everything*. /1 https://t.co/onczNleWFF

Alcoa is a massive multi-national organisation. When O’Neill took the reins as CEO, he shocked the corporate world by jettisoning the usual CEO rules. He said he just wanted to focus on safety. But what about everything else? O’Neill was a genius, he knew something. /2 https://t.co/YKKeRcOZ30

He knew that organisations have all of their habits/processes at once. They’re all connected. And that if he picked the right one, changes would flow to all the others. And that’s what happened. O’Neill’s obsessive focus on safety utterly transformed Alcoa, in every way. /3

It’s critical to understand that the revolutionary jump in performance across the entire organisation involved changes to everything there, much of which seemed to have no connection to safety at all. We forget that organisations aren’t a collection of separate parts. /4

All groupings of humans are networked, they’re not assembled using separate parts. Find the hubs that drive those networks, and it changes the entire network. Now scale this up to society as a whole. ‘Safety’ is public health. /5

Just as O’Neill completely transformed all of the problems Alcoa was facing by focusing on just one thing, societies now could do exactly the same thing. By focusing on public health to the exclusion of everything else. This *doesn’t* mean ignoring all other problems. /6

Societies, like organisations, are networked. We refuse to use history to understand them. All civilisation only exists because of victories over one thing. Infection. Half the people who have ever lived died before they reached 10 years of age. /7

The things we would need to do to eliminate circulating infections to a maximal extent are the things that would improve our societies in EVERY way. That was why humans invented public health in the first place. It wasn’t just about health. /8

Poor public health is a *symptom* of dysfunctional processes throughout a society, in work and personal life. We are biological, microbial creatures. Our social-driven lives obscure that most basic fact every single day. Nothing else comes close in importance. /9

Focus on public health to the exclusion of all else. I mean, how obvious is it that our collective health is THE most important thing in life? It will fix everything else too, this central hubs of human existence. All our beloved economies and other proxy nonsense. /end