IDENTIFY. QUANTIFY. ELIMINATE.
where the highly infectious viral disease is still transmitted. He makes this accomplishment seem simple. “It’s a matter of how you’re organized and how you operate, right? And how you’re capacitated to execute your strategy.”
Te 55-year-old Aylward, a native of Newfoundland, Canada, joined WHO in 1992, a year after earning a Master of Public Health degree from what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He earned his medical degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1985 and completed a residency in internal medicine in Vancouver, British Colum- bia. He also received training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the course of his career, Aylward has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and is a 2017 inductee into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.
In many respects, Aylward’s approach to readiness mirrors that of DOD, which is why Army AL&T reached out to him at WHO’s Geneva headquarters for this July 21 interview. When we spoke with him by phone, he’d just completed an eight-month stint in the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to lead a newly established Change Management Unit there.
Army AL&T: Te U.S. Army’s operating statement, “Win in a Complex World,” looks at improving readiness through three particular paradigms—streamlined personnel, logistics and maintenance systems. How similar is this construct to what you look at when you’re looking to improve readiness?
Aylward: I think it’s actually fairly similar. With readiness, we think in terms of what our goal is to ensure that, in a com- plex world, exactly as the military might say, you have the plans, processes, people and capacities in place to be able to respond rapidly to the unexpected hazards you face and emergencies that they give rise to. So we might use slightly different language, but it’s all about having a plan in place with the right person- nel, logistics and maintenance systems, as you would say in the Army, to execute that plan.
Army AL&T: How do you plan for the unexpected? If you don’t really know what’s going to happen but can only conceptualize it, how do you actually build readiness in concrete terms?
Aylward: Te first thing that we have to do is break down the unknown, because we actually know a lot more than we often realize. Te first thing we tend to do is look at, OK, what are
98 CONFRONTING THE UNKNOWN
Aylward delivers his plan for an international response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak at a September 2014 press conference at the World Health Organization at Geneva. Aylward drew on his understanding of epidemiology, disease eradication and humanitarian emergency operations to establish the strategy and lead its execution. (U.N. photo by Jean-Marc Ferré)
the possible hazards and groups of hazards we might face? Are they natural hazards or man-made, and then, within natural, are they biologic [hazards]? You then have to understand that the consequences of those hazards can be X, Y and Z.
From there you want to know, what are the vulnerabilities of different populations in different parts of the world? What are the capacities to address those? Very quickly you can build up a pretty good risk profile on which you can base your readiness work. Although the “where” and “when” something is going to happen are pretty unpredictable, especially with new infectious diseases, there are patterns over time that can help.
So we’ve got to be very careful about just saying, “Oh, it’s unknown.” We can build up pretty good risk profiles, though even then we can’t just put them on the shelf. In any given cor- ner of the world, the geopolitics may have really changed, and now the whole risk for civil disturbance or conflict has changed, so you’ve got to update those risk profiles as well. While these risk profiles are helpful in terms of the “where” something may
Army AL&T Magazine
October-December 2017
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