A guest post by Marc Maxmeister.

Ebola is a threat, but not for the reasons you might have heard. It won’t wipe us all out. It won’t topple nations. And there are no actual zombies, despite early reports to the contrary.

The story of our response to Ebola over the past four months paints of stark picture of two approaches: An expert-led paralyzed effort to impose “standard” solutions, and an agile local effort to find solutions that work.

My latest book takes a realistic look at Ebola with an emphasis on what the local response can teach us all about better ways to run projects. Check out “Ebola: Local voices, hard facts.” on Amazon here.

I started out just listening, and from then curated stories from people directly affected, or those acting within their home communities. I then infused these stories into better answers to the top most-asked questions GlobalGiving and some Liberian nonprofits had on a recent reddit_AMA about Ebola.

It evolved into lessons about what makes a community resilient, offered in plain language, wonk-free stories. In the context or trying to understand an immediate crisis, where making one wrong decision forces us to make even worse ones later, I found it much easier to talk about the solutions. Behavior change, agile organizations, positive deviance, data interoperability, rapid learning and experimentation, and local accountability to do something, even empathy, all make an appearance.

The book brings out a deeper message about systems and leaders: Leaders are not created evil. They just slip into a downward spiral each time the choose the easy way out, kicking the tough decision down the road, ensuring that they’ll need to choose from even worse options at the next juncture.

The implications for our world are obvious.

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