The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to collaborate with many circles. It makes us mutually dependent as we face new challenges together.
By
Kompas Editor
·3 minutes read
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to collaborate with many circles. It makes us mutually dependent as we face new challenges together.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect and make anybody its carrier, regardless of wealth, education, occupation, age, gender, ethnicity or religion. Wealthy countries, developing countries, poor countries, all are impacted. Covid-19 affects the whole planet, and the entire human race needs to engage in a joint effort to overcome it. The slogan of the World Health Organization (WHO) is very clear: No one is safe until everyone is safe.
In the face of this difficult situation, a collaborative approach has proven to be effective. Coronavirus vaccines have become the most rapidly developed vaccines in human history. After China in early January 2020 distributed the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2, experts across the world studied it.
President Joko Widodo, when opening the Kompas100 CEO Forum last week, invited corporate leaders to devise forms of collaboration to accelerate Indonesia’s health and economic recovery (Kompas.id, 21/1/2021). Global collaboration is easier said than done. Collaboration is a process of cooperation to settle a complex problem jointly with the aim of realizing a common goal.
Collaboration is a process whereby people connect and work together in an interactive, interdependent, unified, cooperative and synergistic way to achieve a common goal.
Nevertheless, Anne Loehr, author of a leadership and management development book, in her article in The Huffington Post emphasizes that collaboration is not merely working together, favoring one another, accommodating, giving in, caving in to others, getting along without challenging one another and compromising to overcome differences. Collaboration is a process whereby people connect and work together in an interactive, interdependent, unified, cooperative and synergistic way to achieve a common goal.
Indonesia actually has a tradition of collaboration. A culture of mutual assistance was a tradition even before the country was founded. Founding father Bung Karno frequently called to mind the meaning of gotong royong (mutual assistance) in his speeches. “Gotong royong is working hard together, perspiring together, struggling by joining hands with one another. The action of all in the interest of all, the perspiration of all, for the happiness of all,” he pointed out in his speech on 1 June 1945.
As we face the pandemic, the question is, to what extent has that spirit of collaboration or gotong royong awoken between state institutions, business circles, members of the public, and between all the three? We must continue to promote mutual trust.
It should also be our common awareness that all of us will not be safe before the 275 million people in the Indonesian archipelago are safe. Collaboration between all elements of the nation is the bottom line. Without collaboration, the pandemic will take even longer to surmount. We can only wait for our turn to be infected and to become further trapped in the abyss of recession.