Reseña

Preface

I tried to calm my coronavirus anxiety by watching Netflix but became bored after a while. The bombardment of COVID-19 memes wasn’t helping either. I remember reading a meme that said, “2020, written by Stephen King and directed by Quentin Tarantino." It was kind of funny to me, but then again, I was laughing at anything that would temporarily take my mind off of reality. I prayed that this pandemic would never happen to humanity again. I know it will happen again, but I hoped next time we will be better prepared for it.
I started writing this book as a documentary of how COVID-19 unraveled itself in locations where I have loved ones. I reckon maybe in the future my family would like to know what happened during those first four months of the pandemic. However, my background in Performance Improvement and Change Management made this sequence of events more appealing to me. I observed that although the world had the same real-time updates of how aggressive the outbreaks were, countries, cities, and states reacted to the pandemic differently.
Some responded well to the change, yet it utterly devastated other countries. I asked myself, 'Why?' What were the reasons? And what can we learn from them? That was when I discovered the intention of the book. My aim was not only to capture incredible events that took place

in the world and my challenging journey during this time period, but also to demonstrate how following Change Management principles affects outcomes.
In this book we will cover my Change Management methodology, which we will use to analyze changes that happened during the pandemic, but you will also practice using your real-life examples. In addition, we will cover the 10 most significant performance improvement interventions the Costa Rican government implemented to successfully manage the pandemic.
At the end of the day, this book is about leadership- accountability. Either demanding accountability from your “leaders” or self-testing your leadership skills. Either way, this book is for actual leaders that want to help guide change. If you consider yourself an actual leader in this world, I welcome you to reflect on the changes that happened during the first four months of the pandemic and to see a fresh perspective including the positive side-effects because of COVID-19. If you continue to be are interested in Change Management, there is also an opportunity at the end of the book to take part in a live virtual performance improvement workshop.

 
Introduction

Change Management has several models to prepare organizations in successfully making a change. An organization can be as unique as a person or team or as big as a business or school district. However, it can also be a large enterprise such as a government, state or country.
When I began writing this book back in April 2020, I was living in as a small town in Costa Rica and it was difficult to see the silver lining. My family on my mother's side all live in Costa Rica. My family on my father's side all live in the States, mostly in the State of Michigan. As time went by, I couldn’t help but notice (from a change management consultant point of view) how well Costa Rica responded to the pandemic.
Costa Rica (population 5 million), is a small Central American country with no army that reacted to the pandemic with the forethought and prioritization of a world power. This especially became intriguing to see once we began witnessing powerful countries such as Italy, Spain and the US with an abundance of experts and resources reacting to the pandemic poorly or not at all. Never in my wildest dreams did I think the outbreaks would spiral into such a worldwide maelstrom with uncommon responses to it.