Is (SWOG) Life Returning to Normal?
Last week, I got on a plane for the first time in two years, flying to Davis to meet with our deputy chair, Primo “Lucky” Lara. I’d gone so long without flying I actually embarrassed myself by making about 50 rookie mistakes in front of the TSA agents. This week, I got on a plane again (no TSA trauma), traveling to San Antonio to meet with administrative and operations leadership, including Nathan Eriksen and Dana Sparks.
Both meetings were quite productive. The former focused heavily on assessing our progress with the SWOG strategic plan, penned by Dr. Lara. At the latter we discussed topics that included transition planning (my final term as chair is winding down) and staffing (Norb Strauss gave us the great news that our protocol coordinator and project manager positions are again fully staffed!). Although I haven’t sat down with colleagues in two years, doing so seemed so ……….. normal.
In fact, flying somewhere each week on SWOG business used to be the norm for me. Pre-COVID, I would rack up as many as 175,000 frequent flyer miles per year. Getting back to traveling leads me to wonder – is SWOG life returning to where it was in 2019?
Certainly, meeting over Zoom and WebEx eliminated daily commuting and left us more spare time for other things, but face-to-face meetings are so much more productive, efficient, and, yes, fun. SWOG’s being such a distributed organization makes our getting together that much more important, intensive, and meaningful.
Returning to some version of “normal” for SWOG will mean once again meeting face to face regularly, taking advantage of the benefits of direct, unmediated interaction among colleagues. In addition to our live group meeting next month (hybrid, technically), we’re now planning a number of other in-person events – a leadership meeting at our Statistics and Data Management Center, for example, to discuss allocation of resources and secondary analyses, and a strategic planning retreat next spring. We’re also convening our Young Investigators Training Course in Seattle later this year. This last example is particularly telling – the quality of intensive one-on-one mentoring that’s at the heart of the YITC loses something essential when the in-person human interaction is missing. This flagship SWOG program has to be conducted face to face.
SWOG’s new normal won’t be identical to the old, undoubtedly, with safety guidelines continuing to evolve. Despite the lifting of many mask mandates, I assume we’ll need to maintain our social distancing for some time to come. But these sorts of risk-adjusted live meetings are becoming the norm – ASCO, AACR, ESMO, and others are all bringing people together again face to face, with reasonable steps to reduce risk.
SWOG’s pre-pandemic normal was many decades in the making. I’m excited about moving back toward that model, even if it’s augmented with a few new features for a new era.
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