Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
For years, a small part of me wished for a zombie apocalypse. I'd skip the brain-eating part. What interests me is how quickly people figure out how to work together when the alternative is to be eaten.
I started thinking about this as a kid. After watching Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, I got my family recycling, tracked my carbon footprint and nagged everyone about water and energy. Climate change seemed like an obvious crisis. I couldn't understand why everyone wasn't acting like it.
Zombie movies offered a strange point of comparison. The threat arrives suddenly. People with very different backgrounds find a reason to cooperate. Decisions that might otherwise take months happen immediately, because the cost of waiting is impossible (in this case deadly) to ignore.
I've kept coming back to that comparison in my work building innovation ecosystems. Many of the problems we're trying to solve have been with us for years: founders who cannot raise a first round at home, startups that cannot find a Canadian customer, graduates who leave to build somewhere else. The consequences are serious, but they don't always feel urgent to the people who can mobilize a response. Then a crisis hits, and suddenly organizations find ways to work together that seemed impossible a month earlier.
I saw that firsthand during the pandemic, helping get rapid tests into businesses across Canada. We built programs in days, worked with people we would never normally have met and helped change processes that had stood in the way. I also saw how much of that capacity dispersed when the immediate pressure eased.
That experience left me with two questions: how do we give ourselves permission to work that way before an emergency forces us to? And when a crisis does bring us together, how do we make the resulting progress last?
At my recent NORDIQ keynote in Québec City, I explored those questions through five rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. They turn out to be useful rules for ecosystem building, too.
Rule 1: Cardio
In Zombieland, rule number one is cardio. How fast can you run?
In 2020, I got a crash course. Iain Klugman, then CEO of Communitech and now one of my NorthGuide co-founders, called me after being appointed strategic advisor to the Deputy Minister of Health Canada. His pitch was short: “I need your help saving lives and saving Canada.” For the next year and a half, we worked to get more than 30 million rapid tests to businesses across the country so they could keep their people healthy and their doors open.
Everything stood up fast. I wrote the workplace testing guide in about a week (before GenAI tools were widely available). We ran community self-testing programs out of city buses so people could see what a rapid test was and how to use it. When government IT and procurement estimated six months to build an ordering system, a local entrepreneur built a Shopify version in two days. It was a minimum viable product in the most literal sense, and it was good enough to get started.
We also had to address regulatory barriers. Early in our work, requirements for clinician-administered testing limited how we could deliver the program. We worked with government to secure exemptions and support changes that enabled self-testing. Changes that touch federal, provincial and regional health systems normally take years. These moved in months.
Three things made us fast. There was one goal everyone could count: tests in hands. We had permission to challenge processes that didn't fit the situation. And we launched a working version and improved it as we went.
Those conditions can be built deliberately. Agree on an outcome that partners can measure together. Create room to test new approaches through regulatory sandboxes or challenge-based procurement. Set deadlines for decisions. Ask what your two-day version could look like.
We moved fast because we secured permission. We can create that permission without waiting for the next emergency.
Rule 2: The survival group is never who you'd expect
Zombieland's survivors are a nervous college kid, a cowboy on a Twinkie quest and two con-artist sisters. It's an unlikely team. So was ours.
Rick was one of our key testing experts, central to the push for regulatory change and to helping the public understand rapid testing. His day job was Engineering Director for Google Chrome. Years before the pandemic, he had started researching virus testing to keep his immunocompromised son healthy and had built a microbiology lab in his basement. His perspective from outside the health system helped him imagine testing working differently.
Ali, the serial entrepreneur who built our ordering portal, brought years of online retail experience. Leslie, who ran our community testing program and pickup sites, normally managed events like the NHL Heritage Classic and Michelle Obama's book tour. Coordinating hundreds of volunteers across multiple locations drew directly on the expertise she had built running major events.
The situation was new, so we looked beyond our usual partners. Outside a crisis, ecosystem tables often get filled by job title and by whoever got funded last year. There is a Rick in a basement in every ecosystem. Most of our gatherings are designed so we never meet him.
Start by mapping the skills a problem requires, then ask who has already solved something similar elsewhere. Event managers know logistics. Retailers know distribution. Leave seats at the table for people who don't fit the usual profile, and share the credit generously. On our team, getting tests into people's hands mattered more than whose logo was on the bus.
Rule 3: Don't take the walls down when it goes quiet
In the horror film 28 Weeks Later, officials declare part of London safe and people move back in. You can guess what happens next. (Spoiler alert: Not a happy ending)
As our acute pandemic response wound down, much of the connectivity and capacity we'd built dispersed. Everyone went back to their day jobs, me included. Rick went back to Google, Leslie went back to her events and I went back to consulting. We lost our licence to move fast because it no longer felt like a crisis.
But the broader challenges of access to care remained. We had built a network that could stand up testing sites, move supplies across the country and work through regulatory barriers. Some of that capability could have been pointed at access to care in rural and remote communities. The time to decide that was before the network dispersed.
Other jurisdictions show what retaining capacity can look like. In the US, the National Institutes of Health adapted the infrastructure behind its RADx Tech COVID-testing program to address other challenges, including hepatitis C, HIV, mpox and maternal health. Taiwan built its National Health Command Center after SARS and maintained its preparedness capability in the years before COVID. It activated its epidemic command centre on January 20, 2020, three days before Wuhan locked down.
For ecosystem builders, the practical lesson is to plan the handover before emergency funding runs out. Decide which capabilities are worth keeping, who will sustain them and what problem they should address next. Keep the people connected, and assess which temporary permissions should become permanent pathways.
The team may need to change. The program may need a different home. But the next mission should be part of the conversation while people are still working together.
Rule 4: Learn from the other groups fighting the horde
In World War Z, Brad Pitt's character travels the world to see how other places are coping. What he learns far from home becomes essential to finding a way forward.
Some of the problems Canada struggles to mobilize around are immediate priorities elsewhere. That gives us a reason to look more widely for partners and approaches we can learn from.
Through NorthGuide, I recently set up and ran a health tech incubator in Barbados. When we started the project, a visit to the island's main public hospital made the pressure on care delivery tangible. The emergency waiting area overflowed into the hallway. For the practitioners we work with, the need for better ways to deliver care is part of their daily experience.
Roughly half of the founders in the incubator are practicing clinicians or health system administrators. That's a much higher proportion than I've encountered in Canadian health tech programs. Their proximity to the problems shows up in what they build. They understand the workflows a solution needs to fit into, the constraints staff face and which problems need attention first. On these problems, they are ahead of us, because they could not wait.
There are two things for us to learn from: the solutions themselves, and how practitioners become involved in developing them. Some of the most useful ecosystem building is happening in places that rarely feature in Canadian innovation conversations.
Look for partners where the problem you're working on is especially urgent. When you visit, spend as much time studying how they solve the problem as you spend pitching what Canada has to offer. Bring their founders and operators into Canadian programs as peers and mentors. Work out what can be adapted to our context and what we can contribute in return.
A shared problem gives both sides a reason to keep working together.
Rule 5: Build a settlement, not just a shelter
In The Walking Dead, communities begin farming and trading with each other. They're planning for life beyond the immediate threat. That is the mindset we need when designing our response to economic disruption.
Canada's evolving relationship with the US has brought renewed attention to diversification, supply chain resilience and domestic procurement. The willingness to work together has been encouraging, and the interest in closer partnerships is something I hear everywhere I travel internationally. The idea of middle powers working together resonates with partners all around the world, and many of them are already asking what we could build with Canada.
But if our relationship with the United States becomes easier, will we sustain that effort?
Internationally, market-entry relationships and soft-landing programs are useful starting points. We should build on them through two-way partnerships around challenges both jurisdictions share. That could mean health tech and life sciences collaboration with Caribbean partners or blue economy partnerships in Asia. Helping companies reach new customers can sit alongside developing solutions together.
At home, the immediate pressure exposes gaps Canadian ecosystem builders have been working on for years. Companies need domestic risk capital and early Canadian buyers. Skilled people need opportunities to stay and build here. Businesses need pathways into a wider range of international markets. Those needs will remain even if tariffs ease.
The infrastructure we build now should address both the immediate disruption and those underlying problems. Give every crisis initiative at least one outcome that will still matter in five years. Decide who will sustain the work when emergency funding ends, and how it can adapt as needs change.
Never let a good crisis go to waste
The energy, the political will and a good share of the funding attached to this moment will not last. What we build with them can.
Each of us has a way to put these lessons to work. A company can launch the useful first version it has spent months scoping. A government can turn a successful procurement pilot into an ongoing pathway for Canadian suppliers. An ecosystem leader can bring an unexpected partner into a project or give an existing team a new problem to solve. Together, we can build programs that serve the wider community and have a future beyond the funding announcement.
The next time you watch a zombie movie, pay attention to what the survivors are doing right. Then ask what it would take to do the same thing on an ordinary Tuesday, with no horde at the gate.
.avif)
WATERLOO | OTTAWA | NEW YORK
© 2026 NorthGuide. All rights reserved.
NorthGuide® is a registered trademark in Canada and the U.S.
