About six years ago, I was invited to give a workshop for a group of managers in a famous pharmaceutical company in the Fortune 500. The goal of the workshop was to show the participants how to inspire innovation and change. Just prior to my talk, the chief operating officer of the firm unexpectedly dropped in and gave a short talk, saying that he didn’t want change from the group. The group was doing fine. It was making good profits. They should keep on doing what they were doing. They shouldn’t waste time and money on any crazy new ideas about innovation. Just get on with meeting the firm’s targets. Then, without taking questions, he left.
For a few moments, the room was in a kind of stunned silence. When the manager who had convened the workshop returned from escorting his boss out the door, he seized the microphone and gave an enthusiastic introduction to the workshop that was diametrically opposed to what his boss had just said. The firm’s stock price, he said, had been stagnant for years. The future of the group, and indeed the firm, would depend on whether it could innovate and bring new value to the marketplace.
The workshop then proceeded as planned. I showed the participants how to inspire change. The workshop went very well and the participants were highly engaged.
But in the ensuing years, not surprisingly, the firm as a whole didn’t innovate and its stock price has languished at about the level that it was in the previous six years.
The manager who had convened the workshop had known what to do. But it didn’t happen. The problem? His boss was a robot.
The most human human
Is your boss a robot? Now a terrific new book by Brian Christian, The Most Human Human, gives you some surefire tests for identifying robots who have somehow wandered into your workplace.
Christian is well-prepared to help answer the question, as he participated the annual Loebner Prize Competition, at which computer programs called “chatbots” compete against actual humans (behind a screen) in trying to convince the judges that they are truly human. The winning chatbot is awarded the title “Most Human Computer,” while the actual human who gets the most votes is awarded the title “Most Human Human.” Christian was competing in the latter category.
In getting ready for the competition, Christian explored the philosophical, biological, and moral dimensions of what it means to be human. The book shares his findings with us as to precisely what it is about robots that are different from people. We can use this to help answer the question: is your boss a human or a robot?
Does your boss engage in verbal abuse?
Does your boss engage in verbal abuse by jumping on everything you say and showing that you are at fault.
Boss: Why is your project late?
You: The designs came in late.
Boss: Why didn’t you anticipate this?
You: Because you told me to focus on my work only.
Boss: The designs were your work.
You: I was simply doing what you said to do.
Boss: Now you’re making excuses for your own mistakes.
And on it goes. It doesn’t matter what you say. Everything is twisted and turned to show that you are always in the wrong. The interchange has a knee-jerk character to it. A clear sign that you are dealing with robot.
Each statement by the boss is a reflex response to the very last sentence of the conversation rather than the actual issue at hand. Christian notes that computers are actually quite good at this kind of interchange and can be programmed to continue it for extended periods, sometimes even convincing the human participant to believe that they are dealing with a real person.
The coldness and deadness and disconnectedness of the interchange, says Christian, comes from dealing in pure abstraction, divorced from actual reality. There is no exploring of underlying assumptions. The interchange is locked in abstract reality. What to do? We need to snap out of it, says Christian, and come “quite literally, back to our senses.”
Does your boss leave you in endless conversational loops?
Is dealing with your boss like the horrible infinite regress of telephone customer service where you struggle your way through a morass of menu options only to find that the live operator, once you reach her, talks exactly like the automated voice you’re trying to escape? If so, you may be dealing with a robot.
Why do call center operators act that way? Because, Christian says, that’s how operators are trained to talk. The chief operating officer that I referred to above was simply, like the call center operator, doing what he had been trained to do. Maximizing shareholder value. Reduce risk. Stick to the knitting. Milk the firm’s cash cows. He knew how to do all this. The activity was predictable. The firm could be run as a machine. It was his world—the world of robots. By contrast, innovation was risky. Change was dangerous. Doing something different was an adventure into the unknown—all bad things for robots.
It’s this kind of thinking, Christian reminds us, that results in technical progress that has us chasing our tails. “For instance, Office 2007 running on Windows Vista uses twelve times as much memory and three times as much processing power as Office 2000 running on Windows 2000, with nearly twice as many execution threads as the immediately previous version.) .. Users were being subjected to the very same lags and lurches on their new machines, despite exponentially increasing computing power, all of which was getting sopped up by new ‘features.’ Two massive companies pouring untold billions of dollars and thousands of man-years into advancing the cutting edge of hardware and software, yet the advances effectively canceled out. The user experience went nowhere.”
Does your boss engage in interchanges with foregone conclusions?
Robots, says Christian, have become quite good at feigning conversation, giving an appearance of interchange, when in fact there is none.
Thus, when your boss asks you your opinion on something, does it really matter what you say? Or is the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Thus the chief operating officer at the pharmaceutical company had determined that previous financial returns for the group were acceptable and that no change was needed. The method of his thinking led relentlessly to the same endpoint. Evidence was irrelevant. Other viewpoints were useless. It was a foregone conclusion. It wouldn’t make any difference whether this kind of manager had machines or people working for him. Everything is determined in advance.
What we are fighting for in the twenty-first century, says Christian, is the continued existence of conclusions not already foregone—the continued relevance of judgment and discovery and figuring out, and the ability to continue to exercise them.
Is your boss no more than a bundle of attributes?
Does your boss have an idiosyncratic point of view or is he (or she) just a bundles of attributes? Christian notes the way a robotic person engages in speed dating.
“Hi, I’m Miranda Hobbes.”
“Dwight Owens; private wealth group at Morgan Stanley; investment management for high-net-worth individuals and a couple pension plans; like my job; been there five years; divorced; no kids; not religious; I live in New Jersey; speak French and Portuguese; Wharton business school; any of this appealing to you?”
Dwight Owens is obviously a robot. In talking to him, we get a gaggle of facts, but nothing distinctive coherent or unique. To be human, Christian notes, is to be a single human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view. If your boss is just a bundle of characteristics, then you can be pretty sure: you’re dealing with a robot.
Does your boss engage in purely left brain speech?
If your boss speaks like Spock of Star Trek fame, who insisted on “Vulcan logic”, living by reason and logic with no interference from emotion, then it’s a good chance that you’re dealing with a robot. This is not uncommon. Our culture, notes Christian, celebrates and emphasizes the left side of the brain, so that people start to act and think like machines. By better educating the left hemisphere and better valuing and rewarding and nurturing its abilities, all of us, particularly managers, are encouraged to act like robots.
“You see the same left-hemisphere bias in the field of economics,” says Christian. “Emotions are considered barnacles on the smooth hull of the mind. Decisions should be made, to the greatest extent possible, in their absence—and, as much as possible, calculatingly, even algorithmically.”
If your boss is all left-brain speech of ratios and calculation and logic, you know what you’re dealing with.
Does your boss impose work processes that turn you into a robot
Does your boss’s hierarchical bureaucratic work processes turn you into a robot? This is strong evidence that you are dealing with a robot.
In organic organizations, peopled by real human beings, the work, says Christian, is not pyramidal/hierarchical, but rather fractal. The level of decision making and artistry is the same at every level of scale. He cites as an example the U.S. Marine Corps and the classic handbook, Warfighting: “Subordinate commanders must make decisions on their own initiative, based on their understanding of their senior’s intent, rather than passing information up the chain of command and waiting for the decision to be passed down. Further, a competent subordinate commander who is at the point of decision will naturally better appreciate the true situation than a senior commander some distance removed. Individual initiative and responsibility are of paramount importance.”
The reality in today’s workplace is for the most part very different. Christian cites Studs Terkel: “For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. ‘I’m a machine,’ says the spot-welder. ‘I’m caged,’ says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. ‘I’m a mule,’ says the steelworker. ‘A monkey can do what I do,’ says the receptionist. ‘I’m less than a farm implement,’ says the migrant worker. ‘I’m an object,’ says the high-fashion model. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: ‘I’m a robot.’” The workers, notes Christian, are not bemoaning jobs they’ve lost. They are bemoaning the fact that their current jobs suck.
The fact that the managers are the unhappiest workers of all should hardly come as a surprise.
Does your boss have a robotic obsession with efficiency?
Many jobs can be automated. Christian sees this as potentially a good thing—“a kind of maggot therapy: it consumes only those portions that are no longer human, restoring us to health.”
After all, isn’t efficiency a good thing? Surely doing more with less is beneficial?
The problem, Christian says, is that the robot’s sense of efficiency is efficiency in a narrow sense. It’s at odds with the ancient Greek sense of Aretê, which implies a respect for the wholeness and oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of efficiency in one part of life at the expense of the entirety of life. In this narrow robotic sense of efficiency, we are losing our understanding of what it is to be part of the world, and instead becoming an enemy of it.
“A farm equipment worker in Moline complains that the careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good. The first is an ally of the Gross National Product. The other is a threat to it, a kook—and the sooner he is penalized the better. Why, in these circumstances, should a man work with care? Pride does indeed precede the fall.” (Again from Studs Terkel.)
Does your boss prevent you from adding value?
The chief operating officer at the pharmaceutical firm was telling these highly intelligent people to keep doing the same thing over and over. For robots and even some humans, there is comfort in following a known method: it can be a relief not to have to reinvent everything at every minute. But if you’re just operating by habit all the time, then you’re not really living.
If you see work as spending a certain amount of time learning what to do, and the rest of your time simply doing it, then there is a risk that the real human being has left. A robot has already taken your place.
What can bosses can do to stop being seen as robots?
If you are a boss, what can you do to stop being perceived as a mere robot? For a start, you might stop calling yourself a “boss”, with its cultural baggage of extremely hierarchical bureaucratic authority and instead present yourself more neutrally as a manager or supervisor, someone with legal responsibilities in the organizations, but also someone with an obsession for delighting customers, a leader, enabler and inspirer of self-organizing teams, a remover of impediments, in short, a practitioner of radical management.
You might also stop referring to your workers with terms that imply that they are things such as “human resources” to be exploited, rather than as people. You might also stop referring to your customers as “demand” or “eyeballs” or “wallets” and instead refer to them as real people with real problems and real hopes and dreams, people who need to be delighted if your organization is to survive.
Above all, you might start having real adult-to-adult conversations with both the people doing the work and those for whom the work is being done. You might set aside top-down communications and the habit of telling people what to do, and instead actually start listening to the other human beings in the workplace and responding to their concerns, their hopes and dreams. In the process, you might begin to reemerge as a genuine person.
In all of this, Brian Christian’s book, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, would be a terrific guide. Read it. Learn from it. Implement it. You were human once. There is still hope.
Steve Denning’s most recent book is: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning
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