I've written about this topic before, including the immediate prior post, linking to a dark humor YouTube video on "Technology in the Classroom", comments on social media, and on productivity gains from "Sharpening the Axe"
The area of need for technology is clear in my posts on "Seriously, Why didn't we see it coming?" and "Hypnotized in high places."
The technology I'm talking about is not the type that T.S. Eliot warns us about, "systems so perfect that no one needs to be good" -- it is "socio-technology" -- the technology of making people work more productively together than they would working separately, or in the "parallel play" world of most office settings.
The first example that comes to mind is the Neanderthal activity called "a meeting", often mocked as "the acceptable alternative to work." Another example is "the committee", a structuring of human activity with the curious property that adding more and more helping hands to the mix makes the outcome less and less helpful.
In terms of basic math or common sense, since our problems grow at least as fast as the number of people in our world, is a method of addressing those problems that utilizes people as resources, not liabilities, and also grows at least as fast as the number of people in the world.
Instead, we have a method of addressing problems that has flattened out only slightly above the capacity of a very bright single person, albeit one with very strong , technology-enhanced muscles. Sadly, our technology has, by simple observation, done nothing to enhance vision, insight, and understanding of the world. We have the paradoxical situation that GM executives are actually surprised that a rising price of gasoline might cause people to prefer cars that get better gas mileage. It's not just GM -- the larger the organization, based on "Meetings" and "reporting", the blinder it appears to be to actual reality on the ground.
Even General Colin Powell has noted that he would tend to trust the opinion of a private on the ground at the site over the central War Room, on whether a bridge existed or had just been blown up.
The technology we need then, to dramatically get back on the productivity increase curve, is technology that creates a work structure where adding people to the decision-making group improves the decisions that come out of it. In math or basic computer science algorithm terms, we need a process whereby N+1 people make better decisions than N people, for any N.
Theory Y management and mindfulness get us much of the way there, but, harking back to TS Eliot's wisdom, we expect to run into the equivalent of the sound barrier -- a wall at which humans who arrive with the intent of fighting each other cannot pass without setting aside their "differences" in the consultation process.
Can technology help us with that transition? This is not about "Powerpoint", or other ways to shout at each other more loudly -- it is about socio-technology that helps us calm our anxieties, touch our better selves, and honestly seek out win-win solutions together.
For this, we need to leap to the next level of computing -- from processing "contents" to processing "contexts".In other words, we need assistance not in dealing with the complexity of details within a particular frame of reference or viewpoint, but in dealing with how those contents and available solutions appear to change, based on the framework or viewpoint that form the context for those detail.s.
The reason is that there is a huge amount of important stuff buried in the tacit relationship between the details we are seeing, and the reference frame that gives specific meaning to those details.
Meetings at which people simply continue to assert loudly their details and which dots form an "obvious straight line when connected" with others doing the same, but from different viewpoints, will only generate anger and confusion. It is not the details that are the problem -- it is that we have failed to adjust in a rational way for the differing perspectives and frames that are invisibly but critically attached to those details.
This is where the next breakthrough in productivity will arise - in solving this problem.
And this is where I see the power of virtual worlds, such as Linden Labs "Second Life" coming into play, becuase, there, it is possible to shift the entire visible context of a meeting in a keystroke.
That means that we have a way to get our contexts out of our heads into a space where we can compare and contrast them, and understand how much our differences are due to different frames, not different data.
More on this in a later post.
Wade
1 comment:
This post touches the core concept behind "Getting to Yes", in terms of letting go of arguments about "position" and trying to shift upwards to seeking common "interests".
The key concept is that rational people should be able to sit down and discuss what is the truth in terms of "frameworks" as well as the truth in terms of "details". They need to deal with both figure and ground, as it were, to understand why the figure they see so clearly is so invisible to the other parties at the table, and the way to fix it, by shifting it to the other framework.
Technology to make us aware of our contexts and help us shift between them so see things as others see them IS finally available.
That's our direction.
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