Building Bridges Across Cultures III-Are Humans Ready to Compete with Machines?
Building Bridges Across Cultures is a Monthly series where two perspectives from West and East shall be shared by Jennifer Sertl, USA and Dr Amit Nagpal, India by answering the same question.
With machine learning, machines have been optimized to perform at their highest potential. How can organizations optimize employees to perform at their highest potential ? (eg creativity, narrative, right brain attributes)
Shobhit Mathur, naukri.com
Jennifer Sertl’s Opinion, USA
Given this was about employees, I thought it might be good to have people included in the bridge photo.
With machine learning, machines have been optimized to perform at their highest potential. How can organizations optimize employees to perform at their highest potential ? (eg creativity, narrative, right brain attributes)
Strategy Leadership and the Soul is a book dedicated to answering this question. People and organizations are complex adaptive systems. They are living and breathing entities that are dynamic. Optimizing human capital is a process that is always learning, always changing and always re-evaluating what is relevant and what is no longer valuable. Beliefs don’t change. Tactics do change. So I will share the three most important beliefs the leaders I work with have about employees.
Belief One: My organization is successful based on the vitality of my workforce.
Agility3R has designed a model that integrates human vitality into the business strategy. Because this is a complex process the best way for me to demonstrate this is through images.
An employee’s competitive advantage is the accuracy he or she has in scanning the environment and making decisions. Leaders that value human capital want their employees to be effective scanners. To be an effective scanner the employee has to be holistically healthy and our model for holistic health is the following:
Organizations that value the holistic view of vitality will have an employee base that will be more adaptable. Demonstration of this point of view is seen in the P & L where investment is made on coaching, weight and nutrition programs and financial literacy.
Belief Two: My organization is successful based on the learning velocity of my workforce.
Many organizations ask employees to learn and yet do not create capacity for learning. The organizations that thrive are the ones that actually build in learning time into the capacity planning model. Designing in 10 hours a week to be “no producing” but synthesizing, processing and learning will ensure that the business culture knows that integrating new knowledge is a business imperative.
I recommend that employees always have three distinct skills to sharpen each year.
One skill based on core function of their role within the organization.
One skill based on collaboration and teamwork.
One skill based on communication and storytelling.
People lose their jobs more to lack of cooperation than lack of skill. In this era where we have cross-cultural collaboration, it is a core competence that is undeniable.
Being effective communicators is the way knowledge transfer occurs. There is always knowledge transfer in customer discovery, new skil development and feedback and coaching.
Organizations that build in learning capacity will have more adaptable employees and be better able to infuse the culture with emergent core competency.
Belief Three: My organization is successful based on the truth telling capacity across all layers in the enterprise.
Organizations rise or fall based on truth telling. Jim Collins writes about it better than anyone I know in Good to Great where he describes “confronting the brutal facts.” Too many leaders train people to tell them what they want, then the enterprise spends a lot of energy keeping the illusions safe to protect jobs. An organization that honors how important true feedback loops are and encourages the truth will be more successful. Truth creates an environment for psychological safety- topic which could easily be another book.
People can only adapt and make real positive changes if they actually know what is going on and how their role impacts the outcome. The clear and more precise this occurs with embedded feedback loops allows employees to focus on seeing, sensing, learning and not participating in corporate politics.
There is so much more to say, yet, these three themselves will take a lifetime to master.
Jennifer Sertl, Brand Strategist and co-author Strategy Leadership and the Soul
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Dr Amit Nagpal’s Opinion, India
An Unfair Corporate World
First we created a data oriented (storyless and left brain oriented) corporate world, which was unfair to humans, as only one part of the brain was focused upon. Creativity and Narrative were like neglected siblings.
Then we created machines who can learn. Machines are optimized. Are you?
Result- A world where machines have an unfair advantage over humans. Machines are optimized but humans are not.
Realising Human Potential
To realize the peak human potential, and to optimize employee potential, all the groundwork has been done (in terms of research & studies, tool development) for eg
- Learning styles- How different people learn differently
- Impact of meditation on creativity and intuition
- Studies on power of the sub-conscious mind
- Studies on impact of IQ and EQ on performance
- Learning pedagogy such as Activity based learning/ Experiential Learning and skill based learning
Though all the tools to maximize human potential have been discovered and are theoretically available. But when it comes to implementing all these tools in schools/colleges/ universities, there is still a long way to go. Corporate training also has a long way to go when it comes to realizing peak potential of employees. There are exceptional organisations like Google which are utilizing peak potential of most of their employees, as well as equipping them with right tools and training.
So what’s the Solution?
Individual level
As individuals (employees or entrepreneurs), we have to work hard to bring out our peak potential. Variety of learning tools are available for us for eg books and videos, public workshops, online courses and so on for self learning and guided learning.
Organisation level
Organisations will have no choice but to create a continuous learning culture. Government needs to support this culture for eg IT industry employees getting a tax rebate for personal development activities.
To keep pace with the machines, we will need continuous skilling, upskilling and reskilling according to the changing demands of the industry. In my view, the future roles and skills in demand will be more right brain focused for eg jobs requiring creativity and innovative thinking. Some of the tasks will require close human machine collaboration such as drawing insights from data, finding patterns in data etc
Training and Coaching has to become intrinsic part of culture of every organisation. Machines have an unfair advantage over human beings and it is human beings who need extra support to compete successfully with the machines and collaborate with machines whenever required.
Co-optetion is the future, where human beings will do both:-
- compete with machines
- collaborate with machines.
Are you ready?
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Dr Amit Nagpal is a Business Storyteller and Lifelong Educator. He is also President and Community Builder of Bloggers Alliance.
