Humans Are Not Robots! Really? Wow!

In a recent report sponsored by the SAP institute, Human Capital Media released the dramatic headline: Humans Are Not Robots.”

OMG!  Really???  And here, for nearly a century, we’ve been treating them like they are!

What are we going to do?

The SAP article was talking about the implication of having to accommodate individual differences that are not problematic when coding application software – but just imagine!  Eventually, we’ll have to treat everyone as unique individuals with their own skills and experiences and histories and capabilities and – good heavens! – emotions!

We’ll have to start actually discussing how people can use their unique value to contribute to team efforts in a collaborative, innovative way.  We’ll have to use a common language to describe those skills (for efficiency, of course – since we can’t completely lose sight of that!), and management will have to actually change from what Ordway Tead described in 1935 as, “getting people to do what they ordinarily wouldn’t want to do” to helping people grow, aligning their strengths and capabilities and passions with corporate interests which – come to think of it – might actually address real customer problems.

Now, of course this post is jestful hyperbole.  But think about it!  What are we really doing when we treat everyone in the company as some sort of conglomerate entity?  We might, of course, differentiate between roles or levels in the organizations (Nurses vs. Doctors, Management vs. Workers, etc.) – but we still bunch all these folks together as though we could establish one approach that might successfully eke out the most productivity we can from them.

Now, we’ve even added age differentiation into our vocabulary.  It’s really discriminatory ageism – but it sounds niftier when we call it “Millenials” vs. “Gen Y” vs. “Boomers.”  Cute titles make it ok to segregate, I guess.

How do we end this descending spiral into a day when our workforce really is simply an automated resource?  By honoring and respecting each other as individuals who are of inherent value – not just because of what their job title is, or their rank in the organization, or their education or age or ethnicity or any other factor – besides the value in being who they are.  From there, we can appreciate history and education and circumstance and experience and passion, and help each other evolve a workplace – and a world – worth living.

Honda Asimo Robot

Ant Orgs: Taking out the Middle-Man(agement)

There is big talk these days about how large businesses are adjusting to stay nimble in the market. There is at least one group of 10,000 member organizations that are succeeding… seed-eating ant colonies – studied by Deborah Gordon. And what’s more, they are winning.

In Gordon’s 20-year study of the highly functional and adaptive insects she unearthed (sometimes literally) many astonishing facts about how simple and non-cerebral the complexities of their system manifest in one of nature’s most successful biological systems.

And all ant colonies have in common that there’s no central control. Nobody tells anybody what to do. The queen just lays the eggs. There’s no management. No ant directs the behavior of any other ant. – Gordon

Gordon shows that ants use a simple form of social communication – a combination of scent and tactile frequency to perform every task, job change and promotion that supports biological systems of 10,000 members and more. As it happens, effective interpersonal communication accounts for the success of a colony for 15-20 years (the lifespan of the queen) all without the assistance of managers; just a set of agreed upon, albeit genetically innate, rules of engagement.

The correlation to business organization is striking. What a grand undertaking it would be to structure a company like an ant colony. Strip title and ego (even the queen is beholden only to her job function – not issuing orders or commands to assist the flow of the colony). Implicitly enable employees with proactive and reactive tasks based on their skills with the ability to assist where they observe it necessary and valuable (ubiquitous leadership). Reap rewards on an equivocal basis. (payment via profit share) In essence, eliminate the hierarchical structure of a business and replace it with a fluid, task-centric organization.

Perhaps the most challenging hurdle to the experiment is the human-ant disparity in worker incubation. The ant “mentality” arrives with the larvae transmuting into ants. A similar on-boarding program for business necessitates a design processes. Where ants had a 400 million year darwinistic R&D experiment, human counterparts would have to leap-frog to a moderately functional model for deployment with the auspice of self -correction and adaptation inherent in the system.

The future of the corporate landscape is trending toward flatter organizations. The cost of bloated middle management structures is taking it’s toll on profitability and the flexibility to achieve business goals. The interpersonal trust and accountability exhibited by ants shows a functional model for one of the flattest (and largest) natural biological systems. Are we not of nature? What stands in our way? And more pointedly, what would it take to get the same elegantly simple form for us?

Collaboration: One of the Essential Elements of Workforce Equanimity

Thanks to Idea Champions for assembling this list of interesting and inspiring quotes on collaboration: 

1. “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

2. “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

3. “If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.” – Darryl F. Zanuck

4. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford

5. “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

6. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

7. “It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak, and another to hear.” – Henry David Thoreau

8. “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw

9. “Politeness is the poison of collaboration.” – Edwin Land

10. “I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.” – Golda Meir

11. “It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” – Napoleon Hill

12. “No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.” – Althea Gibson

13. “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson

14. “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford

15. “The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.” — Thomas Carlyle

The ability to collaborate is essential in the post-modern, equanimous workplace.  However, not everyone collaborates in the same way.  People are different, and they bring different gifts and talents to the collaborative space.  In fact, they bring widely different ways of collaborating with them, based on temperament, past experience, role, etc.

WE encourage teams to use the DiSC assessment to inform them of their collaborative styles, as well as the other skills that they will bring to a team, as the project is starting.  WE will be happy to facilitate that for your team, too.