In 2017 Strive To Be More Human, Less Perfect

One of my favorite songs is by The Police. It's called "Roxanne." Almost everyone reading this knows it. Almost everyone knows the intro because of the weird bantering at the beginning that feels natural in the song. What many don't know is that song was a throwaway tune that was never supposed to be a single. It was never supposed to be a hit. It was never even supposed to even be recorded in the first place.

Did you know that bantering in the intro was a mistake that was left in on the final production? Well why not when you don't feel the song is worth anything anyhow?

The story goes that Andy Summers had sat on the piano during the recording and laughing ensued. It was so imperfect yet it made the final cut.

That imperfection is a learning lesson for us all as we head into 2017.

Even though we live in a world powered more and more by technology, we are surrounded by people. People who make mistakes and are imperfect. They are showing they are human. They are showing they are dependent on others to learn from those mistakes. Yet the more we are surrounded by technology, the more we become surrounded by process. Processes make us believe we are more efficient. Yet even with all this efficiency we are surrounded by new forms of chaos. We are surrounded by change. We are surrounded by institutions built to solve problems or provide services that indirectly create only more problems and more services. Many of these same businesses, governments and institutions have forgotten what makes us thrive, evolve and survive as human beings. They've forgotten about why they created themselves in the first place. They've sold out humanity and kindness for division, bureaucracy and disinformation. For some companies dehumanization in the name of automation and convenience has helped them possibly double or triple revenue but it's also led to a questionable future. It's led to outrage. It's led to alienation. Once people don't trust institutions or are made to feel like a cog in the wheel or irrelevant, well, we seek to find or create new alternatives. To find new opportunities.

This is why people leave countries decimated by war, oppression and discrimination. It's why you may want to leave a crappy job you are enduring currently. If you are in an uncomfortable place in the world, you take any opportunity to try to find other scenarios especially when it means staying alive. You're a human after all, just like the rest of everyone here on LinkedIn.

Last year I wrote about how 2016 would be a world of analog. Many laughed. But one person, David Sax, wrote a whole book on the topic. And for good reason. When you are surrounded by technology you crave human emotions and feelings. We don't simply want an app that can give us every piece of music in the world. While that's convenient it isn't something that provides connection like the vinyl you have on a shelf that others thumb through at a dinner party. Or the books that take up your shelf that acts as a conversation starter with others. While the "likes" and "follows" of social media in the halcyon days of these services were a way to showcase to others your interests, now they are simply data signals to help advertisers sell you more stuff you probably don't need.

So where does this leave us as we cross the chasm from a turbulent 2016 into what could possibly be an unforgiving 2017? Many institutions may feel the need to build up process and efficiency at the expense of the human touch. Here's three reasons why putting people first and accepting their humanity instead of their perfection in an overtly digitized world can work wonders for connection in this new year:

1. Companies who actually care about their employees will be more important than those who only care about technology. It's interesting when you are told you are important but then put through such systems of automation that require you to do the work more than the software if some of these companies really care about you at all. My thinking is they don't and they can say they care about their employees but when they want them to work like software rather than people, maybe they should stop lying and just automate the entire infrastructure.
2. Companies that make their entire experience based on human emotions and moods will be more relevant than those based solely on utility. We've seen this happen with some companies. It's interesting (not really since I come from this world) that music experiential SaaS company Spotify does this best. I'm in the mood for hip hop, I can listen to a bunch of it. I'm in the mood to work out, I can find 135 BPM dance music, I'm in the mood to host a dinner party I can find chillout music. Ultimately Spotify will know more about my mood and I'll have to tell them less about that. This is the beauty of machine learning in making these experiences more emotional, not less.
3. Companies that make mistakes and leave them in to show their imperfection will not be castigated but praised. Corporation are not people. They are made up of them (for now). We as people make mistakes. And companies that are made up of people and not machines or people who behave like machines will benefit the most when they make mistakes and explain to others why those mistakes happened and what they plan to do about it. While many of us love perfection, many of us realize we live in an imperfect world.

Geoffrey Colon works at Microsoft for Bing. He is author of the book Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal. Listen to his weekly marketing podcast for eccentric minds Disruptive FM on iTunes, Google Play Music, Spreaker, SoundCloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and YouTube.