Automation

We’ve always used people to do machine’s work because:

• It was easier
• It was cheaper
• It was more convenient
• It followed traditional dogma

Then, when circumstances forced us to automate those jobs the people who did them perversely resisted it because they felt that they:

• Became irrelevant
• Became worthless
• Lost a sense of who they are
• Lost a sense of purpose in life
• Felt that they were under attack

Automation is as old as the Iliad so its slow uptake in our lives owes a lot to the expediency offered by the first four points made above and it is resisted for the five distinct reasons that follow them.

It’s the same everywhere, work and life. And it needn’t be.

Imagine the disruption that would arise if we viewed each human being as an incredibly valuable, virtually irreplaceable resource and treated them as such. The employer/employee contract where the former seeks to, maybe subconsciously at times, diminish the sign-on value of the latter to the extent that they cost as little as possible, would instantly change.

Workers then might be treated as football stars whose value is determined not just by market conditions but also their relative skills and talent.

The way we treat work will change, from a chore we all need to a passion to be explored and developed. We may become self-propelled in a business, navigating its culture and adjusting to its needs, as Gore Associates do.

Job satisfaction, employee retention and business growth may become outliers as in the case of John Lewis and Partners.

The difficulty other businesses face in emulating these examples speaks volumes about our priorities and ‘vision’ (or lack of). The fact that every new form of automation is enthusiastically embraced by business owners and almost universally rejected by their employees speaks volumes about how we price work and how we prize those who do the work.

To change this we need to think differently. Not about technology, that is always the means through which we amplify what we would normally, manually do but about each other.

If we were to start by the simple, basic principle that people truly matter, that would change everything.

I know this is not easy to do (and in a past life I was part of John Lewis and Partners and experienced the difficulties in maintaining this first hand) but as work becomes more of a challenge to get right and getting it right becomes the challenge to solve in order to succeed, the alternatives we have left narrow.