Automation and Innovation – Mindsets first !!

Automation and Innovation – these are the new buzz words of today’s world. We’ve seen it happen… see it every day; if you were born in the 80’s, like me, you would definitely have transitioned from manual to automated in several aspects.

Automation is not a new technology – it is only application and integration of technology that exists and enhancing them to improve productivity. It is a procedure change, a revolution of SOPs which has increased what we can achieve in a day’s work and gives us more opportunity to focus on what really needs our attention. The advent of Automation challenged us to think beyond – “out of the box” in the true sense!

Since we are in an era where collectively we push the boundaries of what can be set up and set free to work on its own, I would like to share my thoughts on the process of adaptability to automation.

Let us think about Automation at a very mundane level – let us talk about e-mail rules which we all use!

Lets talk about Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). Their existence and usage are so commonly fed into our systems that many of us probably don’t even recall what the acronym ATM stands for!

Think about Voice mails, think about cars that drive on their own, automated doors, all of these make me think of few basic questions:

1)   How did we transition to Automation?? Change is supposed to be difficult – how did the radical change of Automation settle in so smoothly across the globe with minimal resistance?

2)   How did some of us come up with the idea of automating: something hitherto not thought of??

3)   How can we contribute and implement this in our everyday life to achieve more and at the same time, focus on the criticals and save time for other pursuits?

The answer to all of these questions can be summed up by this one sentence: “Automation and Innovations are mindsets first!”

The very advent of Automation is a mindset, a belief that something can be done better. Technology can be integrated, made to work together to achieve greater targets. Think of it this way: a clock could always keep track of time and also sound alarms at a set time. An AC which switches itself on at a pre-determined time or a music system that switches itself off after an hour (sleep mode) – these are basically the power supply and the clock integrated and made to work together. Both the technologies existed separately for a long time, but the integration is what changed the picture completely and took us to a new era of tech-savviness!

Similarly, when we transitioned to knowing how to use the pivot table function within Excel, when we started to learn and understand the syntax for a v-lookup formula, or a nested if condition – we only adapted to the change in the procedure. These can always be done manually – but what did we learn? We learned how to write that syntax. The same way as we switched from going to banks to ATMs…

We saw the benefits, and we embraced the change. We started with a willingness to learn, and we practiced. We pressed the buttons, nervously at times – at times ending the transaction due an incorrect key press, and we learnt from our mistakes. We resolved to get better – and thus, we embraced the change! We took that first step, and enjoyed the result, and moved further ahead!

Embracing the change as more and more automation was pouring in was the key factor in mass acceptance and establishment of automation in our routines. This acceptance helped us think of what more can be automated… and so we did automate by leaps and bounds and we believe so much more can be automated!!

In my own work, many years back, I saw an amazing feature within Microsoft’s office – the spell checker. It is a simple functionality that corrects common erroneous spellings such as extra key-presses. Everyone who has worked on MS Word knows about this.

However, I realized that I can tweak this functionality to write large emails with a simple keyword. I started entering pre-formatted, well written lines, that I commonly use in my emails (such as “I look forward to your response!”) into the spell-checker. Today, I can generate a 30 liner or bigger email with simply two or three keystrokes!!

Of course there are templates that do the same – but I find this technique faster than even templates. This is automation in a very simple aspects – but is very easy to implement and saves a huge amount of time specially considering that I often send out over 300 emails in a normal day’s work apart from phone calls, reports, meeting, status calls, and so on – that’s almost 1 email every few seconds and this is my secret! It also standardizes the content and ensures that none of the important aspects are left out – which may have been the possibility if was typing this from the scratch every time!

I taught this technique to my colleagues, and today our team is way more efficient than before, we have drastically decreased our response time while maintaining the quality of language and presentation in our rocket-fast responses!

Where did I learn this from? I wasn’t taught this at school, I did not attend any courses for this. The entire idea came from the belief, the mindset change that there has got to be a better way to make the machine take care of a repetitive task. Also, for repetitive tasks, consistency of quality is key, and the machine never loses focus!

Such a simple step helps me multitask as well – multitasking is really quite a topic of debate: When can you effectively multitask?

I don’t think it is possible to divide your attention to three things, all at once, and do justice to all of them! Few people, arguably, are naturally talented to do two things at once – but most of us cannot. There is a reason why driving while texting is dangerous: The human mind is not equipped to handle this!! It can only be safe to do so when either the text writes itself (voice to text functions) or if the car self drives!!

In other words, when you use a machine to take care of the repetitive yet important task, even as you handle another critical task with your focus on it – is when you can effectively multitask. What do you focus on? The critical piece without delaying the other aspect by letting the machine take care of it!

It is simple things such as these in which we can bring in innovation in execution and increase our outputs, and it is this practice that helps us create this mindset which inspires to come up with greater ideas.

I understand, for some of my audience, this is at a very basic grass-root level since some of my contacts would probably be making headway progress into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I am a Human Resource person myself (not a techie, please do excuse the layman language). However, I still believe that even for those who are working on advanced Automation concepts such as AI and ML, it is the change in mindset that brings in innovation – first in ideas and then in products. If we can embrace this mindset, we would very naturally be able to usher in greater innovation in what we do!

With this, I encourage fellow LinkedIn users to share your views; especially if you have implemented any similar automation or innovative methods to improve outputs in simple tasks; please do share in the comments. Let us exchange ideas and improve our work environment, let us embrace and join the Revolution of Automation!