Dialogue & 4IR
How Dialogue advances the Fourth Industrial Revolution
By Paul Mooney, Founder | Cohesion Global | [email protected]
Senior Research Associate, Institute for Global Dialogue
Head of C-Suite Leadership, University of the Free State Business School
Head of Dialogue Faculty, DaVinci School of Business Leadership
Founding Fellow, Chartered Institute of Dialogue
PhD Candidate ‘Transforming Collective Thought into Economic Value through Dialogue’
This is a 7,000-word article that will take a human 40 minutes to read and to fully understand. A robot can read it aloud in 18 minutes, but may never fully understand it.
The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) refers to the global spread of cyber-physical systems on a multi dimensional and multi-cultural scale which will bring with it un-thought of capabilities for humans and machines leading to a potential singularity where human-like thinking and machine-like actions may merge to form its own consciousness and intelligence.
4IR bodes that digitisation will lead to implants with built in intelligence on chips the size of a human hair, that will be embedded in every facet of global civilisation given permission by the free will of a human.
Long before we might have to agree to have an implant in our arm to measure our blood pressure so that we get lower life insurance premiums, our senses have been bombarded by digitisation since the moment it was invented. Nothing changed the collective mind as much as the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago.
For now at least, any vision of a Blade Runner future only applies to a small percentage of the world’s population. Yet, it won’t be long in coming to fruition, as in 2013, the UN reported that more people on earth have a mobile phone than have access to basic sanitation.
The likelihood is that the pace of change for 4IR will be exponential so that the law of squares will be more potent than any law of physics. While 4IR may bring light for some, it will also no doubt bring its shadow to others.
Technology informs our perceptions of the world around us
As technology becomes more than just the tool that helps 21st century humans navigate an ever-decreasing planetary reality, digitisation of information and warehousing of data is fast becoming the manner and the means by which humans who have access to it, actually perceive and act in the world.
Deliberately or inadvertently, the future of our species could depend on our ability to ensure that communities begin the dialogue together to ensure that any 4IR technology acts as a force for value creation without harm.
More sinister than this, technology is already the platform that influences the thoughts that drive our behaviour. 4IR might be about digitisation, but it is also important to remember that for now, humans are still analogue.
Long before he ever heard of 4IR, Professor David Bohm (1917 – 1992) had quite a bit to say about how humans have created a fragmented society with such a pervasive fault in our system of human thought.
First industrial revolution – robot becomes robot
Ten thousand years ago, humans evolved from being hunter-only civilisations to being settled gatherers by the establishment of small-scale farming.
Yet, it was not until the late 1700’s that Europeans developed steam and waterpower that led to the introduction of mechanical equipment that could speed up and also reduce the cost of human labour. In effect we saw the creation of the first modern robots. It could be said that robots became robots.
Second industrial revolution – some humans become robotic
In the mid 1800’s a second robotic evolution began with the specialisation of work, widespread electricity and mass production that was fuelled by the advent of global communications.
Human actions themselves became more robotic, as workers on both sides of the Atlantic toiled on immense production lines to build standardised products for global distribution. It could be said that some humans became robots.
Third industrial revolution – some robots dreamed of being human
In the 1960’s, humans began to develop transistors, computers, space flight, and large-scale information technology, as we know it today. This led to automated production; essentially positioning low intellect humans lower down the value chain while placing high intellect humans higher up the value chain. The first signs of global inequality began to appear.
It was also the birth of the consumer value chain on every continent. It could be said that some robots dreamed about being more human.
New questions for 4IR ethical frameworks and governance
While technology is used to organise rebellion and revolution (France and Hong Kong) just as much as it is being used to track consumers (Chinese Citizen Scores) or to drone-bomb terrorists (Bin Laden), many commentators agree that the key issues are as yet ‘unthought-of’.
I suggest that we will have to do much better at ‘thinking about thinking’ together if we want to avoid accidentally speeding up the extinction of our species.
What is Dialogue?
Dialogue is interplay of words and their meanings, by a process of slowing down words, thoughts, emotions, actions, behaviours, internal reactions and external reactions in a ‘psychologically safe environment’ that is created specifically for Dialogue to take place.
Dialogue is therefore a learned process of ‘collective creation’ through the mutual shared meaning of ‘deep non-communicating’ which makes conscious (1) the origin of a thought (2) the person who thinks that thought (3) the process that the thought goes through and if that thought is shared; (4) by the understanding of that thought by its receiver (5) its meaning by the receiver, thus creating an (6) iterative process of thinking about thought together in a psychologically safe environment.
The people who originate thinking about thought become engaged in a conscious process of reflection, analysis, understanding, exploration and shared meaning-making, which continuously examines their process in a non-judgmental, suspensive, respectful, deeply safe spirit of inquiry into the nature of the process itself.
Dialogue is an experiential adult learning process which has been designed for groups who wish to improve their collaboration, to deepen their self and other awareness, to improve their performance and to improve their capability to operate as a group focused on task orientations without falling into anti-task behaviour. Ultimately, it is a process that expands and enhances personal and group leadership.
4IR technology
4IR includes such processes as genome editing, cloning, machine intelligence/mobility, breakthrough materials, virtual reality, non-traceable avatars, machine based human limbs, thought activated devices, self driving cars, self programmable guns, speech to text and vice versa, advanced robotics, 3D printing, flying cars, cyber everything, nano technologies, breakthrough platforms such as blockchain and massive shifts in cyber currency, which will all lead to new questions for agreed ethical frameworks and for the governance of human society, both in particular and in general.
Right now, we have no idea what the robots will invent for themselves, given they may get the opportunity to do so.
First world opportunity
I myself, the writer of these words have not been in a nine to five job for twenty years. My Internet connection, my laptop and my phone have been my office environment for decades.
Yet, I cannot report any inconvenience to my ability to travel, to consume, to create a business, to build technology, to create products and services, to be in relationships, to be in constant touch with my children who live 10,000km away, nor to my ability to create, sell and deliver workshops and leadership training to over ten thousand delegates in eighty companies on four continents.
This was possible because I was born in a little ‘so-called’ first world country called Ireland. In 1982 I was working on DOS based accounting packages, by 1984 I owned my own personal computer and by 1989 I was walking down Grafton Street in Dublin with my first mobile phone. I remember playing Dark Castle on my Mac Luggable while my friends were playing snooker at lunchtime. I was lucky enough to work for several international telecommunications companies.
In 1999 at the age of thirty-six, I became an international technology entrepreneur because I could build a technology platform in Dublin that was run from Sweden; with connections to mobile operators in eleven EU countries. I was delivering SMS and WAP services to millions of consumers every month.
Now, as I live and breathe in Johannesburg and as I prepare to become a citizen of South Africa, now being called a ‘Femicide Nation’, I am gifted to witness and just as much abhorred and challenged to realise, that I am seeing with my very eyes a much different and much more complex possibility that unfolds in front of me at the dangerous traffic lights, in the sullen and insulated gated communities, at the violent farms, in the ferocious townships and in the horrible reality that in this Cradle of Mankind, a woman is raped every four minutes.
Dialogue and 4IR may never be enough to stop the violence of humans thought.
A philosophical rather than a 4IR technology question for Dr. Frankenstein, the monster and the village
The 4IR movement appears to be a flash point of at least three philosophical worlds; the world of investors and technology developers who choose to build and deploy their creations (Dr. Frankenstein), the individual’s world where he or she makes choices to use or abuse the available platforms (the Monster) and the world of collective culture driven by desires and the choices they have made, pitted against fast-moving moral standards (the Village).
An easy way to understand this complexity is to remind ourselves that that automatic weapons have become much better at killing humans, yet in certain countries, they are being sold to people whose moral compass is untested when they are buying them. Equally, drones are sold online that can place innocent lives at risk by being flown near airports.
So how shall we think together about the reality of a tiny drone the size of an insect that kills a human by face recognition that you might be able to buy at Wal-Mart?
Corporate meets carbon life form meets civilisation
Perhaps 4IR is a narrative in which corporate meets carbon life form meets civilisation. In a 2019 statement, corporate leaders of business roundtable in the USA scrapped shareholder-first priority in favour of stakeholders. But is a top down approach enough?
Consumers will vote with their apps more than their phones it seems. Even the mighty Apple Computer Company predicts that services will outperform hardware in their future revenue. The ‘i’ in the iPhone will become more important than the phone. It is this very ‘i’ that would benefit hugely from Dialogue.
What informs this fusion appears to be much deeper than our ability to make military grade weapons available to psychopaths, in our producing addictive medicinal drugs that kill thousand of patients every year, that you can buy cannabis infused vape at a mall, or that reality TV and sex slavery can be delivered to your door faster and cheaper twenty four hours of the day.
VR (Virtual Reality) will change the game even further. You won’t even have to leave your apartment, your farm or your house. If it were possible for you to eat your battery power, you would likely never leave home.
How is it that 4IR consumerism might be driven by money that does not exist, by pleasure that does not last or by culture that shifts faster than sand in a storm?
What for?
The key question about 4IR and about Dialogue for that matter must surely be ‘what for’? What do we want to integrate technology and thinking for?
Even if this could be answered by the generation that makes 4IR a reality, much more thinking about thinking is needed, because billions of online trolls will make choices that will affect us all; and not just the five people they used to have a beer with on a Friday night.
As always, potential and paradox appear to arrive together. Nazi rockets that killed hundreds of thousands in World War 2 propelled us to the moon. So to whom will we ask the question?
The World Economic Forum is one place to start because they represent Dr. Frankenstein. They name the key issues of inequality, security and identity, voice and community as topics for consideration in 4IR.
Inequality
According to Oxfam, sixty-two named individuals own more wealth than the poorest three and a half billion people on the planet. Unequal societies tend to be more violent than more equal societies. This shows up as more people in prison, higher mental illness, lower life expectancy and lower levels of trust.
While the benefits for 4IR consumers will continue to be incontrovertible, what is needed is to find a way for Dialogue to take its place on the 4IR digital platform as a powerful practice to evoke belonging, connection, creativity and impersonal fellowship that re-balances an already unequal pendulum.
However, Dialogue among the technologically elite will not be enough. Not everyone on the planet is an equal consumer. What if 4IR forces more consumers to live behind electric fences, as most middle class people do in Johannesburg today as part of their modern reality?
We must first face the reality that all consumers are not created equal.
Primary consumers
Primary consumers are likely to be either entrepreneurs or to be employed. Realistically, they are so consumed by consumerism that they find little time to slow down to have a conversation, never mind knowing how to have a Dialogue. Back to back meetings are ‘stab in the back meetings’ more often than not.
Primary consumers are obsessed by production and efficiency. Little do they realise that they waste over 50% of their efforts simply due to their individual confusion and the collective incoherence that surrounds them. Even though they swim in a swamp of data, most executives do not know how to interpret it for meaning or for wise and mature decision-making. This is where Dialogue comes in.
Secondary consumers
Secondary consumers service the primary consumer with low level services or alternatively they are more likely to be unemployed. Yes, they have more time to Dialogue, but it appears that they are driven by rage and loathing or a deep desire to destroy. Trigant Burrow once theorised that the core of group dynamics is actually the hatred by the people who are in the group against the people who do not belong the group.
Many of us practice our right to be a primary consumer by ordering a pizza on a phone app that is delivered to our door and there isn’t even a cash transaction involved. A secondary consumer that cannot afford the pizza might collect the trash or if they are lower down the literal food chain, they might even have to eat the leftovers from the bin.
Primary consumers can therefore ignore secondary consumers much more easily in this technology era because they are nothing more to them than an avatar on their phone. This is another reason to create a digital platform for Dialogue, but only if we answer the question what for?
Facebook and Twitter is not the answer. A viable technology platform that convenes deep, long lasting, authentic human-to-human connection is needed more than ever.
Terence McKenna once wrote that “the issue is not to find the answer, the issue is to FACE the answer”. Deep down, we all know we are part of the problem, but our social and corporate systems are not psychologically safe enough for us to explore it, never mind to admit it. Never mind to do something about it.
Unless we can link the thinking to the data, we will never be able to convince Dr. Frankenstein to build a new monster that will fulfill his ambition to create life and still not kill the villagers.
Lets face it, WE ARE THE PROBLEM! We can’t even have that conversation we have been putting off with our mother or father, even though all we have to do is pick up the phone. That thirty-year feud with your brother could be ended on one whatsapp with an apology.
Tertiary consumers
Those we have called secondary consumers (the poor and the unemployed) could in practice become tertiary consumers. As 4IR value will be created by the primary consumer and supported to do so by the secondary consumer; they may all look into their phones on the subway and not be bothered that only the scraps go to the tertiary consumer.
This is not a new story to humans. A wise man once was reported to have said ‘the poor will always be with us’. Technology helps us to hide and divide; yet with 4IR there may be no place to hide.
4IR security threat to primary consumers
The 4IR security threat will be a new reality because anybody who has a phone and some airtime with an intention towards violence could use it to track and steal the pizza; to kill the primary consumer or even to attack the delivery guy out of desperation.
Such viciousness seems to come from a deep sense of rage and one inviolable fact here in South Africa, is that violence is a viable business. You just have to look at the xenophobia in South Africa at this time to see what is actually going on in the real world. All over Africa, former presidents have been accused of rape, corruption and murder and to this day, none of them have been successfully prosecuted or imprisoned.
4IR will upwardly segment intellect
4IR will upwardly segment human intellectual capacity so that technology workers will be paid more to develop platforms that will feed Dr. Frankenstein’s profit motive and at the same time feed the consumer’s desires in the village, but only if the monster does not get out of its cage.
It is only when the monster escapes, that the villagers become afraid and form a mob to kill him. But how in a 4Ir society will they be able to kill a robot?
The secondary consumers from the village will look after the health, waste management, roads, security, food, and pleasure of both the doctor and the monster by supplying them with their desires while at the same time paying them for their own consumer habits. Is this a classical Catch 22?
Cohesion Dialogue
Cohesion Dialogue is a five stage process of evolving a leader’s maturity, enhancing the resilience of the executive team, making staff groups more cohesive, training internal guides to run Bohm Dialogue processes that solve intractable organisational problems at the source of the issues and by accessing a continuous listening active information field through a real time dashboard that consistently produces coherent collective decision making in an organisation.
When the collective matures or coheres in this way, it links directly to value creation on the profit and loss and balance sheet. The process demonstrates how coherent leaders convert human-machine potential into measurable value; by minimising waste and by diminishing the impact of toxic cultures that often arise inadvertently in complex adaptive systems.
In essence, Dialogue becomes the leadership and followership process that guarantees that any organisation can evolve into being a mature coherent organisation.
In effect, it simplifies the complex task of leading and managing massive amounts of human energy, mechanical algorithms and economic resources into becoming an integrated and whole organism capable of becoming a 4IR collective.
Corruption of thought is more expensive than corruption of money
We can easily count the cost of executive or leadership corruption when it is discovered. It can be counted in rands and cent. While Don Henley once sang that a man with a suitcase could steal more money than a man with a gun, we can’t blame the leaders alone for incoherence or for fragmentation.
When we are able to count the cost of corruption of thought in psychological, emotional, spiritual as well as in financial terms, the Dialogue community will be adding meaningful wisdom to the evolution of ‘homo meditatus cogitus’; a reflective meditative man.
Real client views
Having gathered data from more than ten thousand delegates over ten years, I have seen that the quality of thoughts in most meetings, the quality of words sent in most emails and the quality of language that takes place in most corporate conversations is corrupt enough to start with. As Bohm said, ‘we must attend to the waterfall rather than to the pool’.
The corporate mind may be changing. I can see a glimpse of hope. I had a call with a senior leadership executive in the global mining industry recently who told me that having to make a business case for Dialogue would be a copout. I was told that ‘Dialogue needs to happen at scale or there will be no business to make a case for’.
The pace of 4IR
4IR has the capacity to accelerate the rate of primary consumerism more than at any time in recorded history. The side affect is that a general motors factory worker could lose his or her job, and could therefore lose their status as a primary consumer.
Unless an individual takes control of and maintains their own value creation so that they can remain a primary consumer, they could end up being a secondary consumer. If they cannot do that, even though they might have a high level of education, they may even end up experiencing their life as a tertiary consumer.
4IR Jobs for primary consumers
The ‘posterbot’ for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2019 is a robot called Sophia and there is little evidence that this machine could add one iota to the quality of life of any household on the planet, never mind to the staving refugees in Yemen.
According to the Future of Jobs report, 4IR jobs will require employees to practice complex problem solving; to increase the quality of their social skills and to exponentially advance their systems skills. How will a robot help them do that?
What if the robot taught them Dialogue? Once again, Bohm’s call is a sound and most necessary practice.
Those most prone to 4IR job losses will be such simple admin roles as telemarketers, tax consultants, insurance officials, sports referees, legal secretaries, real estate brokers, farm workers and couriers/messengers. Those least prone will be complex multipart and multisensory roles such CEO’s, sales managers, marine engineers, archeologists, technology analysts, coders, HR managers, psychologists, doctors and interestingly enough, mental health workers operating in the field of abuse.
In short, high quality thinking humans will not be fired in favour of a robot.
More unemployed men
One potential impact of 4IR will be that men who make up the majority of the current workforce may become unemployed. If they cannot up-skill themselves back into the value chain, it could put a block on younger lower women who rely on this vast middle class value chain to feed their families. Men are more likely to spend their salary on themselves. How do we factor that into the value chain especially that men are often not used to deep meaningful conversations?
More unemployed countries
If 4IR digitisation means that labour costs will no longer a driving economic issue, populist governments who are lobbied by Dr. Frankenstein will incentivize them for keeping production closer to home. In the USA in 2018, sixty companies from the Top 100 avoided paying any federal taxes at all.
Companies such as Amazon, Delta, Chevron, General Motors, EDG Resources, Occidental Petroleum, Duke Energy, Dominion Resources and Honeywell International between them earned $122,278bn dollars paid no tax at all but received $1,913bn dollars in tax rebates between them.
There is a rumour that Brexit is nothing more than the upper echelon of the wealthy class in Britain avoiding EU regulations on disclosure of income and in enabling the elite creators of their particular monsters to avoid higher EU tax rates.
One knock on affect of 4IR is that the poorer countries that have bet big on the third industrial revolution in terms of cheap labour in mega-factories may not gain their return on investment. They may even end up in deeper debt to the IMF who helped them invest in them in the first place. Economic hit men will still claim their bonuses.
Security
The WEF suggests that a hyper but unequally interconnected world may lead to fragmentation, segregation and social unrest. This is a daily reality in 2019, never mind 2029. Once again, I have seen with my own eyes how a nine-minute Dialogue does wonders to reverse the fragmentation, make people feel connected and respected and to still any social discontent.
The recent drone attack on the oil field in Saudi Arabia shows us that new battlefields create new opportunities for warring government to blame, shame and drone-attack their named enemies, even if the enemies refuse to accept that they are in fact enemies.
4IR has the capacity to weaponise information, money, reputation, national identity, and citizenship; thus bringing state actors into direct conflict not only with other states but also with militant groups, vigilantes, hate groups and media induced maniacs. Frighteningly, 4IR empowers stalkers to a degree never before realised in the history of the human experiment.
Such inevitable 4IR path to destruction could be littered with biological missiles, wearable weapons and distributed energy. The villains of marvel comic books will increasingly coming alive in real life if your finger could become a tazer!
Identity, voice and community
4IR may allow you to have several personas on your various platforms, but it disconnects the real voice. Already in Japan, clinics have to help young teenager to have a date and how to have sex with real people as they have become more connected to virtual dolls and magma cartoon characters.
Here again, Dialogue ensures a safe space for all voices to be heard without judgment, with suspension of opinion in a circle of trust and pure creativity.
Who kills humans?
While it used to be said that a gun did not kill a man, and that a human finger did; we will not be able to say that in the 4IR world; because the gun will be programmed to kill a man, a woman or a child; the gun will pull its own trigger.
If there will be some form of intelligence behind the kill order, it will be some form of humanoid that will be in front of a screen using satellite or 5G to track and fire; just like a video game. This time, it may not even be a man.
A woman is more likely to excel at the visual and kinetic dexterity needed to kill people at a distance. It may even be a child pressing the return button. The execute key literally becomes an executioner. The child soldiers of Africa could never kill so many people as the future child soldiers of 4IR.
Violence begins in the mind
Violence begins in the mind and James Giordano from the Georgetown University medical centre suggests that the ‘brain is the next battlespace’. While the human brain is built for separation and judgment, human language is built for connection. Language is the core of Dialogue. Words are its tools and Thought is its source.
If we wish to end violence, we must get beneath the thoughts that think about violence. One of the simplest ways to do this is Dialogue.
Cooperation and Corporation
Martin Nowak is a professor of maths and biology ay Harvard and he has suggested that co-operation is the only thing that can redeem mankind. It is not lost on me that if we move the letter O in cooperation and replace the E; followed by changing the other O to an R, co-operation becomes corporation.
I would go so far as to suggest that co-operation within and amongst corporations is one of the quickest ways to redeem mankind because so many people are affected by the cultural shift that could take place. 4IR is not about money. It is much more important than that.
This means corporations can choose to learn how to Dialogue amongst themselves and then Dialogue with their value chain and supply chain to co-create value without harm in their extended communities that depend on them for their daily bread.
WHAT WOULD A 4IR CORPORATION LOOK LIKE?
(Written as a Dialogue with Chris Heron, Founder of Vivagogy)
Evolving 4IR organisations in the 2020’s will look very different from today’s ones. They will use different capabilities, operating at increasing speeds of co-creation made possible by effortless operating models running at faster scales of influence.
One of their key practices is that they will use ‘speed of learning’ to differentiate themselves from competitors and potential disruptors. They will be built with flatter structures and grow only based on new social models that will transcend geographies and other physical boundaries.
Love of Creativity
Their love of creativity and of learning will regulate their evolution. Their continuous and coherent contact with their internal and external customers will co-create an entire new value chain that will be extremely difficult to disrupt. Client switching costs will be measured in both psychological and emotional terms as well as in traditional commercial terms.
These self-expanding organisms will be made up of less rigid structures endowed with uncomplicated responsibilities. By embodying divergent leadership and followership styles and by embedding cohesive practices, they will become self-tuning. This means that their evolution will be constant – and most importantly, their advancement will be faster than the constant rate of change.
Managers will be redundant
As a consequence, the day-to-day activities of what are now called ‘managers’ will be very different than they are today. ‘Getting by’ with what is being taught in most business schools will be counter-productive. Even Wharton Business School recently announced that the ‘MBA is in crisis’.
Traditional management, in the form of direct decision making, will reduce because fewer aspects of the organisation will be “managed’ by a ‘human-only’ decision. Right now, SAP runs many business decisions to such a degree that any manager may use it to read data and react to intelligent suggestions.?But what if the core data is aged, incorrect or even incoherent?
Managers in the 20’s will need to think of themselves as mentors or coaches rather than decision makers, and this means they will need to shift their mindset to the next level of coherence and maturity by developing new Dialogic competencies.
Transversal competencies are but one of the latest classifications being promoted by the EU, Unesco, and the United Nations as the next generation of leadership capabilities that will need to be learned and collectively shared.
4IR Managers will need to learn how to enable their teams by co-creating the right culture to thrive in a new eco-system environment where all is one and the customer and the company the same. This means moving from the ego system to the eco system!
Exponential Change
Things are changing so fast, that to remain competitive, leaders and followers in organisations will need to co-create the ‘curve of change’ rather than running behind it.
McKinsey states that ‘the speed of 4IR is ten times as fast and is having three hundred times the impact as the last knowledge revolution’. This means that the fourth industrial revolution will operate three thousand times faster than the organisation you joined ten years ago.
The dizzying nature of this speed of change means that one hundred years is twelve days in today’s terms. To put this in context, a business that took one hundred years to imagine and organise itself, can now be built to the same scale in less than a fortnight.
Just look at your Uber or Airbnb app and remember how long it took to build the taxi system and the hotel system. Observe how quickly these platform organisations have manifested a totally new business model.
In South Africa, Tyme Digital bank operates a business of 750,000 clients with 125 staff and it took only seven months to go from zero clients to its current scale.
Up-skilling thinking about thinking
Leaders, managers and staff will be expected to constantly up skill themselves and this means that the workflow processes in the organisation will have to continuously support this evolution by providing the right environment for learning and thinking. Not only thinking, but more importantly ‘thinking about thinking’.
Taken together, learning and thinking are the core ingredients of Dialogue; because deep in the collective is where the creativity sits that is often hidden or even suppressed by immature or incoherent leaders and followers alike. Boston Consulting Group claims that ‘in the coming decade, companies will increasingly need to compete on their ‘rate of learning’.
Despite the misnomer that revenue drives business, it is actually margin that is responsible for business growth. So how does a 4IR organisation increase its rate of learning so that it can increase its margin?
Artificial Intelligence will evolve some humans into ‘Homo Meditatus Cognitus’
As AI begins to take over repetitive tasks, this will cause a huge disruption to business processes because machine decision-making cannot yet replace how humans actually think and act, especially when they do so maturely and cohesively using higher order cognitive skills using what may be referred to as Transversal Competencies.
Nevertheless, shareholders will insist on the use of AI algorithms for mundane tasks because it will be able to perform better than incoherent humans by processing data more cheaply and more accurately and consistently without a tea break or time off to visit the dentist.
Respond rather than react
Those humans that wish to step into their personal leadership will be few and far between because in these more complex times they must ‘choose to un-learn and re-learn’. They must choose to learn new ways of how to ‘respond’ rather than to ‘react’ by adopting cognitive higher order tasks that AI simply cannot perform. Simply ask an AI programmer and they will tell you there is never enough data to get an intelligent decision from the code.
This means new managers must choose to abandon their current career paths, which are often determined by seniority or by nepotism and by actually doing the work of evolving their ego maturity. The mirror is a tough coach, and it usually does not lie.
This means in simple terms, that the machines may do the doing, but the ‘thinking thinking humans’ (not a typo) will joyfully choose to spend more time in higher order meta-cognitive processes such as practicing Dialogue.
Dialogue advances the culture that automatically innovates in mundane project management meetings in such a way that will accelerate both individual and group creativity; even while processing invoices or when buying photocopiers. Waste is reduced exponentially.
These new ‘thinking thinking’ humans are nothing less than a new breed of leaders whom could be called ‘homo meditatus cognitus’ or ‘contemplative thinking humans’.
Leaders, managers and followers will need to practice the maturity, the resilience and the cohesion that enables them to co-create a more fluid environment.
All the while, AI technology will be seamlessly tracking, recording and reporting data that facilitates the deepest and most profound quality of insights that can augment thinking about thinking that the human/machine interface can achieve together.
This would be a highly evolved singularity in the man/machine interface – harmony rather than competition; both/and instead of either/or.
Thinking as imagination and creativity
Thinking is not just about the words that emanate from the brain as your small mouth noises. It is also counterfactual. Being able to hold the paradox and ambiguity long enough for insight to arise is a critical skill, because consumers will want to buy from companies’ with imagination rather than ‘me-too’ products and services. In the same way, companies will want to attract more intelligent consumers who can help them develop new products and services at minimal additional cost.
The time of business to consumer is coming to an end and will be replaced by AI to AI and consumer to consumer. It is only those leaders who can co-create a fluid culture who will be able to develop new business models that are currently un-thought of.
Mass-Customisation means mass re-training in dialogic practices
This cycle of innovation and its future production cycle will become a sequence of mass customisation. Products such as automobiles are already being customised on production lines just as individuals have ordered them because they be produced in a ‘just-in-time’ production cycle measured in hours rather than days. This means massive unlearning and retraining will be necessary to cope with the increased demand.
McKinsey suggests that half the global workforce of today already needs retraining and we are only just beginning to fathom the scale of the challenge ahead. What appears obvious is that the early adopter organisations that adopt the concept of Dialogue in a fluid culture will thrive from increased transparency and by getting beneath the system’s complexity to reach its elegant simplicity.
Imagine if your ERP system was not blocked by negative politics, absenteeism, hidden agendas, feuds, waste or silo infighting? What kind of organisation would you be leading then?
Yes, the growth of the 4IR organisation will imposes huge psychological, emotional and even spiritual strains to the conditioned behaviour patterns of the workflow and to the established leadership styles of most managers. Most of all, this fluid paradigm will require a measurable transformation to the ‘lived reality’ of the organisational culture.
The evolvable organisational context
Boston Consulting Group recently noted that ‘If 4IR leaders wish to take advantage of new information and to compete in uncertain environments, the organisational context itself needs to be evolvable’. But what does it mean to be evolvable?
The new generation of leaders and managers that will make up the workplace of the future already see things very differently than their parents did. The different behaviour of millenials, who will make up half the global workforce within the next two years, is often a complete mystery to their older C-suite colleagues.
This culture clash has the inadvertent capacity to destroy businesses that are built on rigidity. Leaders, who do not realise that the culture of their organisation is becoming their most important asset, will not understand how quickly they will lose it. Just ask the shareholders of Kodak, Blockbusters, Lehman Brothers or Readers Digest.
One of the most important leadership decisions any leader can make is to conceive of, and to co-create a fluid culture that can be measured and benchmarked through evidence of multiple perspectives of success. The triple bottom line is no longer enough. It will be like moving from playing ordinary chess to competing on a three dimensional chessboard.
By reconceiving the external and internal workings of the organisation as a flexible, evolving ecosystem, businesses will be able to handle much greater dynamism and complexity. This requires aligning all aspects of the organisation to levels of coherence that can be mapped against what may even be incoherent market forces.
The human/machine interface will need to identify and re-allocate resources which will increasingly occur at algorithmic speed. The mathematical algorithm of the machine may be able to show the data, but it is only the knowledge and the wisdom of the human that can accurately convert information into wise action. The ability to press a red button to launch a nuclear weapon is very different from the wisdom of actually doing so.
When combined, the multiple capabilities of Dialogue can create a “self-tuning enterprise” that constantly learns and evolves according to its environment.’ These self-tuning organisms will be evolvable based on at least four key principles that of course are fluid in themselves:
1) A mature management style defined by measureable Dialogic practices
2) Fluid systems defined be measurable executive resilience and group cohesion
3) External views defined by measuring coherent vision and shared values
4) Quantum collective learning by measurable thinking, culture and actions
A mindset shift that the leaders mind cannot make by itself!
What we are suggesting is nothing more than a complete mindset shift in relation to hierarchical structures, an end to micro-management, a massive upheaval in workflow processes, an end to current HR practices and the absolute death knell for traditional chalk and talk type training.
At a minimum, training and learning will no longer be a separate part of the organisation, established as an empire or a silo, rather it needs to be integrated into standard operational workflows that are directed and measured automatically. This means dynamically empowering each person in the workflow to respond to live conditions in the present moment.
Guess what? This means that what workers think will become more important than what they do. If they do the wrong thing, the knock-on effect is measurable. But if they think the wrong thing, the impact is more pervasive to the accidental creation of a toxic culture. Chris Argyris called such incoherence ‘The ladder of inference’ in that only one wrong assumption creates multiple levels of wrong assumptions beyond it.
A manager would no longer tell a staff member what to think; they would have to think together! Shared thinking leads to shared value creation in the moment. And the impact need not be measured only in economic terms. A staff member may genuinely welcome the connection to the manager and may feel rewarded for being important enough to think with in the first place.
Yet, when workers think about what they think, they become more coherent. More coherence means less waste and consequently results in higher margin. Many staff forget that while revenue may pay the wages, it is the margin that pays the bonus!
Continuous human learning means unlearning
The first stage in continuous human learning is unremitting human unlearning. Leaders must unlearn rigid forms of leadership. Managers must unlearn unbending styles of managing. Staff must unlearn inflexible staffing.
If an organisational system is co-created on collective leadership, collective learning and collective coherence, new skills and novel practices become available in the moment. The silo of the individual brain combines with all the other silos and individual ego makes way for what David Bohm called the ‘Wego’ – the collective personality.
Everything that will be needed to meet the strategic and operational goals of the organisation is instantly available to it. There will be no need for a weeklong leadership development course in Harvard or Insead; someone in the organisation has done this before successfully and they will want to help you do the same. It will be a co-operative instead of a competitive environment.
Learning can no longer be a batch process; it requires a continuous evolving psychological contract between employers and employees, and between peers and colleagues.
How does Dialogue enable self-tuning organisations?
To change the mindset of an organisation with even as little as a hundred people takes time. During that period, the business needs to make margin while the leaders, followers, staff and customers all adjust to the power of the collective. But to be crystal clear, the evolution of the organisation begins with the thoughts of the leaders who organise the resources of the organisation. Dialogue organises those thoughts in new ways that deliver value without harm.
Cohesion Dialogue
Cohesion Dialogue is an individual, collective and systems process, which evolves the maturity of the leader, it expands the resilience of the executives and it makes groups more coherent.
In as little as one hour, teams can be shown how to access the source of the problem. In as little as one day, groups can be aligned at multiple levels of the hierarchy. In as little as thirty days, small pockets within the system become more coherent and therefore become a catalyst for the rest of the organisation.
Cohesion Dialogue practices are transferred to each member of the leadership, executive and staff teams, which means that each member of the system can evolve at their own pace and learning style.
Furthermore, by implementing an AI based measurement platform that is continuously listening to hundreds of tangible and intangible data points in real time, the Dashboard and interactive AI access points to the present need for a Dialogic circle; whether that be related to sales, cost of sales, expenses, operations, HR or customer service; the list of issues that can be solved at source is endless.
Once such behavioural data can be linked to the profit and loss account and then to the balance sheet, value creation becomes a quantum process of converting human and machine potential into value as a leading meme rather than as a lagging indicator.
Once Dialogue is the new norm, it engages the leadership and their teams to alter behaviour through continuous evolution of dialogic practices, to evolve organisational culture through mature coherence, and continuously iterating workflow processes by making learning and development a constant practice rather than a trip away from the office once a year.
Outputs can be presented in any visual form to share and digest shared meaning because each member of the system progresses in awareness, thinking and coherence which leads to a better understanding of how each person and each machine algorithm uses their energy to manifest economic return on investment as an input to margin and not as some lagging indicator of how the business did last quarter.
This is the beginning of the creation of real time margin! Now while all the CFO’s in the room are falling off their chairs because they will also have to retrain, let us continue to imagine the present…
How to start?
The entire engagement starts by co-creating the fragmentation case, by deeply understanding what is incoherent at all levels and by defining what is to be measured. This is done by engaging with all levels of the system in a one-day discovery process and then by ensuring that the approach is compatible with the ability of the organisation to absorb change in small steps rather than in huge waterfall type workflow changes.
Each group of 100-250 staff that undertakes the Cohesion Dialogue process becomes a fractal of the entire organisational evolution.
A typical one-day discovery process produces enough data points to deal with sources of people and process problems the very next day; because the Dialogue process creates deep transformation as experiential learning.
Following the initial euphoria of actually getting to the root of intractable problems that have been plaguing the system for years, organisational evolves with fluid Projects and fluid Processes that impact on future research, long term strategy and short term implementation.
Implementation time depends on the size and adaptability of the organisation but it means that the paradox of gradual and long-term project of culture change can be, directed towards short term strategic objectives as projects, dialogues and workflow processes while all data is measured about how everyone in the system is evolving in their transversal competencies or any other lens for that matter.
Rather than creating a co-dependent consulting relationship, we hand over the IP, the technology and the skills through our teams of experienced Dialogue guides, trainers, experienced eco-system experts and data scientists from our global multicultural teams.
Organisational culture becomes a set of flowing guidelines that develop a fluid mindset. This mindset creates a self-managing and adaptable culture. This contains the powerful attribute of creativity, problem-finding, learning cultures, framing external views and being customer and market-orientated focused at the same time.
The organisational mythology if there is one becomes Socrates rather than Julius Caesar.
In short periods of time, these traits create and maintain competitive advantage by providing the evidence for the 4IR relevance of the business to its own fast-moving business environment.
All Dialogic activity then directly contributes to the balance sheet, to revenue, to brand and to the entire system growth by growing individuals for the benefit of the whole.
ENDS