THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTOMATION AND BEING A DATA DRIVEN ORGANISATION & THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING & THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF-CONSCIOUS
Contents of what is at the Table
Executive summary
Automation and efficiency & data driven and permanent improvement
Modern societies are permanent self-reflexive & individual selves are impermanent
Data driven business’s as saviours and reflections of a permanent self
Executive summary
(4-2-2019, Amsterdam). The difference between automation and data driven organisations is defined. A data driven organisation is an organisation that is permanently self-reflective. Permanent self-reflection is analysed in its sociological meaning of modern societies in which individuals experience their impermanency and the need to constantly affirm themselves and seek their selves in their impermanent bodies.
Data driven organisations do not seek permanency in an impermanent business model, but in a permanent absolute mission that allows for a continuous quantitative change, qualitative transformation/improvement.
A rudimentary analogy is made between self-consciousness and a data driven organisation. It is stated that because self-conscious is mirrored in data driven organisations individuals that are part of modern societies and work in data driven organisations can (and I will predict ‘will’) become more modern for the permanence they will find in the organisations they work in and for. This will result in ‘unconscious self-conscious’. Modern people are made self-conscious in data driven organisations, but are not by themselves out of themselves self-conscious. Self-consciousness is not an essential inner quality a qualitative essence, but a ‘feature’ that is given by the data driven organisation by the data driven organisation. The organisation becomes a collective (framework that bestows that feature and depending on the collective you work for that feature may be more or may be less bestowed). (Think of ‘the Borg’ in Star Trek without the centralised intelligence embedded in the queen). Collective frameworks to ‘freely’ construct identities in a predefined manner. (If the frameworks die the identities may die as well).
The business take away is that only organisations with a powerful mission (and thus powerful core values and vision) can really with stand ‘being data driven’. The data must be drived to the mission and if you have no (strong) mission data will be driven to data and spin senselessly in the void.
Automation and efficiency & data driven and permanent improvement
Instead of sending a letter we send an e-mail. Instead of getting a letter from HR with our payment slip we can go to a portal and get the information when we want. Instead of going to the bank to retrieve money we can go to an ATM.
These are everyday examples of automation so what is the difference between automation and becoming a data driven organisation? Well you could say there is no difference for both are about technology and making things easier for people to manage time more efficiently. You could say all snow looks the same or all Europeans look the same. Well I am not Eskimo, but I see differences between Europeans and between automation and being data driven. I see the difference between a knife, a sowing machine, an automobile, a computer and a network of computers etc.. (Do you? And do you see the transitions between these technologies?).
Being data driven is something different than ‘plain’ automation. It is about continuous improvement and not just about changing, but changing how an organisation can change for business models, the fundament of the company, can change (or is at least less permanent than a decade ago). Automation: imagine change. Data driven organisations (that digitally transform): change imagination.
Modern societies are permanent self-reflexive & individual selves are impermanent
About twenty years ago I read some of the sociologist Anthony Giddens. His analysis of modern societies is that they are constantly changing and its members are constantly reflecting on their selves, their identities. Personally, I would state that a permanent reflection on your identity is the cause of the constant change and would further state that this change is relative. ‘Tindering’ through your live may be seen as a constant change, but that is no qualitative change into a real enduring relationship. However I cannot remember whether Giddens saw a causal relation between the permanent reflection on the self and the constant change, but can imagine that as a sociologist, rather than a philosopher, described and related two co-existent phenomenon’s without asking the question ‘what is more primary?’.
What struck me in his penetrating gaze, his analysis of society, is that even to the more physical level of illness this permanent reflection of the self showed itself. ‘Anorexia nervosa’ for example is a typical expression of the will to reflect constantly on the self. Moreover the ‘self’ becomes identified with the body as we also seen in the modern day health regimes as ‘going regularly to the gym’. Co-existent with these health regimes to discipline the body is that the body as self is becoming a public identity that has to fit public ‘ethics’ of transparency resulting in a lot of hear cutting and shaving. Hair covers and thus hair lies. Boldness makes everyone equal and also the adult with the child. (Infantilization of modern society is caused by a longing for the holy, transcendent value, that is reduced to innocence. Gold cannot be reduced to yellow and the holy cannot be reduced to the innocent for gold is more yellow than yellow).
The continuous reflection on the self permeates relations between people as well because the relation itself has become something to be discussed and a good relations is in modernity something that ought to be discussed for it to be a good relation. The fundament of the relation, namely the relation, can must be discussed and put on trial over and over again with the natural risk that the relationship can end. Marriage is not instituted by something holy anymore. Value is no more for all value can be constructed by subjects, individuals.
This permanent reflection on the self, whether it is the self as body or the self as relation is (falsely) seen as modern freedom. It is an empty freedom: a spinning in the void. The permanent continuous reflection on the self is caused due the fact that the self itself has become a value of the self rather than a value that transcendents the ‘finite’ self, for example the finite idea of ∞ (‘infinity’) as a symbol of perfection that refers to the Transcendent One and makes reflection of self, self-conscious, possible in the first place, as Descartes would state. Ones value is forgotten by the self the self will forget its own value, will forget itself and will believe it is just a body, a talking piece of flesh, a talkative medium rare steak.
The thought of continuous storytelling and reinventing oneself, to constantly change in order to be is born here. These stories are in a sense all the same although the rhetoric of the media is that everyone is different. In the movie ‘The life of Brian’ this is beautifully revealed when Brian, who was mistaken for the Messiah, says to the people ‘We are all different’ to convey that they should not follow him, hearing from this monotonous crowd ‘We are all different!’, except for one person who says ‘I am not [different]’ and thereby becoming different. Being different, being an individual, a unique self, a soul can only be defined in the negative as a negation of the same old grey same. The modern age is the dispassionate disgust of the ‘tedious’ (the reason why people seek to free themselves from the tedious and decide to go bungee jumping, ‘city tripping’ amongst many other things). The new or original will never be found this way and that is why Hegel and in his slipstream Fukuyama speak of ‘the end of history’. Events will occur, but no qualitative epochal change will occur. The will to permanent reflection on the self is impotent because the will cannot be intended towards non-constructible transcendent permanent value that can give permanent value to the self, and relations between selves, as well.
Data driven self-conscious businesses that permanently reflect on their business models
To improve is to change in these modern societies. Data driven organisations are not modern in that sense for their change is about improvement. A data driven organisation as a subjective self(-organising organism of organising selves) is objective in the sense that by continuous improvement it will abide in a permanency because it is directed to an absolute valuable mission (that gives back to society and the environment and ultimately aims for a zero negative footprints and adding positive value). A data driven organisation has a few characteristics:
1) It gathers data from certain sources to transform the data into information by seeking, with the help of artificial intelligence, were in subjective correlation between data objective causal relation between data can be discovered on the basis of which people, employees, can decide what to do. Facts are about causal relations and people must decide on the basis of facts.
2) Deciding on the basis of facts to make better products and/or services and/or to change the process of data gathering and/or how to analyse the data and/or how decisions are made (in order to transform data in information on the basis of which people can decide what to do). Ergo, a real data driven organisation is self-reflective and gathers data also of the process of gathering, analysing and acting on data. Certain data sources, analysing tools and actors can change in permanent self-reflexive data driven organisations.
Yet organisations are not spinning in the void as individuals who life in modern societies, because a certain objectivity is very urgent, namely that of earning capital, money. Objectivity, improvement (that is development, evolution) and permanence in time are sides of the same ‘self’ and that is why I called data driven organisations ‘scientific’: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/under-sea-level-how-become-data-driven-organisation-james-roolvink/. The strange thing is that data driven organisations will educate the individuals that are spinning in the void, that reflect permanently on their body-selves. A Christian could say that the ‘Holy Spirit’ is active in certain data driven organisations, that data driven businesses are safe harbours or ‘saviours’ for modern individuals. I would say that the structure of self-consciousness is objectified, that is made visible in the structure of data driven businesses (so ‘ordinary’ people, there bodies, can experience self-consciousness because they are not self-conscious). Modern ‘narcistic’ individuals are not necessarily educated in data driven organisations. There is only a chance of to be educated beyond modernity and the impermanence of the self. Most likely the individual will become more bodily orientated to seek the permanence in the body and will become more and more an ‘un(self)conscious’ piece of the data driven machine and the more ones the individual is less of an individual, less a self, and more a narcist. (Narcists lack a substantial permanent self, a soul!).
By analogy:
Business models can change permanently as an improvement, thus objectively for the good, is the ‘self-conscious’ data driven organisation is directed towards a valuable mission.
The role of storytelling
This article is a story on storytelling, but not story in the sense of unreal. It is a story for storytellers and to tell the hidden story behind the relation between being data driven organisations and storytelling.
Storytelling in a data driven organisation is the expression of the self-conscious of the organisation. Storytelling is the glue, the ‘ghost’, of the organisation. Due the ability to constantly (with agility) change the business model to adapt to the market that self-conscious is brought forth. That what is already always presupposed and expressed is actually the mission.
My personal mission in this article is to say that how business operate has been already thought by Descartes many centuries ago. And before Descartes thousand of years ago people already thought the structures in which businesses (organisations) operate and can be. In organisations thinking is spread and not located in one individual, but generally speaking spread mainly among the hierarchical higher divisions. Rather than being self-conscious modern individuals partake in self-consciousness via, mediated by, commercial businesses (and less and less by governmental institutions). Self-consciousness is a feature bestowed on individuals, like colour on a canvas, and is thus experienced in essence as a coincidence and not as a substantial permanent quality.
In that sense the modern individual becomes less of a self, less of a soul, and will become a unconscious self-conscious, a forgetful memory, talking pieces of meat. To speak about the modern individual as ‘narcistic’ is to say too much for there is no self as a carrier of narcissism. The fundamentalist that longs for a steady business model and abhors change is of the same making for the fundamentalist also does not experience a permanent self (and that is why fundamentalist are many times in psychological interpretations seen as narcists).The narcist and fundamentalist are both zombies: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/zombies-work-%C3%BCber-untermensch-test-more-james-roolvink/.
This is the age of the non-self self. The age of contradiction, of thoughtless nothingness, of what Parmenides (who lived about 500 years before Christ) called those who as ‘two-headed’ people say that being and nothing are both identical and not-identical because they lack the passion, the love for what is beyond the self, beyond self-conscious, and thus lack love to silence their (bodily) selves.
Storytelling is not something very modern. It may be new in businesses, but the ancients even told stories on being silent!