Do we still need people?

Michael Ballé & Eivind Reke

?Eivind: A wave of digitalization, industry 4.0, robotization and smart automation is sweeping business today. Many of the Silicon Valley tech gurus believe that it′s only a matter of time before work life is fully automated by artificial intelligence. In time, humans will be freed from the toils of work or slaves to the machine. There will be no more human jobs. This is not something new, the same argument was made in the 70′s and 80′s during the wave of automation that lead then GM boss Roger Smith to invest $90 billion dollars on a light out factory which in the end failed spectacularly. However, there is no doubt that the new wave of digitalization and automation driven by advanced robotics, machine learning and AI will spell the end of many jobs and create many new ones. The question is, do humans still have a role to play, and what is that role? 

We say that lean is the people centric business system of our time, with its focus on customer value and the ingenuity of human creativity to solve problems in unexpected ways. The learning organization can′t be learning unless there are people there to learn. So why are humans still important to business success and to the wellbeing of our welfare state? I can think of four reasons why people still matter and where their AI twin has a lot of catching up to do: 1.) Only people understand people in context (ever tried talking to a customer service chat-bot?) 2.) If allowed, people are extremely good at maintaining a system with weak point management (The famous o-ring of space shuttle fame is a famous example of how a system is never stronger than its weakest link). 3.) People are natural problem solvers and without kaizen everything deteriorates (ask any company who has implemented a lean system but not been able to engage its people in kaizen) 4.) People have a unique sense of what other people like (even though Avicii′s music is digital, the intuition of what is a good pop song is still very human).

Michael: We’re looking at two different things. First, tools. Tools are part of what makes us human – we became humans when we started banging these rocks together to make axes, and teaching each other how to make better axes. We’re a tool-centric animal if anything else. People will always express themselves by making better tools. Indeed, the first lean concepts were born as Sakichi Toyoda invented a mechanical loom to make his mother’s work easier. Some of these tools are incredibly smart – think of the bow and arrow – some less so. We’re equally capable of inventing espresso machines and Rube Goldberg devices. But that’s what people do. They tinker with tools, whether trumpet playing robots or AI chatbots.

Then, there’s jobs. Why would you want a doorman? Or an elevator operator – I came across some in Japan. The productivity of our tools is such that by now we should be working two days a week or so, but that’s not what happened. In a tradition that probably harks back to ancient Sumer, we invent lots of bean-counting and process-checking, and well, yes, flunky jobs for the wealthy because as social animals, everyone needs something to do – to feel useful in some way. And the nature of status and power is such that people with really useful jobs, such as nurses, farmers, bus drivers, garbage collectors - people without whom society would simply stop - get constantly shafted while marketing executives and computer scientists get raises. Why is it so hard for Jeff Bezos who makes I don’t know how many $2000 per second to pay decent wages and medical coverages for the people doing the real job of moving things around in Amazon’s warehouses – this is another fact of being human.

As humans, we create tools and jobs – or, more broadly, roles. We also have two perverse obsessions. First, with the Frankenstein complex, to quote Asimov: believing our tools will rise up against us and make us obsolete – think Skynet and Terminators. The second with always pressuring the people who do the work to do more for less and bringing them as close as we can to slavery, while paying for absolutely nonsense work such as corporate evangelists or Chief Happiness Officers. Somehow, symbol manipulators are more valued than people who do the real value-adding work. It’s weird, but it’s bred in the bone.

What we have then is a creativity issue – making the smartest tools we can – and an ethical issue – recognizing people’s need for a decent, dignified livelihood. None of this is about the tools themselves, but your own personal attitude towards them – and our tendency to confuse tools and jobs. 

There is no contradiction. By embracing the reality of endless human creativity and need to do something useful, we can build organizations that keep humans on top, so to speak, in control of their tools. When you watch an operator run all machines in a multi-process cell in a repeated cycle, you can see them as the human part of the machine, slave to the standardized work – or, conversely, as the master of each machine, moving parts from one equipment to the other, and looking for quality or mechanical issues. It’s purely a question of attitude, in the eye of the beholder: is the person a human part of a complex machine, or a master craftsman using the entire cell as a machine?

Toyota talks about takumi operators, divine craftspeople who have spent 30 years learning their jobs (forget 10,000 hours, more like 60,000). These are the human masters who will teach the robots of the future. Only they understand what is truly pleasing to another human being, such as perfect alignments or wabi-sabi slight imbalances, or something completely new. Human craft will never disappear.

The real challenge, however, is a social one: what of jobs? Lean’s answer to that is continuous study and learning to find the next job – but not all companies invest as much in training their people than lean companies do. People need to feed their families. People need to feel useful. People need dignity. What we do with these 3 universals is completely up to us – how we demonstrate to cold-hearted, hard-nosed, financiers that a people centric business is more profitable and more sustainable than the manage-by-the-numbers alternative precisely because it has the flexibility to adapt and solve problems and 1/ follow customers 2/ better use investment and 3/ avoid exceptional costs (exceptional or not, costs are costs and they come out of the bottom-line). 

Next time you rent a car ask yourself: what could truly exceptional service be? How can we help the clerk at the counter with all this ridiculous paperwork so they focus on the human part of the job: greeting you sincerely, getting you smoothly and easily into your car, wishing you a great trip and being there if you run into trouble. AIs can help with that, if we have the intent to make them do so – which means putting people first, both customers and employees.