Entering the Age of Augmented Effort

It’s December and the last month of the decade. As the clock counts away the teens and we prep for the twenties, I’m thinking about how work is about to look very different a decade from now.

Just as I predicted in 2010 that we were entering a decade that would be marked as ‘the age of the personal broadcast,’ I’m bullish that the next decade will be pegged as ‘the age of augmented effort.’

Augmented effort is the idea that every worker will have assistance to make their effort more efficient. For teams, augmented effort will make their collaboration more effective. So what augments their effort? And what kinds of effort gets augmented?

To start, the thing performing the augmenting will be virtual colleagues — think AI packaged in what initially feels like the bots you’re probably already communicating with. Because AI so often sounds like snake oil, when I write AI I mean to convey something that’s learning to better perform its service in the context of its service. Virtual colleagues, like the best colleagues, will be active learners who are really good as listening. They’ll adapt to better serve you and your team while always being at your side.

A good metaphor for virtual colleagues might be to think of assistant coaches sitting on the bench next to the head coach.

These assistant coaches are there to augment the head coach’s activities: observe, instruct, recruit, document, research, strategize… the list goes on. An assistant coach doesn’t replace the coach, he or she helps the coach be a more effective coach by providing expertise and performing as an extension of the coach.

If you think about the history of how we perform, whether our work is a personal hobby or we’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the one thing that’s been true universally is that there are only so many hours in the day to accomplish what needs to get done. What separates the great performers from the others is the ability to work most efficiently (Morton Hansen wrote a fantastic book on just this called Great At Work). As we enter the next decade in 2020, suddenly a new strategy manifests in improving performance by giving us more time to do the most important work — by those assistant coaches (the virtual colleagues) taking on a brunt of the effort.

In time, these virtual colleagues will not feel or look like chat bots. They will feel like normal, remote colleagues who message and email you. Who ask questions. Who are there to answer your questions. Who are there to take on actions and perform your requests. And the best upside will not just be that these virtual colleagues save us time, but they provide a lot of value in their efforts while enabling us humans to apply our cognitive load toward critical problems that a human solves best (if you’re curious to read more on this thread, check out ‘Compound Cognition and the Future of Work’).

At Unitonomy.com, we’re building the virtual colleague that augments communication across an organization, to ensure communication runs efficiently to transfer the important stuff. Like making sure the right people know about a decision, or a new hire knows about stories how people embody the company’s values. We are getting ahead of the nascent virtual colleague market and we hope you’ll give our system a try (it’s free to start). We sure once you start to work with our virtual colleague, you’ll never want to work without it.