The future of work - the "technology- time-in-role"-paradox

When was the last time you seriously considered the technology you use on a daily basis? I recently re-watched some episodes of Friends. As a child of the 80's, it is something I grew up with. Would Ross and Rachel make it? Would Monica upset people with her need for cleanliness and would Joey finally settle down? As part of these episodes, you get a sense of how recent some "old" technology still feels. Our dear Friends only ended up having mobile phones towards the end of the whole series, a decent proportion of jokes came from messages left on an answerphone and nobody had heard of Uber yet or was using the internet very much - hence they had time to sit together at an independent café on a regular basis.

If we reflect back over the last 10 years, we encounter smartphones for the first time, we realise candidates prefer to apply for jobs on their mobile device, consumers drive businesses to adopt more and more convenient ways to shop. It is possible to work from home, order food in, get your shopping delivered and amazon is now capable to deliver items either on the same or the next day for free. You pretty much don't even need to leave the house anymore, if you don't want to. While a lot of technology is making our lives easier, we also have an increase of technology that is needed to enable such levels of convenience and it is impacting our work lives radically. In some of my past roles, to complete all activities to do with HR, employees had to use up to 5 different systems with different logins and passwords and that mirrored most of the other functions. Our roles themselves become ever more complex with the enhancement of technology. At the same time, our patience with people and patience to wait for the next role and the next promotion are on the decline. A trend I have observed in recent years was the desire to move up into different roles not after 2-3 years, but after 1.5 years, if not after a year... ideally.

This is where I perceive there to be a growing paradox in the complexity that exists within our roles. The need to actually know and understand the technology is huge - yet, if we facilitated true understanding, people's expectations to move up as quickly as desired would be disappointed. As a result, we often opt to brush over the technology and advance people - sometimes before they have developed an in-depth understanding. Each role I can think of right now has increased in complexity by the sheer need to understand more about the technology involved in them. I would therefore argue that it takes more time to learn a role today. Should we manage expectations of our colleagues around this topic better? Or is the idea to become more proficient obsolete in a time of digital dementia and when we are looking for machines to do the learning? Should we just get proficient at asking for help when it comes to systems?

I don't pretend to have the answers here, do however think about this topic often and broadly. How do you manage this paradox in your organisations?