How social media trends are permeating social sciences and management.

Our growing exposure to technology and social media is constantly reshaping our behavior at work. Management and leadership skills are not immune to these trends. It is up to us to adapt, change and be able to go beyond. We can benefit from it while adding the differential value each of us can deliver.

I have been fortunate this summer to have the chance to spend several days with my extended family in a quiet and isolated archipelago in the East Atlantic. It helped me to appease the stressful experience of moving my home from Mexico City to Atlanta in the US.

This isolation and sense of remoteness made me reflect on the importance of collaboration. I could witness how people helped each other in case of an emergency (a wildfire spread across the northern part of the island). Civil servants of all sorts (medical staff, rescue teams, firefighters, policemen, rangers) along with normal civilians working hard, shoulder to shoulder putting out the fire, evacuating the population and trying to salvage, as far as it was possible, houses, fields, crops and forests. I could observe this collaborative approach also in their daily lives. I would daresay the place scores very high in terms of quality of life and happiness. It is a very sought-after destination for Northern Europeans to retire or spend long stays to enjoy its mild weather, lush mountains, towering volcanoes and, above all, the kindness of their inhabitants.

All this was a striking contrast with what was going on in my home country, heading to another disputed political election. Candidates deployed every kind of simplistic partisan message to grasp the attention of potential voters, arousing the worst feelings and frustration. It made me think about the influence of technology, programming and computing science on our behavior and how it has permeated social sciences and management. By the way, not necessarily for the good.

Here you have some social media trends influencing management:

1. Polarization.

In a similar way to 0s and 1s (basic components of a bit) have commanded the conventional encoding since the very beginning of computing, many managerial problems are simplified to a Yes / No, Go / Not go decision. Management issues are normally complex problems where many variables are involved.?

This is not only impacting our decision-making but also how feasible is to change our previous ones and our ability to deal with uncertainty. Sticking to a decision already taken was the ‘right thing to do’. Changing it somehow involved acknowledging a personal failure. Bringing in a new fact-based point of view in an executive committee could be considered a lack of loyalty, instead of a sign of intellectual honesty.

This trend was aggravated by the lack of exposure of some leaders to other realities and trends outside their day-to-day in their companies, countries or acquaintances. It worked like our feed in social media that is systematically programmed to show us things that we are, in theory, interested in. In a recent interview at FT the historian Tim Snyder evoked the classics in the Odyssey: ‘sirens were so irresistible because they have the power to sing each sailor only about himself’.???

Quantum computing, despite still being explored for research purposes only, somehow acknowledges the limits of traditional computing. It has brought back the limitations of this 0s vs 1s approach that was followed even by the computational theory of the mind to explain how our brain works.

My role as advisor / non-executive director in some companies involves mainly opening new approaches, sowing doubts, exploring new options and navigating between set-in-stone decisions and not-aligned siloed mindsets. This is always the previous step to add the flexibility needed for a proper and coordinated execution.

2. Labeling.

Data labeling is a common technique used to manually tag data that lets computers the identification of an entity (text, image, audio, video). Many decisions in AI are based on this labeling or the addition of different layers of labels. This allows for instance the correct identification of an image or accuracy in the personalized advertisement we receive while browsing is correct.

I deeply enjoy the moments when social media platforms disclose data about ourselves. They allow us to slightly understand how we are tagged, what data are considered and how their algorithms work. Spotify annual statistics are one of my favorites: being ‘tagged’ as a K-pop fan can only be explained by our family road trips when we share my profile to listen to music together.

There is some resemblance with the annual appraisals in companies, especially if we are given honest, fact-based and elaborate feedback. Hence the importance of HR function as advocates of fairness in the process.

It is a growing trend in some organizations that managers also tend to ‘label’ (people, projects, investments, departments,…). The main dangers of labeling are intertwined: bias and oversimplification. Needless to say, we are simplifying the complexity of a project or how a person normally behaves in a single word, it is quite likely that they will be judged wrongly.

Our own experiences, context and prejudices are embedded in the way we label people or projects in a company. In a similar way that a vision recognition system may wrongly identify an intruder when there is a plastic bag flying across my garden on a windy day, leaders may misunderstand someone/something previously wrongly tagged.?

3. Know-it-all

Browsers, search engines, mobile devices and most recently AI-powered chatbots have enabled us access to information with a simple touch of our fingertips.?This has simplified our lives in many ways but also wears off our skills to grasp reality. One of my favorite examples is how our reliance on digital maps to get to a place has diminished our orientation skills.

Many leaders declared themselves experts in many subjects despite having only the shallow knowledge that we can get from these technology ‘shortcuts’. Becoming a good professional involves commitment, hard work, expertise and dedication. Experts and experience are underrated. In my opinion, these people are the ones who really can add value to organizations. Access to technology is available to everyone while experience and expertise are unique. This trend has also altered the balance between speaking and listening that a good leader should always have as I explained in this previous article .

When Chat GPT-4 was launched in November 2022 I remembered a very well-known CEO posting in social media about the similarities between information obtained via this tool and some reports and presentations from prestigious consultancies. It was a good insight to assess if the investment in consultants was money well spent in her company.

A more harmful impact within organizations has blind faith in the information we get from our IT systems. As a KPI-obsessed data nerd, I often play the role of technology advocate in the companies I advise. However, it is only when we go beyond data that we can truly understand what is happening in a business. This implies expertise to explain why we get a specific result and also skills to understand what potential biases or lack of information we have in our samples. This interesting article from MIT Technology Review about the lack of neutrality in AI language models is very useful to illustrate that their recommendations cannot be upheld to sacrosanct.

Anyway, technology is here to stay and it has reshaped the way and skills needed in management as it has already done in teaching, healthcare, law practice and many other professions. However, there are irreplaceable skills that distinguish good leaders: creativity, collaboration and purpose. This article from Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Reece Akhtar published by Harvard Business School delves into this topic.

4. The demise of the Network effect: the winner not necessarily takes it all.

The demise of the Network effect: the winner not necessarily takes it all. The emergence of global technology companies with their huge market capitalization during the 2000s along with the easiness to finance new ventures created a mindset of growing no matter the price. Competition was reduced in many markets.?Professionals wished to do important memorable things and create a legacy. Otherwise, it was frustrating for them. I witnessed this mindset in some business schools. The pandemic changed this mindset.

Today most of the professionals still work for small/medium-sized companies, struggling to grow and compete in a single local market. For these type of companies strategy and long-term vision is important but it comes second to professionalism, people engagement and business basics (‘cash-flow’ generation, customer attrition rates,…).

Post-pandemic economic trends not only have reshuffled some key economic indicators (interest rates, inflation, economic growth, export tariffs) but also have changed the mindset of young professionals, their commitment towards work and their priorities. It is not anymore about winners taking it all. Purpose takes an important role when engaging these professionals.

This trend is parallel to current trends in technology and social media. Users prefer new platforms that allow more freedom about whom to interact with, enable more transparency in their algorithms and share more specialized content. I recommend this podcast about future trends in social media. It also may be a harbinger of how technology will influence management and other social sciences. The impact of generative artificial intelligence, virtual reality and new computing platforms may reshape the way we interact in social media as these technologies may blur the boundaries between interacting with a real person or a bot.

Conclusions and recommendations

Our growing exposure to technology and social media is constantly reshaping our behavior at work. Management and leadership skills are not immune to these trends. It is up to us to adapt, change and be able to go beyond. We can benefit from it while adding the irreplaceable value each of us can deliver.

Hope you can enjoy your summer break and recharge your batteries for your upcoming challenges.