Human Matters in Automation

"The curious thing is that the righter you do the wrong thing, the wronger you become." -Russell Ackoff

TL;DR - When embarking on an automation strategy within an organisation, leaders need to carefully consider the multifaceted ways people are adding value to the organisation, as well as understand how the work system influences how work is done. This is crucial to optimise the success of any automation strategy and will expose areas where technology should rather augment, than replace people within the organisation.

I am a technology enthusiast.

It is mainly because of this reason I decided years ago to pursue a career in software development. However, during the almost 20 years experience in my field I have learned that no matter how exciting the things are that we can achieve with technology - if we do not consider the impact on people at the centre of what we do, in the greater scheme of things, our achievements are worthless.

The fact is that software programs are getting smarter. You don't have to go far to find lots of articles touting the advances in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, etc. And something we have to deal with is that software programs will just keep getting smarter and we will continue to be amazed by the achievements in this field for years to come. It is also important to understand that these achievements are not isolated to laboratories, but will continue to have an increasing real-world impact.

 "With great power comes great responsibility" - Stan Lee (Peter Parker Principle)

The impact these advances have on the world is largely determined by the choices people are making - driven by incentives, directed by their values.

It is truly encouraging to see the positive implementations of this technology in fields such as farming and medicine as well as taking care of certain dangerous tasks.

There is unfortunately also potential to do great harm. This has led to the rise of organisations such as The Future of Life Institute, who in 2017 created a short film called Slaughterbots, showing the potential devastating impact of allowing the weaponisation of AI controlled machines.

Many articles warn of a dystopian future where machines have destroyed all resemblances of social structure. This article however focuses on something more subtle happening right now. Something that has the potential of harming, or helping people in a very real way.

This something is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

In line with expectations around the Fouth Industrial Revolution, RPA has been gaining increasing traction in businesses and industries and this is only set to increase in the years to come as software and the underlying hardware supporting AI improves.

Many people live in blissful ignorance, believing that the work they are involved in is too complex or require a level of creativity that cannot be matched by machines. Whenever I encounter people with this assumption, I like to point them to a video called Humans Need Not Apply in an attempt to challenge some of those base assumptions - and then remind them that this video was created back in 2014.

In the same vein I believe many organisational leaders live in blissful ignorance of the value that people add to their companies. RPA comes with many promises - increased efficiency, decreased costs, higher reliability, quality, etc. Leaders that do not appreciate the full scope of value that their people add to their organisations, or how systemic problems in their organisation contribute to inefficiencies, high cost and low quality, stand the risk of making costly mistakes during the adoption of RPA - sadly at the expense of the people in their organisation.

"All to often, the production of financial capital seems to occur at the expense of social and natural capital" - Peter Senge

Most organisations exist for the reason of generating wealth. We can package it however we like through values, virtues, etc. - the bottom line is that if the revenue stream dries up, so will the organisation. I do believe organisational leaders bare a burden of social responsibility - not only to the public, but also to their employees. I truly wish this virtue was enough for every leader to consider the human impact of RPA in their organisations, but sadly I do not think that this is the case.

As I've said earlier, the impact of the advances in smart technology is determined by the choices people are making - driven by incentives, directed by their values.

I believe many leaders - especially those in charge of organisations where strategic decision making have lost touch with the tactical reality - underestimate the capital and potential they have in their people and how their employees truly support the success and continuation of their businesses on a daily basis.

"Get the [management] assumptions wrong and everything that follows from them is wrong." -Peter Drucker

Job Profiles

I am sure that before the decision is made to automate functions in a business unit - especially when it will lead to downsizing - that some effort will be put into understanding how exactly these people contribute to the organisation. I am not referring to Job Descriptions, as these mostly centre around role responsibilities. Additionally, Job Descriptions have a very high probability of excluding invisible, but very important details of how people are holding things together in the organisation.

It is true that as technology around automation improves, an increasing amount of tasks can be automated, but there are not many modern roles where an entire job or role can be automated - even more so when people are working in a complex organisational structure.

A key consideration is distinguishing between the output achieved by an individual, and the value generated by an individual. Many times, these are not directly related. Leaders need to be cognisant of the multifaceted way each individual is adding value - such as mentoring or assisting others, dealing with unexpected issues, diffusing problematic situations, etc. - these things may not be easily traceable through metrics that purely measure performance output.

Similarly, many leaders erroneously assume that communication in their organisation flows according to the neat hierarchy in which everyone has their place. To the contrary, Frédéric Laloux in Reinventing Organizations explains that communication in organisations in reality flow through a complex network of informal channels within the organisation. Any automation strategy that fails to understand this and doesn't take this into account is likely missing key information to its success.

Once sufficient information is gathered, it is also important to carefully consider the maturity of automation technology in these different task areas. The fact is that there are a lot of legitimate success stories, but as with most new things, there are also a lot of hype around certain areas of automation that will likely lead to disappointment. In the special nuances of your work environment you may find that some technologies that are generally mature may not be compatible with your organisation. For example, consider transcribing and analysing voice communication for all 11 official South African languages.

Work System

"We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem." -Russell Ackoff

For any leader lamenting the quality of the people in their organisation - the fact of the matter is they are there because of the work system. I have heard senior leadership complain about the "dead wood" in their organisation; my question to these leaders are:

Did you hire dead wood?

If that is the case, then your hiring practices need serious attention. If that is not the case - then why is your organisation causing vibrant, ambitious, smart people (assuming that is who you are hiring) to be turned into "dead wood"?

I firmly believe the quality of workers in an organisation is the result of the function of the work system of the organisation - and that many of the inefficiencies and problems aimed to be solved by replacing people with machines can be addressed by making changes to the work system in such a way to allow people to do their best effort.

Any automation strategy that does not carefully scrutinise the system of work in an organisation for its part in the problem - and aims to mostly automate processes as-is within that work system - is guaranteed to have limited success. If this coincides with job losses, then this process also punishes people for things they probably had no, to little control over.

"If we value cooperation, why have we designed so many structures that reward people for competing more than cooperating?" - Douglas McGregor

Something else to consider when implementing an RPA solution, is that it could have a negative effect on the agility of an organisation. Borrowing (and modifying) a phrase from this article -

A significant consequence of using RPA is that it’s like pouring concrete over your existing processes.

It is important to keep in mind that failure creates the opportunity for learning, which in turn creates an opportunity for improvement. Putting a system in place that prevents failures in problematic parts of the work system may hide the fact that these areas may be in dire need of redesign. Not having clear visibility of these issues could make it difficult to diagnose bigger, overarching system problems at a later time.

One key thing Systems Thinking has taught us, is that the most interesting things in any system are not the things in the system - but rather the connection between the things in the system. Failing to understand how and why things in a work system are interconnected - and what the implications of these interconnections are - will very likely result in many unexpected problems when deploying large scale RPA solutions.

Culture

One does not have to search hard to find many resources on why organisational culture is important. The term organisational culture sometimes means different things to different people, but in general it can be seen as the shared set of values between the people within the organisation.

Seeing that culture is most definitely a people-thing, not understanding how individuals in the organisation contribute to a healthy culture can severely harm an organisation that hastily seeks to replace people with automated processes. Apart from the possibility that some of these "expendable" people are playing important roles in keeping the culture healthy, there is also the risk of creating irreparable damage to the trust relationship between the remaining employees and leadership through an improper or insensitive implementation of RPA.

Another related topic is that of Thought Diversity. Having a diversity of thinking patterns within an organisation has many advantages, such as increased organisational creativity to name one. The surest way to decrease thought diversity is to replace people with a collection of non-thinking identical drones.

For many organisations that find themselves in a tight spot and need to make some quick improvements, RPA solutions may look like a silver bullet.

"Panic is the mother of the path of least resistance." - Michael Lopp

Apart from the people-related costs mentioned already, the reality is that RPA solutions can be very expensive - and can lead to costly mistakes if not implemented or managed correctly.

Personally I hope leaders use RPA to take a fresh look at their people - and realise they are more than human resources or cost centres. That each of them have the potential to contribute great things to the organisation, if the work system will allow and encourage them to do so. I believe companies can achieve great things if leaders are value focused over being cost focused - and utilise RPA solutions to augment and improve the work experience of their employees, while continuously investing in the growth of their people.