Technology can be great, but people are far greater!

by: Colin Adam

November 2023

Our experience of change is a strange phenomenon. It combines two major components, one being the passage of time, the other being novel events that have the potential to impact our beliefs, our expectations and our behaviour, sometimes in ways that seem irreversible.

We’ve all experienced rapid change. It can feel like a tsunami that sweeps everything up in its path in an instant. The cellular phone revolution in the late 1990’s was like that. Almost overnight, everyone either had acquired a cell phone, or knew they had to get one. The 9/11 disaster in 2001, and the more recent covid-19 “pandemic” are other examples of events that quickly and radically transformed our world. These events, and others like them, were seismic in reshaping people’s worldviews, beliefs and behaviours.

At other times, change creeps up surreptitiously without us paying much attention, like the proverbial frog in a pan of water that doesn’t notice the temperature rising until it’s too late to prevent the inevitable. I’m sure we’ve all experienced change like this when we've had a vague sense of incremental adjustments happening at a rate that doesn't fully capture our attention. But then one day we wake up to a sudden realisation that things really aren't as they used to be and there's no possibility of going back!

Depending on how many candles were on your last birthday cake, you may or may not have encountered the now extinct beings called ‘typists’ who often worked in ‘typing pools’ in organisations.

We would deliver hand-written documents to them and a day or so later a typed version would dutifully be returned to us. Imperceptibly, and gradually their numbers dwindled until one day, they were no more. ‘Typists’ and ‘typing pools’ were gone forever as we learned to produce our own documents using computer terminals, desktop computers, and the now ubiquitous laptop. Sadly, hand-written letters and holiday postcards have all but disappeared in the same gradual way.

But faster is better, isn’t it?

Technological advances have brought many benefits, mainly related to speed, efficiency and convenience. But there are some lamentable drawbacks to what has become a global obsession with ‘faster is better’, not least of which is our addiction to (or dependency on) electronic “devices”.

I recall one of my first bosses in the 1980’s prophesying that “technology won’t solve any of our problems. It will just enable us to make the same old mistakes faster!”

How true this turned out to be. The fundamental problems of our human existence have persisted through the ages.

We are still a predominantly warlike species prone to destruction and vengeance, quick to anger yet slow to forgive. Our weapons have become alarmingly efficient and our relationships more distant.

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The ‘Need for Speed’ and other things that crept up in the night!

?‘Big Tech’ has been hugely impactful! It has radically changed our world, our habits of mind, our language, and our behaviours. Cellular phones, for example, have become our constant companions. In fact, to refer to them as “phones” is an insult to them! They are far more than that, providing, as they do, WhatsApp, e-mail and other messaging ‘platforms’ so we don’t need to 'waste time' speaking to each other; they entertain us with games and videos; they deliver our local and global news; we snap, store and share our photos on them and partake in the dreaded ‘selfie’ phenomenon! We even order our pizzas through them! And so much more!

Have you noticed the new language that has crept into our everyday vocabulary over the last while? In the few examples I’ve just shared we see: cell phones; WhatsApp; platforms; and selfies. These terms would have carried no meaning at all a few short years ago.

Technology has gifted us with a plethora of communication channels and devices to keep us connected. Yet, ironically, we still have “communication problems” in our organisations, teams and families! The ’faster is better’ paradigm doesn’t appear to have done much to deepen our relationships, resolve our conflicts, or enable us to deeply listen to those we say we care about.

What it certainly has done is shortened our attention spans and reduced our ability to concentrate for long. We’re more easily bored and on the lookout for something new to distract us or capture our interest, if only for a while. We don’t have time to read books, so we read short summaries – usually ‘on screen’ - rather than with a real book in hand.

This ‘need for speed’ has pervaded society and entrenched itself in organisational cultures and mindsets too. Employees expect to move on or be promoted every two years or so, just as they are developing expertise in their roles, only to be replaced by others with much still to learn. This can easily extrapolate to a tipping point of inexperience resulting in a lack of institutional expertise and wisdom at all organisational levels, including senior leadership. We already hear, too frequently, of leaders who are ill-prepared for their leadership roles.

The ‘faster is better’ phenomenon has put pressure on employee training time causing an increased demand for short, sharp, nano-byte learning interventions with as little time away from the workplace as possible. With an endemic emphasis on pragmatism, efficiency, cost cutting, and ‘doing more with less’, there’s precious little time for deeper, more meaningful, in-person conversations as we spend more time working, usually on our ‘devices’. The time available to focus on our own personal growth and development is also too often compressed. The demands on us to “do” more, which can imply “be” less, are significant.

(Some time ago, I was invited to coach in an organisation that I discovered had abandoned the idea of one-on-one personal development discussions. For them, such discussions took up too much time and the benefits weren’t provable in hard numbers. Needless to say, employee turnover was high, but this was apparently a cost worth bearing.)

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The need to “be” more?

Of course, there are times when speed is necessary, but our unconscious addiction to speed is a problem. At times, it’s important to deliberately slow down, but this requires conscious choice. High quality relationships and personal growth can’t happen at the speed of light! It takes dedicated time to establish and maintain mutual trust and respect which are the bedrocks of any quality relationship, and to actively develop oneself, irrespective of Enneagram style.

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A dystopia we need to avoid!

There are consequences to moving through life with foot flat to the floor on the gas pedal. Our relationships will inevitably become shallower and less meaningful. People will slip into the shadows of our awareness, as tasks, targets and efficiencies become all consuming. Eventually, we’ll lose sight of real human beings and fail to recognise them as precious souls, with incredible potential and immense creativity. They will become simply ‘resources’ to access or ‘units of production’ to optimise. The depth of the human ‘being’ behind the ‘doing’ will gradually become unseen, un-cared for and without value. The light in their eyes will dim as we reduce them into the very objects that we perceive them to be – two dimensional resources required to complete tasks on time. And, significantly, we’ll begin to view ourselves this way. How de-humanising is that?

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Let’s save the frog before it boils!

?We have to recognise that we may be in danger of slowly ‘boiling the frog’. Surely we need to take a different path or we’ll wake up one day to the realisation that things have changed irreparably for the worse. Human beings are already well on the way to becoming extensions of the technological gadgets that they are so addicted to. Micro-chips will soon be integrated into brain and body to make us more efficient and able to be monitored. As we become more like machines, machines are becoming more like humans. Humans could easily become increasingly dispensable if empathy, compassion, care and freedom should diminish and disappear. We must not let this happen!

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But how?

?To counter this dystopian possibility, it's imperative that we nurture and ignite the light of human spirit in all our interactions – personal and professional. The Enneagram is an incredibly powerful ‘tool’ to enable this. It can help people to truly get in touch with what it is to be compassionately human; not only by illuminating visible external behaviour, but importantly, by illuminating what happens on the inside? - our ways of thinking, feeling, intuiting, and suffering.

The four ‘lenses’ that embellish the Enneagram in our FIVE LENS model aim to deepen the understanding of people’s primary Enneagram patterns.

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But we need to be careful not to use the Enneagram to simply polish our egos and make ourselves feel good about how we’re showing up within our core Enneagram style. Our core Enneagram style represents the ego, the stance we adopted to cope with life. It’s certainly not WHO we are. It’s not an identity. The essence of who we are is different from ego which motivates an habitual way of behaving; our real self, is a deeper part which we only get close to accessing at high levels of integration.

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So, how can we utilise and use the Enneagram to access our highest levels of integration?

Here are some ideas:

1.??Get to know and understand the nine Enneagram patterns and motivations.

2.??Clarify which of the nine styles represents your primary pattern (and when you find it, be careful not to feel too good about it! It’s not about polishing the ego!)

3.??Start to self-reflect and self-observe, particularly around your ways of thinking, your emotions and moods, your intuitions, your triggers that cause your Enneagram style to snap into place defensively and in negative ways.

4.??Become aware of your ‘tiggers’. Different people, situations or interactions may tigger you defensively. Your defensive reaction is most likely aligned with your primary Enneagram style. Develop an awareness of what these different triggering contexts have in common. Look for a connecting theme. What are you defending against?

5.??You may even be able to trace the connecting theme back to childhood. It’s often what we refer to as an “Area of Avoidance” related to your Enneagram style.

6.??There’s a need to become more comfortable with the triggering “Avoidance”. It's then that its triggering power will diminish; you’ll be less ‘stuck’ in your habitual reactive patterns and your level of integration is likely to increase. This is where a good coach, counsellor or therapist can assist and support.

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Additionally, working on elevating Personal Mastery Emotional Resilience can support the journey to higher integration levels.

The passion and motivation driving our FIVE LENS Enneagram resides in our need to see and value human beings for who they truly are, and enable them to unleash their true creative potential in all aspects of their lives.

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Let’s be sure we get our priorities in order when it comes to technology and people. Technology can be great, but people are far greater!

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As always, I welcome your thoughts on this, so please be in touch!

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Wishing you love, joy, and blessings until we connect again.

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Colin Adam

CEO Ennea International Group

https://fivelens.co.za