The answer is: emotional intelligence (and slowing down)

I am breaking a self-imposed silence of many months, well spent on personal life and wonderful developments (I got married 😉).

But over the past 6 to 9 months, everything in the media, press, politics, and tech world continues to scream at me with the insistence of the obvious.

The answer is: Emotional Intelligence.

We now live in a world optimized to the Nth degree by corporate efficiency… science… artificial intelligence.

The technology sector is awash with investments, progress, start-ups creations in AI, VR, data analytics, mining and profiling.

This world view is even pushing us to put in numbers human behaviors, to put humans into numbers.

Everything must be measured, quantified.

Corporate leaders and marketers seek a 10%, 30%, 50% increase on campaign optimizations, thus translating in dollars and percentages the little gestures of an online day: a click, a scroll, a view, a moment of attention.

Health care companies try to assess and predict future risks, to soon plan a future where you pay on the basis of your DNA sampling (just watch Netflix brilliant series “Black Mirror”).

The Anglo-Saxon world was meant and built, with the efficiency of the English language, for this world where everything is compartmentalized, optimized, calculated.

All of this lead us to forget, first in the Silicon Valley, then in Wall Street, then all over the world, that the Human Heart is what matters, that the Human Heart is what lies behind all decisions, even the apparently most rational ones.

And that if those decisions are made by machines, like stock trading algorithms, they balloon into bubbles disconnected from reality, and thus, they burst.

Countless of my friends, business acquaintances, customers, clients, partners, prove to me daily that behind the so-called facade of rational analysis, lies a gut feel, a judgement which we first make based on information received from all our senses — and which, in the end, rely on Human Trust — and then, which we try to justify with numbers, because we are too scared to admit that we are human.

In the end, small and large investment decisions, hiring decisions, firing decisions, decisions to go to war or not, all hinge and rely on a personal trust judgement.

Humanity is at a turning point, like we have had just a few in the past two thousand years.

Our brain developed between a limbic, primal, emotive system, and a frontal lobe cortex.

Hence, the story of our lives, and the life of humanity, is driven by a dynamo between two poles of our psyche: the rational and the irrational, the thought and the feeling, the reasoned and the intuitive.

I am not talking here about the right BRAIN and the left BRAIN distinction, but the ELABORATE and the PRIMAL, the thought and the feel, the DOING and the BEING.

The bridge between them is, precisely, Emotional Intelligence.

The 24% voters who voted last November in the United States are, in my view, revolting mostly against a view of the world which ignored their gut.

Their limbic system resonated with a limbic proposition, not a front lobe, cortex driven one.

In an age of science progress pushed to the limit, in an age where we are now putting robots to replace humans, today the local barista, tomorrow the UPS driver, and the day after the restaurant waiter, we are replacing so many of our daily interactions by cortex-born machines that the limbic system of humanity is crying out loud to be seen, and heard again.

As humanity burned the Alexandria library, as the Greek philosophers died one after the other, we entered into a long age of the dark, Middle, Limbic Ages.

It took hundred-year long wars, it took bloody revolutions, it took the guillotine and its horrors to finally (re)establish a new age of frontal cortex, started with the Renaissance and developed the Industrial Age.

We are today at yet another one of those juncture points.

We now have developed the power to destroy the entirety of humanity multiple times over.

We are so deep in the great advances and promises of science that we are forgetting how to take the time to discuss in the political sphere what it means to keep the Human at the Center of it all.

What is new also, is that the pace of change is now at such a juncture point, because, precisely, technology changes happen so fast that we are not giving time to time… we live in an instantaneous world, where we believe that speed is quality, that speed is efficiency, that speed is value.

<as I upload this story, yet another example of a world gone instantaneous hits us: the New York Times announces LA LA Land as a the winning Best Movie Oscar, without waiting 5 minutes for the end of the show. Ooops>

To be more precise, we are no longer creating the safe space for time, the willful conditions to connect the cortex and the limbic.

I will write in a separate blog post how we are also at the node and advent of a new medium (social media).

And so, I posit and call for everyone to just stop. To sit in a chair.

To take a tea or a coffee, or a glass of French wine.

To slow down.

And to think about your feelings.

And to listen about your feelings.

And your gut.

Slowing down: it goes for individuals, but it goes too for leaders, for corporate CEOs, for Board rooms, for political, for elected officials, for institutions.

Emotional Intelligence lets us understand the key tenets of what it is to be human:

It is about making decisions based on trust.

It is about leaving space for errors, and accepting them (where machines return error code 501: “sorry, can’t compute”).

It is about making “leaps of faith”, and making decisions, precisely, based on imperfect and incomplete information (where machines return error coded 404: “can’t process — reboot”).

It is time to add a few more articles to our Declaration of the Digital Rights.

“in the digital world, every human has the right to make errors”

“every human and end user has the right to refuse to be charted analytically and in data”

“every human has the right to edit and correct the information about them, directly, without incumbrance”

“every human has the right to override a machine decision intervening in his or her interactions with another human being”

We must protect the space of our Emotional Intelligence.

It is where our Heart lives, and it is what makes the bridge between our limbic system and our cortex.

It is what will bridge the advances of our societies with the progresses of our technology.

It must be accepted that it is not resolvable in equations, machinery, and modeling, because that would be negating the possibility of error, the possibility of faith, the possibility of risk taking, the possibility of love.

In short, it is about the possibility of Life on this planet as we know it, and must preserve it.

It is about the continuation of Nature’s grand experiment, which we call Humanity.