MOVING BEYOND THE UTOPIA-DYSTOPIA DICHOTOMY
DESIGNING THE FUTURE: AN URGENT CALL TO ARMS FOR HR
This article was originally published in the 12th “Weconomy” Magazine “Robot: is automation collaborative” by Logotel, along with other awesome contributions
There is no doubt we are experiencing another social, economic and industrial revolution through digital technologies. There are similarities and differences compared to the previous revolutions of this kind: we find positive and negative perspectives, we have early adopters and scared skeptics, we see winners and victims at all levels. We had them when we asked ourselves fundamental questions in the Renaissance, when the steam engine led to the creation of huge factories, when electricity and electronics deeply changed them.
This revolution is also once again impacting one of the most fundamental and human activities: “work”. What we do and how we do it, which distinctively makes us human and is critical to our quality of life.
The difference today is the speed at which change is happening and the exponential acceleration of the disruption it causes.
Should we be scared or cheerful in facing this change? “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes” Mark Twain said. What we learn from the past is that (1):
- Employment in some sectors can decline sharply, but new jobs created elsewhere absorb those that have been displaced.
- Employment shifts is going to be painful.
- Technology creates more jobs than it destroys, including some we can’t imagine at the outset.
- Technology raises productivity growth, which in turn boosts demand and creates jobs.
- We all work less and play more thanks to technology. For each aspect of the emerging digital technology we can find studies praising their positive impact on our lives and research painting dark portraits of our future.
Yet, today change is impacting large parts of our society across the planet and it is moving much faster than people’s ability to cope with it and even their ability to understand it and its consequences. In one of his last books — Retrotopia (2) — sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman pointed out that for the first time in the modern era the future is no longer associated with progress, but with regression. Our utopian impulse is redirected towards the “space of collective memory”, “remodeled at will” to provide people with a safe refuge to their concerns and fears.
We lack ideas and vision about the future to guide our actions today. The general feeling at all levels is that change is happening at the speed of light and nobody is on the driving seat. Nobody seems to be able to provide the lens through which people can interpret their present and future. We are funding studies and analyses, pictures and projections, but we haven’t initiated a serious and fruitful conversation about the revolution we are facing yet. We need to stop asking ourselves “what it is” and start looking into “what we can do about it”, to leverage the change and actively design the next phase of our evolution. Today we have very few leaders, institutions and movements doing it, leaving the vast majority of people alone confronted with this large scale stupefying fast disruption.
This is not a simple think tank for famous minds held in a nice location and fueled by good food and optimistic mood.
We need to review the “social contract” that is at the foundation of our Western society as we know it.
Corporations, citizens, governments, organizations need to meet to redesign how “work” is defined, distributed, compensated. How education is structured and provided to get ready for this new world.
HR has a unique opportunity to be driving these conversations. No other function within the corporate environment is uniquely positioned at the intersection between the business models and the people making them happen. No other team is interacting at the same depth with the society, academia and institutions, no other function has the sole objective to provide the environment to manage, motivate, engage people.
All other functions view the digital disruption through their own business-lens, they care about the implications and impact for their own objectives, HR is the only one having the charter to address change by placing the redefinition of work as such, the relationship between employers, employees, society and the educational sector at the core of its interventions.
This is a call to arms for HR organizations
This is a historical and critical call to arms for HR organizations:
- to drive business leaders to put the redefinition of the “social contract” (with their employees and the society as a whole) on top of their agenda; — to engage employees in the dialogue about their future work experience
- to create a lead in conversations with the administration in defining the wider policy changes needed to shape and support the new contract;
- to partner with educational institutions in recreating education to prepare and develop people for the new reality we are building.
HR teams need to rethink the structure and operating principles of the enterprise as we know it, need to redefine themselves from the ground up, questioning what the „H“ stands for in this new world of human and machine interactions.
It’s time to move beyond the paralyzing Utopia-Dystopia dichotomy: as always the future is ours to shape and HR is called to be the engine and leader of this activity.
Will we live up to these expectations?
1. McKinsey Global Institute, Five lessons from history on AI, automation, and employment, Nov 2017.
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia, Cambridge, 2017.