The importance of human creativity and sensitivity in the age of Bionics
The book by strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg argues that humanities aren’t a luxury — they are your competitive advantage in the algorithmic age.
Culture
Global businesses need to understand the foundational and emerging cultural nuances of their new target markets. “Great art connects us across the ages,” says Christian. Conversations and symbols change across boundaries and ages.
For example, even elements of perfume have different connotations in different cultures. The US has five conditions of cooked meat (from rare to well-done), whereas the French have nine.
While spreadsheets give an atomised understanding of the world, humanities give a more holistic perspective. Prioritising “chains of meaning” among customers calls for inspired and courageous leadership.
For example, Ford is repositioning and restructuring itself by conducting research on “vehicle ecologies” to understand the aspiration of drivers in emerging markets like China and India. It focuses on style symbols, personal expression, and productivity services, and not just on the technological features of the car. Ford is re-casting itself from automaker to hybrid technology and transportation services company.
True mastery in such domains requires reaching a state of being in intuitive flow rather than a self-aware computational process. The five-stage journey covers the following stages: novice (following formulas), advanced beginner (building on early experience), competent (hierarchical procedures), proficient (ability to see the situation in totality) and expert (intuitive flow).
Thick data
Thin data is about facts, thick data is about the context and cultural frameworks around those facts. Thick data is organic, and is drawn from ethnographic studies, stories, anecdotes, and social behaviour; it may have multiple meanings and even ambiguities as compared to thin data.
Big data is not necessarily better data; it offers reductionist views of ourselves. For example, trends based on Google search patterns may not always be accurate in terms of understanding deeper phenomena and the causation links.
Fields like global financial trading require deeper understanding of politics, news narratives, conversations, turf wars and even bruised egos of leaders — not just monetary policies and treaties. George Soros is a notable example in this regard.
Sensemaking draws on all four kinds of knowledge: objective (scientific realism, management science), subjective (personal opinions, feelings), shared knowledge (situational and contextual; not universal), and sensory (‘sixth sense,’ stream of consciousness).
While big data may unearth unforeseen correlations, a deeper approach is needed to explain causation based on context and empathy. For example, mere demographic profiling won’t reveal the behavioural differences between quick shopping after work and leisurely shopping on weekends. This goes far beyond quicker approaches like design thinking.
The Savannah
Broader insights about customers come not just from pain points and needs but the customs and heritage of the culture. Fields like phenomenology help unearth relationships between people, objects and experiences in cultural contexts, and can offer real explanatory power across the ages.
Discourse analysis can help unearth clues about how customers view products like insurance policies at different stages in their lives. This can help insurance companies frame conversations in more pro-active and empathetic ways, eg. use digital tools to interact with youth, and meetings for elders.
Supermarkets can better service customers by viewing them not just as shoppers but as people with specific tasks, like cooking. Stores can become a “stage setting for the theatre of food,” eg., watching a chef create samples, changing the lighting and smells in the store.
There are three types of empathy in this regard: first level (eg. language, dress code), second level (when something is amiss), and third level (analytical, drawing on theories and frameworks).
Christian shows how this can help understand different interpretations of success in life (eg. work-life balance, high fashion), consumption of beverages (eg. meditative experience of tea in East Asia), home spaces (eg. open plan designs), and museum membership (eg. investment in a larger cause and not just a transaction).
Creativity
Three kinds of reasoning are used to solve problems: deductive (top-down, in constrained problems with set boundaries), inductive (bottom-up, with set knowns and unknowns), and abductive (non-linear, generating new ideas).
Abductive reasoning has elements of uncertainty, messiness and doubt, and involves more creativity in dealing with twists, turns, dead ends, and breakthroughs. Sensemaking is crucial in situations where there are no clear knowns or unknowns, and there are no coherent hypotheses.
Times of change are cause for optimism as well as pessimism, as seen in the work of Henry Ford (dawn of the automobile era in the US) and TS Eliot (poems on new ways of being in Europe). The rise of new eras creates new moods, and success requires staying open to new insights.
This sensitivity requires a combination of grace and will, according to Christian. It is a desire to immerse in another world and be receptive to new and even confusing or disturbing experiences.
Creativity comes through us, and not just from us — in the “bus, bath, and bed,” in the words of Wolfgang Kohler. Creativity comes from the stream of the sub-conscious, a “middle voice” that is neither entirely active nor entirely passive.
There is much more to creativity than design thinking, which Christian dismisses as “the bullshit tornado.” Many designers unfortunately think they do not need perspectives from anthropology, economics or political science, Christian laments. He dismisses the approach of design thinking companies like IDEO as “drive-by” anthropology, where designers never fully immerse themselves in the world of their subjects.
Immersion into the client’s history and context gives renowned architect Bjarke Ingels the “marinade in which to simmer,” so as to draw out new impressions rather than stamp older impressions from previous work. His designs for housing projects in Copenhagen take into account not just government regulations on spacing but also historical and environmental considerations. Other approaches are based on a “managed forest” design, as in his design for a Budapest museum.
The North Star
Leadership in an era of big data is about selecting the appropriate context for data collection, and connecting the data to create a textured view of the world for better interpretation. Sensemaking in this regard helps determine origin and direction by using all data, human as well as technical.
Interestingly, the US Naval Academy did away with requirements of celestial navigation in the 1990s, and replaced it with GPS — only to bring it back in 2015. Effective navigation uses all available data for interpretation, according to Christian.
“Difficult conversations” in organisations require nimble and astute navigation across complex cues. Leaders need to gauge the social context of meetings and teams in real-time, along with their relationship with themselves.
The design of company culture rests a lot on navigating the balance between what can be said and what remains unspoken. For example, a willingness to try new things must also allow for people to own up to mistakes without getting defensive for fear of criticism.
Heads of organisations like the European Commission for Competition need to continually balance between generalities and specifics, so that laws are enforced but not in a rigid manner. Leaders need to be approachable and be out in the field so as to “take the temperature” of others and understand changes in the situation on the ground.
Deeper issues of empathy and cultural understanding have even been deployed in communication in the “theatre of the media,” with those who took journalist Jill Caroll hostage in Baghdad in 2006. This requires active listening and empathy, but not necessarily liking the other side or approving of their actions.
The wine industry in different parts of the world shows a mix of biology, chemistry, technology and even alchemy. “There was a wine inside of me that needed to get out,” in the words of California winemaker Carby Corison, explaining how new varieties of grapes drew her into making new wines based on her expertise and sense of commitment.
In sum, in a modern world where technology is almost treated as God, we should be careful not to let technology replace us. “Technology is the master of scale. But it need not be our master,” urges Christian. Technology can help us arrive at extraordinary places, but we still need to figure out what to do once we get there, he adds.
For long-term success, a spirit of caring serves better than a nihilistic leadership or even a high-precision algorithm. For example, healthcare needs artful hacks and not just quantitative measures; efficiency is not a substitute for empathy.
AI is forcing us to ask ourselves what humans are for. “People are for caring. People are for making and interpreting meaning,” answers Christian.
In that regard, disciplines like art should not be seen as a needless luxury, but as the source of crucial insights and skills for sensemaking. Art is not just about fun, but extending your analytical muscles. “The humanities aren’t a luxury; they are your competitive advantage,”Christian signs off.
Bionic is a mindset. When understood and properly wielded, striving to be bionic helps teams make better decisions and build better processes — the kind that result in higher quality outcomes.
3 Steps Toward Bionics
1. Identify the Friction in the Process
First, understand there will always be bad processes in need of fixing.
Despite our best intentions, poor systems emerge. Cumbersome bureaucracy happens — even to the best companies. The resulting friction can slow operations down and in the worst cases, grind progress to a halt.
Friction in the process can happen for several reasons, such as not solving for the right root cause, evolving needs that result from rapid growth, trying to accommodate too many asks in a single process, or by continuously bolting on solutions to an original process. The key to identifying brokenness in your bionics is that the machine is now opposing its intended function. And in the most egregious cases, the human-element is nowhere to be found.
When friction happens — and it will — take on a bionic mindset. Be willing to experiment, iterate, and adapt. Don’t settle for the status quo. Always be scanning your ecosystem for signs of pain or friction that have appeared since you last checked in. And be self-critical — that amazing process you innovated last year may now be woefully out of date.
Once you’ve identified friction, answer a simple question:
“Does a human add value to this process?”
If the answer is “No,” you’re not looking for a bionic solution, you’re looking for an automated solution — and that is OK! Some things we have to do are just drudgery. Identify those things and do everything in your power to automate or eliminate that type of work.
And for that, you’ll want to read on for Step 2.
If the answer is “Yes” — and a human does add value — then skip to Step 3.
Audit Your Time, Automate What You Can
Adding machinery to our daily workflows should free up your time to do the meaty thought work humans do best.
Bionics need not be just about sweeping company-wide processes. Have you ever examined your calendar or used a time tracking tool to figure out exactly how you spend your energy most days? Sometimes it can be eye opening how much time you spend simply manipulating spreadsheets or providing answers to questions that could have been documented.
If you haven’t done this recently, take a moment to audit how you’ve been spending your time. There should be at least a few things you hate doing (see step #1) and at least several things that you really love and look forward to doing.
Here’s how you can get started. Take a sheet of paper. An index card will do. Throughout your day, write down the things you do. If you spend 15 minutes dealing with email, write it down. Is Slack consuming lots of time? Make a tick mark for every time you jump into Slack. Track the meetings you attend, making a note of every 30 minutes you spend in a meeting.
Audit your days over the course of a week. Where are you spending your time? Are there opportunities to cut out activities that rob you of time? E.g. is there a way to batch process Slack? Batch process email?
There are simple things you can do to eek out efficiencies in your daily workflow. While it can be a pain to audit your time, if you can automate certain workflows or find ways to make the drudgery more efficient, it’s well worth it. Because the routine tasks you do every day — even if they only take a couple minutes here and a couple minutes there — add up to huge chunks of time over the weeks, months, and years of your life.
Once you’re saving all that time spent on less meaningful tasks, you’ll want to turn back to leveraging bionics for your favorite, human value adding activities.
Start Bionicizing by Constructing Pits of Success
I’m a big fan of process, but I sometimes get dirty looks when I say so. This is because people tend to equate the term process with red tape or friction (see list item #1).
It doesn’t have to be that way.
On the contrary, when you’re wearing your bionic hat, process can (and should!) be equated with a “pit of success” mentality wherein the process itself is seamless and invisible to the user.
“Pit of success? What’s that?” Some light Googling ties the origination of the term “pit of success” back to Rico Mariani from his memo about software development:
“The Pit of Success: in stark contrast to a summit, a peak, or a journey across a desert to find victory through many trials and surprises, we want our customers to simply fall into winning practices by using our platform and frameworks”
— Rico Mariani, MS Research MindSwap, Oct. 2003
Rico’s idea was simple: build products so your end user — by doing what seems to be the simplest, most intuitive thing — always succeeds in their task.
Although this quote was meant to describe product design and development, it also applies to business operations. You can help employees at your company fall into a pit of success by constructing processes wherein the very act of trying to do the right thing actually results in doing the right thing.
First, eliminate as much decision making and as many manual steps as possible. When paths diverge, humans are forced to make decisions which are cognitively expensive and prone to error. <Insert your own favorite research and psychology lessons about how the brain workshere>. In short, our brains are constantly trying to run on autopilot and we’re often making split second decisions based on categorizations that may or may not apply to the situation.
Here, the bionic approach is to eliminate ambiguity so that tasks can require less conscious thought. In other words, leverage pattern matching to create habits that are repeatable and predictable. Make it easy for employees to spot a common workflow and then anchor that pattern to a habit.
Be a Happy Human: Spend Your Time Doing the Things You’re Best At
The goal of bionics is to optimize your human time, making sure machinery is both alleviating the rote drudgery and helping you to make decisions without consuming all of your available brain glucose. Use the time you save to apply your most human skills (e.g. empathy) to the tasks that make you want to come to work every day.
Ultimately, being bionic is not about cutting-edge tools. It’s a process of rationalizing decisions with a view to reaching the most scalable solution possible — while still maintaining our humanity.
Resources for Bionic/Adaptive orgs
-https://blog.fullstory.com/3-steps-to-build-bionics/
-https://blog.fullstory.com/more-than-human-but-not-machine/
-On Working like a Pod
More General:
https://hbr.org/2017/02/how-spotify-balances-employee-autonomy-and-accountability (Spotify Example)
https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/a-business-within-the-business-d5c3107a78f1 (Dave Gray has books on this)
https://medium.com/making-bulb/the-product-team-how-we-structure-for-success-459a8b760814 (Startups Example)
http://blog.idonethis.com/cells-pods-squads-structure/ (Analysis of Dave Gray’s writings)
https://medium.com/the-connected-company/the-future-is-podular-c71d090abf80 (More from Dave Gray)
More Technical:
https://medium.com/@wmorein/the-canonical-startup-org-structure-4e320d462864
