Who Works For Who? Reminding Ourselves What Tech is There For

From time to time, I hear a statement that goes something like this from a client or a colleague:

“I just don’t know what to post on Facebook.”

Substitute for Facebook any technological platform of your choosing (MailChimp, Twitter, Pinterest, your website, etc), the sentiment is the same.

Now, partly, this sentiment expresses a basic anxiety that a lot of people feel about new technology and doing new things. And that’s understandable, and I am sympathetic to that anxiety. So if that’s how you feel, don’t be ashamed of that. It’s natural, especially if these tools are new to you. And this post should hopefully help you conquer that fear a little bit.

That’s because I want to reframe this sentiment a bit. Another thing about this sentiment is that it exposes a misalignment in our relationship to technology. I think that misalignment is a big part of why we are anxious or afraid.

To help illustrate this, I’m going to make a movie recommendation: go see The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Nightly. It’s a fun movie, and the main character of the story is one of the founding figures of computer science, Alan Turing. Turing and his team, as depicted in the movie (though not 100% historically accurately, mind you) developed a machine that could crack the German codes during World War II. Their efforts probably shaved two years off the war and may have saved millions of lives. So that’s kinda a big deal. But it also illustrates a very important point about computers and technology: that they exist to solve problems for us. The problem Turing and his colleagues tackled was the problem of interpreting German codes. You probably have different problems you need to solve. In my work in particular I often find myself tackling problems around how we communicate a particular message to a particular group of people (marketing and communications, or in an academic parlance “hermeneutics”), and technology plays a significant role in that process.

Regardless of what problem you might be solving, though, the fundamental insight is that technology exists to be a tool for solving that problem. What’s really important here is the order of the logic, so let’s spell it out:

• we are trying to solve problem x
• technology y can help us solve problem x
• therefore, technology y is a good tool for us to use in order to solve problem x

That’s how the relationship is supposed to be constructed, and I think for most people that’s a construction that will intuitively make a fair amount of sense. Here’s the problem, though: in practice, we often don’t follow that logic. Instead, here’s what the sentiment we started out with looks like:

• we are trying to use technology y
• technology y requires us to produce input(s) z
• therefore, we must create/invent input(s) z in order to use technology y

So what I want you to notice is that this construction does something fundamentally backwards: it has us working for the technology instead of the technology working for us.

To use our Facebook example: when we express that we “need” to come up with things to post on Facebook, what we are really doing is “feeding” Facebook instead of using Facebook to feed us.

As an aside, since I’ve raised this analogy: think about this from a Facebook consumer’s (rather than marketer’s) perspective. Facebook does, in a way, feed them. They want to solve the problem of “keeping up with what’s happening in their friends’ lives” or “seeing cat videos” or just “killing time.” And Facebook is a vehicle through which they can and do accomplish these things (setting aside the questions of whether or not those things are good in and of themselves or whether there are other concerns that come from using it). This is part of what makes Facebook so effective and addictive: it actually is scratching an itch we have, even if it’s not (or at least not always) a good idea to scratch the particular itch in question and even if scratching itches often has other less desirable side-effects.

So when we try to feed the feed instead of letting the feed feed us (try saying that ten times fast), we are doing it wrong. What does it look like to do it right?

Your results to this questions may vary depending on what problem you are trying to solve. I’m going to stick with the Facebook example because (a) we’re all having so much fun with it already and (b) it’s germane to the field I mostly work in, marketing and communications.

So to do this the right way we need to identify a problem we want to solve first (problem x). Let’s say our problem is that we want to alert people to a community program we are offering.

Notice that this problem has nothing to do with Facebook, per se. It has to do with what we do. It’s about our organization, our operations, our programs. It’s about our real-world goals. In other words, it’s the dog wagging the tail instead of the tail wagging the dog.

We observe that many of the people we want to alert about this program we are offering are active Facebook users. So one way we could solve problem x (telling them about our community program) is to use Facebook as the vehicle through which we communicate. In other words, Facebook is a tool that can help us solve problem x. There are lots of ways it might do that: we could create an event and invite them all. We could create a nice visual about the program and share it to generate interest and enthusiasm. We could send direct messages to a bunch of people. We could use paid advertising. But the point is, whichever method or combination of methods we choose, Facebook is a vehicle that we are using to accomplish a particular goal rather than a beast we are feeding because we think we have to.

Hopefully that’s a paradigm shift for you. Make the tool work for you, don’t work for the tool. What that means is that you should never start with the technology you want to use, you should always start with the problem you want to solve. That could be a marketing/communications problem (like our example of alerting people to an event we are offering). It could be a financial problem, like maintaining the right balance in a portfolio of stocks. It could be a productivity problem, like sharing information among members of a team so that everyone is one the same page. Or it could be any other sort of problem you want/need to address in your life or business. But the problem has to exist in your real-world operations: it’s about what you are trying to accomplish, your mission and goals, not what you think you’re supposed to do with some particular tool de jure. Keeping the order of our relationship with technology structured correctly should make these tools much less anxiety producing and your use of them much more productive and helpful.