Is your thinking stuck in material gear?
Authored by Miikka Leinonen
Digitalization wipes out the concrete part of our jobs at a mind-blowing pace. The new, more immaterial work forces us to invent a new communication culture. The change will be as significant as when humans came down from trees.
If your professional title is Online Service Specialist, Brand Ambassador, Strategist, iOS Developer, Process Flow Innovator, Experience Design Consultant or Digital Marketing Leader, your work is already about 99% immaterial.
Our minds are stuck in a notion of work equaling something concrete.
Knowledge workers across the globe are finding this harder to justify to themselves because…
- Our tools have transformed into virtual collaboration platforms, mobile chats and cloud services we link to on a lightweight laptop or phone. In a few years time, work comes our way via virtual reality headsets. In a decade, devices will have disappeared altogether. Puff!
- Physical locations designed for work are disappearing. We work wherever we want. We tap away on our devices in a café and take Skype calls at the summer house.
- Even if we spend the day sitting in meetings, the most valuable part of our work — insight — often occurs somewhere else: behind the car wheel, in bed or taking a shower.
But we still produce something concrete, right?
Well…. We design digital services, develop business infrastructures, fine-tune brands, create software that connects disparate systems. Usually our work has some sort of link with the physical world, but most of our time and expertise is channeled into developing the immaterial side.
Maintaining the (sometimes artificial) material link isn’t just part of the legacy of work. It’s proof to us of the economic value of our efforts.
Few dare to admit that their work is immaterial. We fear that if the link between work and the material world is broken, the connection between work and its financial value breaks down.
“If work doesn’t have an impact on the material world, does it have any monetary value?”
How to be intangible?
Thanks to the combination of new technologies, global knowledge sharing and innovation, the immaterialization of work has been so rapid that our culture hasn’t managed to keep up pace.
We try to grasp immaterial issues with a brain that over the millennia has specifically developed to understand concrete things.
We can easily understand what’s physical, but discussing anything intangible is much harder. The more immaterial business gets, the clearer it becomes how our communication skills are stuck in what’s material. We understand things more easily when they take on a familiar form.
Ecosystems are complex
Explaining immaterial business isn’t only difficult because it lacks physical form. In addition, complex ecosystem structures often appear between intangible elements.
Test yourself
Test #1:
You’re sitting on the backseat of an Uber. You are listening to your favorite music, which is streaming from Spotify on your phone and transferred to the car’s speakers via the Uber app.
How quickly can you explains who owns what?
Test #2:
How would you explain bitcoin to your grandmother?
“Virtual currency”?
Jordan Greenhall ingeniously describes bitcoin as an experiment in self-organizing collective intelligence. He sees bitcoin as an immaterial being molded by culture and technology, which is able to adapt to changing conditions.
Next time tell that to your grandmother!
Do you speak immaterial?
Of course the immaterial world is nothing new. We’ve pondered the character and interrelations of intangible things for thousands of years for instance in the realms of philosophy and religion.
But now an ever-increasing portion of our daily lives is losing its material form. We have a growing need to discuss the immaterial in more mundane terms.
Mathematics is an excellent way to communicate complex issues, but the language is so difficult that it doesn’t suit that many.
When we confront complex issues, we usually resort to our strongest sense — sight. We return to a time before writing was invented, to the paintings of cavemen. We sketch on whiteboards and Powerpoint slides. We draw charts and cover the walls with sticky notes. And naturally, we tell stories.
New tools are required
Understanding complex, constantly changing issues requires new tools.
Already now, data analytics and artificial intelligence help us by visualizing huge data masses and emphasizing key details.
In the future, direct connections between human brains will solve a multitude of issues. But developing telepathy is still in its early stages, and the solution won’t be coming from that direction anytime soon.
Maybe one day AI will interpret the thoughts of one person to another without the risk of misunderstanding, but that, too, may take decades.
An outsider perspective helps us understand
Drawing helps us deal with a difficult problem. We try to get some distance to see the big picture and control it like a model railway.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are the most promising communication tools of the near future, allowing to deal with the abstract world in a more versatile and intuitive way. Perhaps these new tools mean we no longer have to view a problem from the outside, but sense the workings form within, even by being part of it.
We need new types of professionals to help us on our way. To create and understand virtual spaces and combinations of senses, we need guides who can help us establish a form and movement language for our thoughts. They can spur us to create a new language from our thoughts, which is immaterial and material at the same time.
Biggest change lies in our culture
New technologies bring us new ways to express ourselves. But the biggest leap needs to happen in our hearts and heads. We have to accept that we no longer work on the premises of the physical world. We must let go of the branch of the physical world and descend to walk the paths of the immaterial world.
Miika Leinonen is a Visual Strategist, Serial Innovator, and MeltMaster based out of Helsinki, Finland. He is a passionate change catalyst and contributor to the Stretch hive-mind.
