Fuga dalla routine, meno errori, prodotti migliori, maggiori possibilità di rinnovarsi e crescere: la paura dell’automazione, a decenni ormai delle grandi invenzioni tecnologiche novecentesche come le carte di credito e il web, deve cedere il passo al pensiero positivo e alla ricerca di nuove opportunità.
WHY AUTOMATION AND REMOWAL OF ROUTINE WORK IS GOOD?
Structural Change of Work
Most of the great innovations including credit card, WWW etc. were made already tens of years ago, but still even today majority of the people are doing routine work that produce little or no value for the organizations. Actually, routine work is decreasing value and bringing risks in terms of inconsistent quality of services, speed of service delivery and safety of delivery.
HUMANS MAKE MISTAKES, COMPUTERS DON’T
Even though majority of people do not seem to bother doing routine work, CEOs and managers should. One factor related to any work made by humans is possibility of risks and inhumane errors. We have bad days and good days. Sometimes mistakes happen, but trying to find them can be very slow and costly process. Computers do not make mistakes, if they do they have been programmed wrong way by human.
HUMAN PERFORMANCE IS NEVER THE SAME, WHEREAS COMPUTERS’ IS (MOSTLY)
As humans, we have good days, good weeks and even good years. On the other hand, we have days when everything goes wrong or at least significantly slower than we would like things to go. Any attempt to standardize human work is attempt to homogenize human beings into similar form, but at the same time this is against all the 21st century mantras ‘We are all individuals’. If we are individuals, why would we even make individuals function as machines. Computers can function effectively, without any breaks and bad day, and most importantly always maintain the wanted standard of quality (if it does not include any programming/technical errors in the first place).
HUMANS NEED INTERPERSONAL COMUNICATION AND MANAGEMENT, COMPUTERS DON’T
Routine work creates the need for middle management functions. Without routine work, there is no need for middle management either. Most of the middle management functions produce absolutely no value for the organization, just manage the routine workers and listen their needs. If workers do not enjoy work flow in the organization, Middle management have even failed their most important reason of existence. Middle management and routine workers aim to make the organization more productive; if they cannot their existence cannot be justified. In addition, most of the problems in the organization are related to problems between people, not between machines.
AUTOMATION OF ROUTINE WORK WILL FORCE PEOPLE TO ADD VALUE
Automation forces people to specialize and cast from distance how they can add value to organizations and societies (their environment). This also forces universities and education centers to focus their education to be more value productive, more exact and clearer. After this, students are able to say more clearly what they will do when they graduate, instead of giving the answer ‘I do not know’. Automation forces us to think how can we add value into organizations and society. From economic perspective, automation forces people to specialize into fields that add value to whole society, into fields that need experts instead of taking general education and graduating without any idea and knowledge what to do. When we know our value to the society we can serve it better, understand value chains and through that the entire business environment. Automation does not kill jobs; it just forces people to think how to add value.
AUTOMATION CREATES OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEEPER LEARNING AND MORE MEANINGFUL CAREERS
Currently automation is said to destroy jobs, but the other way to think this, is actually to think that it is routine work that kills work flow and gives absolutely no chance for learning and personal growth (see e.g. Maslow… higher needs). In a matter of fact, it is the routine work that destroys jobs and decreases work flow, because it adds no value for anyone and causes need to create automation that adds significantly more value. People should never compete with machines. People should be allowed to be people. Lifelong learning can be seen to mean many things, but it is hard to believe that anyone could say they enjoy lifelong learning when they work like machines. Automation allows people to learn and focus; these create opportunities for deeper learning and understanding of bigger pictures as well. Why would we want to use our most valuable resources (humans) to be machines and force us out of the area we currently do better than any machines (understand bigger pictures and see forest from trees)?
di Mikko Myyryläinen
