Invisible and Unspoken - Work Futures - Medium

Beacon NY 2019–07–20 | The hottest day of the year, so far. I took a walk, but now I am staying inside, in my cocoon of cooled air.

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The problem with automation | Steve LeVine reports on several papers from economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo that disrupt the smug assumption that AI and robots will create more jobs than they destroy:

A drumbeat of studies has pushed back hard against concern over the accelerated automation of factories and other businesses, predicting that — just as industrial age advances have always done — robots will produce many more jobs than they destroy. But in three new papers, two leading U.S. labor economists say that is not how automation has played out over the last three decades — nor will it in the future if left to its own devices. Since the 1980s, automation has worsened inequality, stagnated the wages of workers, and struck at productivity, according to MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo. Coming from Acemoglu and Restrepo, two of the field’s most respected scholars,the paperscould seriously undercut a flood of corporate and non-profit think tank studies that have downplayed and even ridiculed alarm about the new age of automation.

[The papers include these:The Wrong Kind of AI? Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Labor Demand | Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, March 5, 2019, and Demographics and Automation | Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, March 2019.]

Snap. Sounds just like Carl Frey, as I discussed yesterday.

In an interview, Acemoglu said that while prior technological cycles have killed a lot of jobs, businesses and government have taken other actions that have counter-balanced the loss. Primarily, towering new technologies have spawned a lot of new industries and jobs. In the early 20th century, for instance, the spread of the assembly line created new jobs for line workers, engineers, machinists, financiers, and so on. These new tasks account for much of the rise in productivity at the time. But automation in our age has been largely about killing jobs, and not about creating new tasks that would require lots of human labor.

So-so because it is not good enough to create jobs, like earlier industrial revolutions did. Maybe the fourth industrial revolution will, but not at first, I bet.

Acemoglu says it’s up to us:

So far, we’ve used our know-how singularly automating at the expense of labor. If we keep on doing that, we will keep on destroying more jobs without job gains. It’s completely our decision. Also, the nature of organization evolution is trending toward platform economics, where non-linear scaling means that adding additional customers, products, or even services does not incur the historic patterns of staffing, It’s not just automation, it’s also the leverage of self-organizing organizations at work.

Does Diversity Training Work the Way It’s Supposed To? | Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman, Laura J. Zarrow, Kasandra Brabaw, Dena M. Gromet, Reb Rebele, Cade Massey, Angela L. Duckworth, and Adam Grant looked into that, and?

There were some other surprises, but the obvious approach — train those most likely to be biased against minorities and women — simply does not change things. The authors suggest a variety of half measures and the recommendation to experiment, but the stark results of the research are fairly negative.

[from Work Futures Daily | The Future Is Boring]

Untangling your organization’s decision making | Aaron De Smet, Gerald Lackey, and Leigh M. Weiss share findings about decision making in organizations, starting with this telling stat:

While there is growing data, and an increasing awareness about cognitive biases that impede rational thought, nonetheless the growing complexity of organizations stands in the way of accountability.

This result is closely related to another finding: both high-quality decisions and quick ones are much more common at organizations with fewer reporting layers The ultimate solution for many organizations looking to untangle their decision making is to become flatter and more agile, with decision authority and accountability going hand in hand. High-flying technology companies such as Google and Spotify are frequently the poster children for this approach, but it has also been adapted by more traditional ones such as ING (for more, see our recent McKinsey Quarterly interview “ING’s agile transformation”). As we’ve described elsewhere, agile organization models get decision making into the right hands, are faster in reacting to (or anticipating) shifts in the business environment, and often become magnets for top talent, who prefer working at companies with fewer layers of management and greater empowerment. As we’ve worked with organizations seeking to become more agile, we’ve found that it’s possible to accelerate the improvement of decision making through the simple steps of categorizing the type of decision that’s being made and tailoring your approach accordingly. In our work, we’ve observed four types of decisions:

The authors dedicate the article to big-bet, cross-cutting, and delegated decisions. I find their approach very pragmatic, as this excerpt regarding bet-the-company decisions shows:

Go read the whole thing.

A Year of Not Knowing | Jane Watson hasn’t been writing much (our loss), due to what she calls a ‘crisis of unknowing’. However, she’s been reading and offers this:

This week I finishedThe Age of Heretics:Heroes, Outlaws and the Forerunners of Corporate Changeby Art Kleiner, a wonderfully weird history of corporate management and the counter-cultural schools of thought that challenged prevailing organizational wisdom, and either changed it or were co-opted by it, on the path from medieval monasteries to the end of the 1980s. I loved every page of this book and I would give almost anything to read a second volume that brings the history to present day (sadly Kleiner never wrote one). What was both satisfying and unsettling was to see how far back the roots of (seemingly) current questions and contemporary issues in organizations go. Self-management, corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, environmentalism, rampant consumerism and the role of corporations in society, it’s all in there, decades before I imagined it would be. Writing in 1996 about the 1960s Kleiner says: “As a nation, we were prepared for the collapse of capitalism or its hegemony — but not for the kind of rolling, choppy, uncertain economic growth that struck different components of society in turn with prosperity and calamity, so that no component could ever remain secure. “We were prepared for a battle over the direction of government, but not for an intensely pluralistic society, in which government was no longer the primary engine of governance, having ceded that role to corporations and interest groups. “We were prepared for race war, but not global interconnectedness, where economies were held in thrall to the imperatives of bond and currency markets. “We were prepared for giant corporations to become public enemies, but not for them to adopt an ambiguous role as public enemyandsocial contributor. “Most of all, we were not prepared for the speed of transactions to accelerate once again.” Should I be comforted to know how many of our present-day concerns and challenges are ones that have long been manifested by the processes at work across our economy and organizations? Maybe.

Thank you, dear Jane, for motoring through your ambivalence. And you, dear reader, should go read the whole thing.

Source: Medium.com

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