I have been reflecting on the messages from Gartner's first pandemic-driven virtual Gartner Symposium. I am really looking forward to a return to in-person networking, especially in the world-class city of Barcelona, but in any case, at the virtual event the messaging was quite obviously focused on "the new normal."
The new normal? Normal is just what we futurists have been calling the New World of Work for more than a decade (nod to Ulrich Beck, 2000 and Bill Gates, 2005.)
These new normal discussions on resilience and digital dexterity are quite simply a sharp cold welcome to the digital era – one that is sorely overdue considering that we are now more than 20% of the way through this bold new century. This is the topic of another upcoming article. For this piece, I will share that if you were not at the Symposium the focus was quite obviously the forced acceleration of our less digital colleagues into adapting to the new world of work. The crisis woke. Now we need to seize the opportunity. However, most of the opportunity will be lost if we focus on the workplace and the tools we aim to use within that physical space.
Digital Is Not About the Workplace
I believe we need to stop thinking about digital as grounded in the workplace. If we don't we miss the opportunity for real change.
Firstly, the real place of work is not found in the tired physical metaphors of the industrial era. The metaphors we use are obsolete and do not have relevance to digital natives. What pray tell is a desktop, a floppy disk, a briefcase or a home?
Secondly, and more importantly, most research from the last decade argues that digital is about human factors, and that culture and mindset are the biggest barriers to change.
And yet we continue to try to improve or achieve digital capability through attention to the infrastructure, the tools and the services that can be made available to the people in order to increase our new normality. I have found in my own organization, that we have been more successful in driving the cultural change when we stop thinking about the desktop and start working on… the digital human.
It seems semantics, but it really shifts the CIO perspective.
From Workplace to Human
Allow me to illustrate with an example. One of the hallmarks of the digital era is that we transition between roles seamlessly. We all live different roles (employee, partner, father, associate, colleague, neighbor.) Once upon a time, the transition from one role to the other, say, from employee to spouse, was slow and without the ability to access information required to play the role. I might stop at the bar for half an hour between the office and home and the information of the office stayed in the office while I did not have access to the information at home until I got home. Today, with access to 99% of human knowledge at my fingertips, I don't even realize that I am constantly switching roles the moment I switch apps from my phone discretely concealed in the palm of my hand.
In reality, in the digital era, in order to function well in all of my many roles, I need (and have) access to all of the information for those roles. I generally do so from a mobile device, which provides all of the apps and services, language, style and assistance to play each of these roles genuinely. Without mobile and its enabler, cloud, I would not have access and could only transition from role to role by moving to a physical place (home, club, office). We forget this mental code switching of the last century because seamless role navigation is so much a part of digital life, even amongst the luddites.
If we leverage this example for the argument, let's explore how starting from digital workplace focused on structure and systems differs from starting from the perspective of a digital human.
Two Different Frames of Mind
If as leaders we come at the issue from the workplace: we will be concerned with IT security and permissions, in order to let us use corporate devices for personal use, or personal devices for corporate use, or some other 4 letter word — COPE, BYOD, themselves 20th century concepts. We will conclude that we need security, but also personal data protection. And so we shift the focus from the person to the technical. But culture doesn't spring from the technical. Culture does not spring from the desktop. And by this route we never get to the heart of the necessary culture change of this "new normal."
If you, as the digital leader of your organization, were to start from the other end, from the perspective of the digital human, you would come at the problem from a fundamentally different frame of mind. If the human needs access to roles, then the conversation becomes about negotiating value vs risk for the human. The thinking might go something like: "I don't want to be an Orwellian Big Brother, but I do need to balance corporate protection with your digital human rights." Just asking that question will force the issue of naturally bringing our HR and legal colleagues into the design conversation. And, yes, it is all about the design.
It is human nature that when you look at something, you blind yourself partially to the periphery. And it is a truism that you achieve what you focus on. If I focus on digital human need… then I put to the periphery the technical problems where we apply our former trade as CIOs, our professional expertise, and we shift ourselves into an innovation and problem-solving space where there is no best practice — only good and emerging practice to explore.
The Architecture of the Digital Human
When we start on the human side, the problems "IT" faces are mental health, safety and well-being, self-service, rights and obligations, productivity measures, and security and personal data protection. These are architecture concerns, and we can engineer them and build them downstream.
When we start on the workplace side, the problems IT faces are security and data protection, wi-fi bandwidth, features and supplier selection, deployment models, and other engineering topics. We miss the architecture opportunity that is right for the 21st century: architecting people, behavior and culture.
Quoting another CIO at Symposium last fall, "Please someone offer me something better than the new normal! We have a chance to do better than normal." I agree with her entirely. We can do much better than normal as digital leaders.
So I recommend we temporarily forget about digital workplace and set ourselves to the task of defining the digital human, and so I propose a conversation in this esteemed community.
The following list is top of mind for me, but I hope by this article to elicit your brainstorming on what a 21st century human needs as compared with those of the 20th century.
- Access to all human knowledge as a fundamental right – in other words, it is less about protecting data than allowing access to data.
- Freedom to live and work in all of my roles and with access to all of my role enablers – in other words, it is about role expansion in lieu of role restriction
- Emancipation and self-determination – in other words, enabling democracy
- Accountability and risk assessment – in other words, enabling democracy
- Digital skill: empathy, communication, innovation, creativity, ethics, dealing with chaos, computational thinking, analytical thinking, scenario planning, multi-tasking and self-learning
I would love to get your views (especially on the importance of multi-tasking as a skill) either here or @devalier (on any social platform.)
HR… are we starting to step on your toes? Is it getting hot in here? Yes, that's the point. Fellow technologists (I'm talking to you, Management Board,) let's get out of the digital workspace business and get into the digital human business. That's how we make forward progress instead of sliding back from this wonderful opportunity.