It’s hard to escape the current barrage of articles issuing dire warnings of the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Personally, I’m quite excited about that (but that’s another article for another time.)
I’m more worried about a rise in "robotic" behaviour in people at work. People doing things monotonously, robotically and almost without thinking. We all do it from time to time – we do things the same way we’ve always done them, or do just enough to keep the wolf from the door that week and move on to the next.
It’s not completely our fault. Organisations are – obviously - ‘organised’ in a particular way to align our collective efforts to a common purpose. They impose a structure and expectations on us. But in managing our performance and mitigating risks, there’s a risk we’re constrained and infantilised. And the way organisations are designed is apt to make us risk-averse particularly when things seem uncertain. Although leadership teams talk about being innovative and ‘ahead of the curve’, the truth is that for many of us our work environment is more likely to reward a safe, steady approach.
What’s the way out of this? When working as a coach I’ve noticed that, as my clients progress in their careers to more senior roles, the boundaries of their jobs become less clearly defined and more fuzzy. Most of them have more latitude than they realise to take bold decisions and do things differently. And ironically, most of us have potential to add a huge amount of value when operating at the edges of our roles (as long as we’re keeping things ticking over at the core too).
Most of us feel that working at the edges of one’s job can be scary – and so we often avoid it. One approach that worked for many of my clients who sit on executive teams is to consider “Where’s my sense of adventure?” This idea of an adventure is powerful. In an adventure you know you’ll face challenges, you know things won’t go as you expect, and there’s an element of risk. But in the end, it’s exciting – and it’s something that changes us. How many of us think about our work that way?
Of course, I’m not saying that people should be reckless – but most people aren’t considering all the options they have before them because they’re not thinking in an adventurous way.
We can probably all think of people we’ve worked with who are too reckless and bold and aren’t conscientious enough in the way they work. Yes, they can cause all sorts of problems. But the truth is that these people are few and far between. There are far more people who play it safe – frustrated by constraints that are in part imaginary and self-imposed.
One note of hope is that research shows that we’re pretty poor at accurately estimating our capability (the Dunning-Kruger effect – if you don’t know it, google it, it’s eye-opening). Just as people of low competence often over-estimate their abilities, highly competent people consistently under-estimate themselves. In particular a lot of highly competent people underestimate their ability to operate at the fringes of their job – that place where real change and adventure happens. People are capable of more than they realise but they need to be prepared to take a bit of a risk.
So, I invite you to ask yourself: do you want to feel like an adventurer or be part of the rise of the robots?
