Why you should treat the tech you use at work like a colleague | Nadjia Yousif

135,705 views ・ 2019-01-07

TED


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00:12
So, imagine a company hires a new employee,
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best in the business,
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who's on a multimillion-dollar contract.
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Now imagine that whenever this employee went to go meet with her team members,
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the appointments were ignored or dismissed,
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and in the meetings that did happen,
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she was yelled at or kicked out after a few minutes.
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So after a while, she just went quietly back to her desk,
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sat there with none of her skills being put to use,
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of course, being ignored by most people,
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and of course, still getting paid millions of dollars.
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This hotshot employee who can't seem to catch a break
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is that company's technology.
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This scenario is not an exaggeration.
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In my job as a technology advisor,
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I've seen so many companies make the well-meaning decisions
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to put huge investments into technology,
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only to have the benefits fail to live up to the expectation.
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In fact, in one study I read,
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25 percent of technology projects
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are canceled or deliver things that are never used.
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That's like billions of dollars just being wasted each year.
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So why is this?
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Well, from what I've seen,
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the expectation from the top management is high but not unreasonable
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about the benefits from the technology.
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They expect people will use them,
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it will create time savings,
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and people will become genuinely better at their jobs.
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But the reality is that the people on the front line,
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who are supposed to be using these softwares and tools,
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they're skeptical or even afraid.
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We postpone the online trainings,
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we don't bother to learn the shortcuts,
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and we get frustrated at the number of tools
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we have to remember how to log into and use.
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Right?
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And that frustration, that guilt -- it's racking up,
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the more that technology is inserting itself into our daily working lives,
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which is a lot.
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Brookings says that 70 percent of jobs today in the US
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require at least mid-level digital skills.
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So basically, to work these days,
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you need to be able to work with technology.
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But from what I've seen,
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we are not approaching this with the right mindset.
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So here's the idea that I've been toying with:
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What if we treated technology like a team member?
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I've been writing my own personal experiment about this.
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I've spoken to people from all different industries
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about how they can treat their core technologies like colleagues.
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I've met with people from the restaurant industry,
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medical professionals, teachers, bankers,
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people from many other sectors,
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and the first step with anybody that I would meet with
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was to draw out the structure of their teams
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in an organization chart.
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Now, I'm a total geek when it comes to organization charts.
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Org charts are really cool because, if they are drawn well,
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you can quickly get a sense of what individual roles are
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and also how a team works well together.
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But if you look at a typical org chart,
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it only includes the boxes and lines that represent people.
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None of the technology team members are there.
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They're all invisible.
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So for each of the organizations that I met with for my experiment,
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I had to draw a new type of org chart,
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one that also included the technology.
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And when I did this, people I spoke to
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could actually visualize their technologies as coworkers,
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and they could ask things like:
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"Is this software reporting to the right person?"
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"Does this man and machine team work well together?"
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"Is that technology actually the team member
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that everybody's awkwardly avoiding?"
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So I will walk you through an example of a small catering company
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to bring this experiment to life.
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This is the top layer of people who work at Bovingdons Catering Company.
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There's a sales director, who manages all of the customer interactions,
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and there's an operations director, who manages all the internal activities.
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And here's the people who report to the sales and operations directors.
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And finally, here's the view
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where we've overlaid the software and the hardware
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that's used by the Bovingdons staff.
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Using this amazing org chart, we can now explore
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how the human team members and the technology team members
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are interacting.
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So the first thing that I'm going to look for
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is where there's a human and machine relationship
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that's extra critical.
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Usually, it's somebody using a technology
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on a day-to-day basis to do his or her job.
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At Bovingdons,
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the finance director with the accounting platform would be one.
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Next, I would check on the status of their collaboration.
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Are they working well together?
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Getting along?
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In this case, it turned out to be a tenuous relationship.
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So, what to do?
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Well, if the accounting platform were actually a person,
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the finance director would feel responsible for managing it
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and taking care of it.
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Well, in the same way,
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my first suggestion was to think about a team-building activity,
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maybe getting together on a specialist course.
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My second suggestion was to think about scheduling regular performance reviews
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for the accounting platform,
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where the finance director would literally give feedback
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to the company who sold it.
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Now, there will be several of these really important human and machine teams
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in every organization.
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So if you're in one, it's worth taking the time
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to think about ways to make those relationships truly collaborative.
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Next, I'll look on the chart for any human role
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which might be overloaded by technology,
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let's say, interacting with four or more types of applications.
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At Bovingdons, the operations director was interacting with five technologies.
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Now, he told me that he'd always felt overwhelmed by his job,
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but it wasn't until our conversation
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that he thought it might be because of the technologies he was overseeing.
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And we were talking that,
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if the operations director had actually had a lot of people reporting to him,
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he probably would have done something about it,
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because it was stretching him too thin,
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like, move some of them to report to somebody else.
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So in the same way, we talked about moving some of the technologies
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to report to someone else,
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like the food inventory to go to the chef.
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The last thing that I'll look for is any technology
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that seems to be on the org chart without a real home.
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Sometimes they're floating around without an owner.
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Sometimes they're reporting to so many different areas
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that you can't tell who's actually using it.
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Now, at Bovingdons,
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nobody appeared to be looking after the marketing software.
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It was like someone had hired it and then didn't give it a desk
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or any instructions on what to do.
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So clearly, it needed a job description,
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maybe someone to manage it.
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But in other companies,
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you might find that a technology has been sidelined for a reason,
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like it's time for it to leave or be retired.
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Now, retiring applications is something that all companies do.
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But maybe taking the mindset that those applications are actually coworkers
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could help them to decide when and how to retire those applications
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in the way that would be least destructive to the rest of the team.
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I did this experiment with 15 different professionals,
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and each time it sparked an idea.
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Sometimes, a bit more.
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You remember that hotshot employee I was telling you about,
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that everybody was ignoring?
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That was a real story told to me by Christopher,
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a very energetic human resources manager at a big consumer goods company.
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Technology was a new HR platform,
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and it had been installed for 14 months at great expense,
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but nobody was using it.
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So we were talking about how,
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if this had really been such a hotshot employee with amazing credentials,
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you would go out of your way to get to know it,
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maybe invite them for coffee,
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get to know their background.
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So in the spirit of experimentation,
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Christopher set up one-hour appointments,
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coffee optional,
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for his team members to have no agenda but to get to know their HR system.
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Some people, they clicked around menu item by menu item.
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Other people, they searched online for things that they weren't clear about.
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A couple of them got together, gossiped about the new software in town.
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And a few weeks later, Christopher called to tell me
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that people were using the system in new ways,
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and he thought it was going to save them weeks of effort in the future.
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And they also reported feeling less intimidated by the software.
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I found that pretty amazing,
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that taking this mindset helped Christopher's team
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and others that I spoke to these past few months
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actually feel happier about working with technology.
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And I later found out this is backed up by research.
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Studies have shown that people who work in organizations
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that encourage them to talk about and learn about the technologies
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in the workplace
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have 20 percent lower stress levels
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than those in organizations that don't.
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I also found it really cool that when I started to do this experiment,
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I started with what was happening between a person
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and an individual technology,
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but then it ultimately led to ideas about how to manage tech
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across entire companies.
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Like, when I did this for my own job and extended it,
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I thought about how our data analysis tools
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should go on the equivalent of a job rotation program,
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where different parts of the company could get to know it.
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And I also thought about suggesting to our recruiting team
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that some of the technologies we work with every day
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should come with us on our big recruiting events.
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If you were a university student,
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how cool would it be to not only get to know the people
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you might be working with,
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but also the technologies?
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Now, all of this begs the question:
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What have we been missing
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by keeping the technologies that we work with day to day invisible,
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and what, beyond those billions of dollars in value,
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might we be leaving on the table?
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The good news is,
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you don't need to be an org chart geek like me
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to take this experiment forward.
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It will take a matter of minutes for most people
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to draw out a structure of who they work with,
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a little bit longer to add in the technologies
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to get a view of the entire team,
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and then you can have fun asking questions like,
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"Which are the technologies that I'll be taking out for coffee?"
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Now, I didn't do this experiment for kicks
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or for the coffee.
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I did it because the critical skill in the 21st-century workplace
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is going to be to collaborate with the technologies
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that are becoming such a big and costly part of our daily working lives.
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And from what I was seeing, we are struggling to cope with that.
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So it might sound counterintuitive,
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but by embracing the idea that these machines are actually valuable colleagues,
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we as people will perform better
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and be happier.
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So let's all share a bit of humanity
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towards the technologies and the softwares and the algorithms
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and the robots who we work with,
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because we will all be the better for it.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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