How Automation Will Change Management

So, for my job I do quite a bit of reading about “the future of work” and I have some opinions about how some emerging management challenges that future implies. Now the key feature of work in this future, which has been coming at us, really, since the start of the industrial revolution, is automation.  Continual progress in labor-saving devices, increasing productivity, allowing us to all enjoy a higher standard of living (at least in the long-run). And the ultimate in saving labor, of course, is automation, performing a task without any human input at all. This has been the trend since steam-power replaced muscle power. As time goes on, the easiest jobs to automate are automated away, and humans do more work that’s difficult or impossible to automate.

What’s easy to automate? Machines excel at routine and predictable tasks – anything that can be fully described in formal, logical, precise terms (“if this do that”) or are totally repetitive (“every 1.74 seconds swing downward with between 1000 and 1050 kiloNewtons of force) is, bluntly, a job perfectly suited for machines – and a job that will be automated away as soon as economical. But sorting good art from bad, understanding spoken language, driving a car – any sort of work that might at any point require a modicum of actual thought (which is quite a bit of “unskilled labor” in the service sector) is difficult or impossible to automate completely. Answering a question like “is this a good investment” is something only a human can do, even as that human uses (hopefully!) a variety of sophisticated machines to help them make that decision.

Why is all this a problem for management? Because the work that’s being automated away is also the work that’s easiest to manage. Evaluating performance is easy for predictable and routine tasks, observing effort is straightforward when the work takes place almost entirely outside a worker’s head. Traditional management techniques and organizational structures are well suited to incentivizing effort (using Motivation 1.0 and 2.0, for those of you who’ve read a certain book) and evaluating performance.

But increasingly, more and more work will take involve complicated tasks that are costly or difficult to monitor, and more of that work will take place inside people’s heads. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but managers will have to lean increasingly on intrinsic motivation (Motivation 3.0) in order to accommodate this. And bluntly, I don’t think business leaders (or at least American business leaders) are able or willing to deal with this problem. Grappling with this problem requires a (in the American context) radical rethink of employer-employee relations; conceiving of an employment relationship a social as well as economic relationship. The fundamental human in human relationships is reciprocity – why should workers be loyal to your company and emotionally invested in its success, if the company doesn’t feel the same way about them?

The alternative response is for management to spend whatever it takes on monitoring in order to 

avoid giving up any sort of control over workers and the workplace – even if it would be costlier. 

Hopefully profits are more important to capitalists than power.