The Business of the Future – This Human Business Episode 6

The following is a full text transcript of the 6th episode of the podcast This Human Business. The topic of this episode is the future of business. What happens next? You’ll have to listen to find out. This Human Business is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Castos, and now on Spotify.

Jonathan Cook: Hello, and welcome to This Human Business. This podcast covers the growing movement among business professionals to bring rich humanity back to a respected place in commercial culture. At least, that’s what the podcast has been. What will it become?

What the future holds is a conundrum. It fascinates us more than anything else, but it always lays out of reach. That conundrum, the future of business, is the subject of this week’s episode.

As last week’s episode of this podcast amply demonstrated, the stories people in business are now telling about the future center around the development of digital technology. Our anxiety about the future grows as the pace of social change is accelerated by technology. Disruption of the sort sown by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can bring economic opportunity for those who are on the right side of it, but it also makes people feel just plain awful. Besides, how can we be sure that we’ll come down on the right side of the disruption?

Jaimie Stettin of the  House of Beautiful Business talked to me about these kind of concerns, but also about her hopes for a future in which we are able to avoid the technological dystopias of science fiction.

Jaimie Stettin: There is an intersection between technology and humanity, and I think there’s a sort of mutual need in this situation. I mean, technology needs humanity in order to continue being developed, and to have purpose in the world. Humanity needs technology in order to deal with life and society. We’re talking about everything from medicine and that kind of technology to that kind of day to day use of technology, from Internet to phones, and all of that, and you can’t discuss one without the other at this point. I hope and think in all advances of technology that humanity comes into play in all those sorts of conversations, and that people are thinking about humanity when they’re thinking about the future of technology. Otherwise, we will end up in some kind of horrible dystopian Black Mirror society that I don’t think I want to be a part of.

Jonathan Cook: Will the future be a Black Mirror dystopia, or a digital utopia? Your response to that question depends less on your ability to predict the future than on your experience in the present.

The future is what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls a zone of displaced meaning. It doesn’t really exist yet, butt we imagine it as a place that’s real, and already decided, a place into which we can put ideas that we are incapable of confronting in the present moment. McCracken’s point is that we create visions of distant realms such as the future in order to reconcile ourselves with discrepancies between our cultural beliefs about how things ought to be and how things actually are in the present moment.

Commerce runs on the fuel of displaced meaning. In the business world, you hear a lot of people talking as if they know exactly what the future holds for us. The Future of Work is a favorite topic, though all the work we do remains firmly in the present.

One forecast that’s been repeated quite often this year is one provided by Annette Zimmerman, vice president of research at Gartner, an advisory firm. She announced, “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.”

That sounds like a statistic worth paying to, doesn’t it? It’s certainly specific. By 2022, Zimmerman says, your mobile phone will know more about the state of your emotions than your own family does. Not by 2023, not even by April of 2022, but certainly before January 1, 2022 — that’s the date when your iPhone will have greater knowledge of your emotional feelings than your mother does, than your husband does, than your children do.

Pause and think for a moment, and you’ll realize that there’s no way on earth that Annette Zimmerman can possibly know any such thing. Gartner has absolutely zero research methods capable of determining this specific fact.

For one thing, there is no standard, reliable, well-established quantitative way to measure of what a person’s emotional state of mind is. We don’t have a way to provide a reliable measurement of family members’ perceptions of each others’ emotions, either. We can form measurements of what they say they know about each others’ emotions, but that’s not at all the same thing as measuring what family members actually know about each others’ feelings. Lacking such a measurement, how could anyone at Gartner accurately assess the relative emotional knowledge of a smartphone and the family member who uses it?

A more serious problem with Annette Zimmerman’s assertion is that machines don’t know anything. They hold information without knowing that they hold it. An iPhone no more knows anything about its owner than a chair knows about the person who sits in it.

The most serious flaw of all in Gartner’s extravagantly bold assertion is this: No one from Gartner, not Annette Zimmerman, nor any of her employees, has ever been to the future. They haven’t researched the future. Zimmerman doesn’t really know anything about what will happen by the year 2022. She’s just saying that she does.

A wiser approach to the future was given to me by Karel Golta, the CEO of Indeed Innovation, when he said to me, “You can’t predict the future. You can only envision it. What the real result will be when the future becomes present, and that’s a mystery.”

If you’re a futurist, you’re really a mythologist, a storyteller. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, as this podcast’s episode on storytelling in business asserted, it’s an essential service.

Let’s just be clear about this: Futurists don’t study the future. They study stories that people tell about the future, and they craft new stories about the future to suit their purposes in the present.

So, if you’re listening to this podcast looking for a certain forecast of business conditions in the future, you’re out of luck. All certainty about the future is an illusion. What you will hear is a number of stories about the future of business, and these stories are excellent tools for understanding the culture of business in the here and now.

Designer Scott Dawson sees a future in which the contrast of digital technology will enable us to perceive the complex qualities of humanity more clearly.

Scott Dawson: I think anything that a person touches, they inform it with their personality. So, if we were given a task for which you thought there was really only one potential outcome, you can get very different things. You can give a hundred people a very simple task. You’re going to find massive variety in the way they approach it, the way they think about it, and ultimately the way it’s going to be.

Computers are really good at permuting all that, at decisioning what’s the best. I’m thinking about computers that play chess. That’s a really tightly constrained universe, a chess board. The problems we’re trying to solve are huge. Think about all the potential outcomes of chess, and play that out by many, many Ns.

You’re not going to be able to eliminate the humanity in things. I think if you do, and people accept that, there’s a certain complacency in which people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, the machines are taking things over, and it’s not awesome, but it’s okay. I don’t have to work as much,’ I don’t see that complacency happening, because I think our human need to put something into the world, and take ownership of it, means that complacency won’t exist. There will always be artists. There will always be people who want to influence, to change, to challenge, to put their stamp on the world.

Jonathan Cook: Scott doesn’t accept the dystopian vision of a future in which artificial intelligence displaces humanity. He perceives self-actualization as the center of the human experience. Contrary to business models that suppose people will always choose the most convenient option, Scott chooses to believe in the strength of the creative impulse of humanity.

What he’s really saying, I think, is that business is something more than an exercise in engineering. He believes that business is a form of art.

Julia von Winterfeldt shares Scott’s optimism for the future of business. She disagrees with the conventional business story about the future, in which automation, quantification, and efficiency continue to expand, making human beings obsolete. Instead, Julia foresees a future in which human compassion becomes the most important professional skill of all.

Julia Winterfeldt: As humans, we self-regulate ourselves, meaning that I do see that the future is going to be a place where we embrace more the communal and the caring for each other. Because all this technology is going to serve us in a sense of doing things for us, and hence giving us the time to share and be together to think maybe of new opportunities, new possibilities, and new frontiers. Where that doesn’t happen, I think these companies will have a certain length of opportunity, but I do actually think that they won’t survive this in the long run.

Jonathan Cook: What if Julia is right? What if the skills that will enable success in the marketplace of the future won’t be coding and scaling, but collaboration and the ability to form human-to-human connections?

If Julia’s story about the future is right, the implications for our present business agendas is clear. Instead of placing a wireless chip in every object we can get our hands on to build a ubiquitous Internet of Things, businesses need to develop new methods to build empathy in order to foster a community of human beings.

You’ve heard this before, perhaps. “Empathy” is a kind of catchphrase in design circles, but more often than not, what’s framed as empathy ends up just being another exercise in gathering piles of quantitative data, which is used to build superficial personas of what a business would like to think about what motivates people. That’s not true empathy. Empathy requires emotional connection, and that takes place between human beings. It’s beyond calculation.

If we’re going to build an authentic movement for human business, we have to go beyond the catchphrases, to integrate an ethic of thick qualitative connection into the core of business culture. That’s the kind of future that Bhavik Joshi, strategic director at LPK, is working to build.

Bhavik Joshi: From a commercial aspect, I think brands, if they truly are a catalyst, if there truly are those challenges and seductions and magical powers along the quest, then they have to be cognizant of the powers that they provide in context of the changing nature of the quest. I feel like right now, if this is what is happening, then how are brands a part of it? How are brands participating in it, and what are the brands doing when they choose to say, hey, we’re just a widget maker, and we just make widgets, and we don’t want to do anything with this?

So, even though they don’t feel like they have a responsibility, and feel like they don’t want to participate in it, I don’t think there’s a fence that people can sit on. Inaction itself is inexcusable.

One of the things that excites me a lot is to first understand the changing landscape, understand the forces underneath it that are causing the tectonic shifts in the sociocultural plates, but then also try and respond to it, and by response I don’t mean from a place of authority saying, yes, this is what a person should do, and what brands should do, but even to insert yourself into the conversation, even for brands to have the courage to say, hey, we may not be in front of a cause, we may not be standing ahead of it, championing it, but we are definitely behind it, we definitely understand it, we definitely support it, and I think at least to have some kind of a dialogue.

I hope what I’m saying doesn’t sound like a separate CSR initiative of that branch. I am not talking about brands that should have a fund on the side to plant trees, save the polar bears, and invest in education or dig wells somewhere. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is in the day to day expression and manifestation and narratives and storytelling and the visuals that they use to communicate the essence and equity of their brand, they should start infusing these changes that are happening in the climate around us, and I think that’s something that excites me. I am hopeful that more and more brands, and at least more and more of the brands that I get to work with get to do that, and we can give them the courage to do that more and more. That’s what I’m looking forward to.

Jonathan Cook: Bhavik Joshi is on a quest, moving through a marketplace set upon a landscape changed by tectonic shifts. What’s he’s seeking are enduring storylines that can keep consumers and companies on course regardless of the changes taking place around them.

In the future envisioned by Bhavik, businesses will shift away from simply making widgets and selling them through systems of efficient management. Instead, he suggests, the main dimension of differentiation in the marketplace of the future will be meaning, and not just as a sweet but thin glaze on top of an otherwise coarse foundation of directionless automation. He foresees a new way of doing business that begins with a narrative that infuses every part of the company it inspires.

In his story about the future, it seems to me that Bhavik is trying to tell us that we’re wrong when we conclude that the present dynamics of rapid digital expansion is the end of business history. Bhavik is reminding us that businesses are tools for accomplishing change that goes beyond the economic imperative of the moment. Nonetheless, as the core cultural meaning of a business moves forward over time, we should expect the unexpected.

There’s a huge amount at stake in this story about the future. It wouldn’t matter if the stakes were low, and maybe that’s the crucial message Bhavik’s story about the future seeks to tell us about the present: What we do now, the choices we make today about how to run our businesses, will have profound impacts. We can’t just wait for technology to save us. We have to make the most important decisions now.

This message also came out in my conversation with Jonah Sachs, author of the books Winning the Story Wars and Unsafe Thinking.

Jonah Sachs: I think that we face tremendous and seemingly unsolvable problems as a species when you look to what scientists are saying about resource depletion and population and climate change with our old way of progressing. There’s really sort of no way out.

And so, these stories about what technology might do with and for us I think are necessary to engage in, because we do need some sort of phase change as a species in our behavior, in our ability to transform the planet, in our ability to live with other more effectively. So, you know I think in a way, it’s like without the growth of technology, I feel like we don’t have a huge amount of hope over the next hundred years to continue as a civilization.

So in some ways, we all do need to engage with and welcome in to some degree a partnership with technologies that are beyond our imagination to help solve our biggest problems. I hope that those technologies will continue to be developed by people who care about these things and think about these things and that that will remain and in sharp focus about what technologies are for and become a filter of reaching humanity’s highest aspirations rather than just kind of increasing inequality and greed and the depletion of our planetary resources.

So, we can’t think linearly anymore. I think that’s one of the big messages of the Singularity, is how do you think asymptotically, how do you think exponentially? And so, if we want to see the future we need to understand that things are going to change exponentially. We can’t predict it but we can sort of be in that conversation.

At the same time, you know, I’ve been moved by stories that you know that human beings will not be the most intelligent species on the planet for much longer, and once that happens, you know, all bets are off and who knows how we can possibly share the planet with a more intelligent species. That’s never been done before, and the most intelligent species always sort of dominate the ones below them. I think that’s credible too. And so, beyond just human intention, how artificial intelligence manifests itself and whether or not we can control it is fascinating and frightening, and maybe even goes beyond what the intention of the people behind it is, whether or not we can coexist with it.

Jonathan Cook: Jonah presents us with an unsettling combination of ideas about the future: First, that we need to make some desperate choices right now, or it won’t just be our businesses that fail. Civilization itself is at stake, he says. Second, we can’t think linearly, and that means that the intentions of business leaders are unlikely to match the outcomes of their actions. Everything we care about is on the line, Jonah says, but we can’t know what the impact of our decisions will be.

Jonah Sachs: I guess I would say that the future of work certainly, and automation, is really unknown, and I’ve always felt like now more than ever is a time to really be thinking about our values between human beings, because two things can happen, I think, when we work gets automated. One, there can be a lot more broad prosperity as people have to work less in factories and can free themselves to do other things that are more actually more human. I worry sometimes that we celebrate and try to look backwards on very inhuman work patterns like sitting in a factory stamping out parts. We don’t need to go back to that, necessarily, if machines can do it. The question is, will all of the people who used to do that just be thrown out on the street, and more wealth concentrated in the people who own the machines, or will this liberate human minds to do new and better things?

Jonathan Cook: Jonah can’t settle on just one vision of the future, because his vision of the present condition of business culture is divided between two different models. First, there’s the idealism expressed by Silicon Valley executives who cast their work as part of an historic move to liberate people from repetitive physical labor. Second, there’s the clear economic trend showing that as the biggest digital technology companies gain more power, the rest of us are losing it, with falling wages, shrinking benefits, and longer working hours under tighter demands.

This divided vision reveals something essential about the future: It isn’t just one thing. There isn’t only one story of the future of business that applies to everyone. In business culture, tales of the future tend to be bright, while in popular culture, the future is dystopian.

Martin Reeves, Director of the Henderson Institute at the Boston Consulting Group, focuses on guiding business leaders in navigating this divided future. He urges us to think strategically, guided by the eternal questions of philosophy, in order to draft plans that have a reasonable chance of remaining relevant in the uncertainty of what is to come.

Martin Reeves: One sort of meta-conclusion is that we can’t really understand what will happen to technology and what the consequences of that will be for us unless we actually re-examine some age old philosophical questions about you know, who are we? Where are we going? How do we get there?

They sound like soft questions, but really you get there. I mean, if we if we use AI in ways that pull people out of jobs, then there’ll be a backlash. There’s a backlash to remaining here with the potential of the technologies. I think many technology companies are fully there in terms of this being a very real set of issues.

Equally, to fully exploit AI beyond trivial applications, we really need to think very hard about how can technology and humans interact. The technology has to be human, and to be embraced by humans, it needs to make us better humans.

So, the particular exercise that we contributed to the conference was not to frame this as a passive forecasting exercise, what will happen to us, but to to frame it as an exercise in imagination where we say, you know, through the lens of film and literature, what are the plausible futures of technology and humanity and which ones do we like and what are the consequences for corporations and employees and leaders and humans, and if that’s a scenario that we want, how do we get there?

Jonathan Cook: Using literature and philosophy to plan for the future sounds unscientific. The fact is, though, that business information systems aren’t as complete as they seem. What’s more, the connection of hard data to executive decision making is rather soft. The majority of executives still don’t trust their own analytics to guide their businesses into the future.

They’ve got good reason to be concerned. The quality of business data remains unreliable, on the whole, and predictive models are limited in their power.

More importantly, when predictive algorithms supplant the decision-making authority of human beings, they undermine one of the most important factors in business success: Human engagement. Even if artificial intelligence could make reliably successful strategic decisions in complex situations, those decisions would be made in a black box, outside of the comprehension of human beings. When people are set to work on tasks without understanding why those tasks are important, their engagement plummets, and productivity suffers.

To feel confident in their work, human beings need a story about where they are coming from, where they are now, and where they are going. Analytics doesn’t supply that. Literature and philosophy do.

Of course, the questions of literature and philosophy are age-old because they are, to some extent, unanswerable. Tim Leberecht, author of The Business Romantic and co-founder of the House of Beautiful Business, is willing to sit with these questions, without rushing to find answers.

Tim Leberecht: Frankly, the more I talk about these issues, the more people I meet, and the more I read, and the deeper I dive into these issues, the less I know. And I think right now and maybe that’s just also in a way the soil of the House, that the House is built on, that we don’t give answers. We just want to make sure that people have the courage to ask questions.

We’re really in this transitionary moment right now between two narratives or two systems, two worlds, and maybe there isn’t a singular new coherent narrative emerging, but I think right now we’re just in such flux and such a painful transition, it’s an exciting time. It’s a really frightening time, and it’s very, very humbling I believe, because I think every day we’re just overwhelmed by the complexity of not just our work, but also all the questions that we’re dealing with, the small questions and the big questions. And I think maybe that humility is also something that actually, maybe, it’s a virtue per se and is, if anything, something that the House of Beautiful Business can cultivate, and maybe that will lead to something more concrete.

Jonathan Cook: Most people re-imagine the present by describing the future, but Tim reframes the future by describing what we’re going through right now, and the biggest theme with that is uncertainty. When he describes the present as a time of transition, what he’s telling us about the future is that we must not imagine it as merely an extrapolation of what’s happening right now.

Tim is suggesting that the future of business won’t be dominated by Google, or Facebook, or Amazon, or companies that are anything like them. As a time of painful transition, the digital upheaval we’re going through right now can be seen as a kind of improvised rite of passage. That means that what we’re experiencing now isn’t really a taste of things to come so much as an aperitif, preparing us with its own unique qualities.

So, though a surge into digital is the trend now, it will likely be supplanted by something quite different in the future. Moving fast may be replaced with a new appreciation of slow. The large corporation may be overcome by the small.

When I met restaurant owner Theresa Fedel at the House of Beautiful Business last year, I asked her what she was looking for in the experience. What she described to me was a relief in an escape from bigger experiences. The future of business, she told me, could be something more intimate than what’s available to us today.

Theresa Fedel: I don’t think beautiful business necessarily means it has to be a big corporation, and from all of the people so far that we’ve talked with there’s been several who are startups own their own business started their own business got tired of the corporate world. And then there’s the big corporations but I think so far, from yesterday, I did not for one second feel like I was in a big corporate conference.

Jonathan Cook: What was the difference?

Theresa Fedel: I found it was a little bit more freethinking. I think a lot of people apart from that we’re talking about, artificial intelligence and how robots are going to play a role in our lives in the future, and I think that’s probably an obvious, to what extent also depends on us, but I know that’s out there, but the other part that really got me was talking about the humans in the company and how to make it more human for people as a place to work, and what are we going to do for people who, their roles no longer exist.

How can we position these people in a so much more human role than the cold corporate world? I think it’s changing. I think it’s changing. I think they’re realizing to be able to keep people you have to, you have to make sure that they’re happy, and I think a lot of people are doing startups now, and they’re turning their own corporations and younger people are going out and doing what they want to do, and feeling more free to start their own corporation and not feel that out of graduate school have to go work for a big company. I think that mindset is changing.

Jonathan Cook: As businesspeople talk about the future, change is the theme that they keep returning to. Too much of the dominant digital approach to business is based on the ambition of stability and predictability, attempting to target people by segmenting them into static categories. What they call “digital transformation” cuts too many people off from the opportunity to change.

Of course, the power of these habit-based algorithms is illusory. Humanity identity is not a stable, singular thing. Even in the course of a single day, we shift from one aspect of ourselves into another multiple times. There is no single truth of who we are. We contain multitudes, each one of which is true in its own way. As long as the future contains human beings, we can expect the future to be diverse as well.

There are those in Silicon Valley who like to imagine that we are in the verge of entering an Age of Machines in which anyone who fails to upgrade into cyborg mode will become irrelevant at best. These technicians need to take a refresher course in evolutionary biology. The development of new species from old isn’t a linear progression from primitive to advanced. Evolution branches and weaves.

Contrary to the story Jonah Sachs spun, intelligent species don’t tend to wipe out less intelligent ones. Most kinds of life on earth are single-celled. Most species don’t have a brain at all, and they get along quite well. Intelligence is just one out of many adaptive strategies, and it’s only one aspect of the complexity of human cognition, which also includes dancing, singing, painting, and poetry.

Those people who tell you that artificial intelligence is the only way forward for business in the future are asking you to ignore a huge range of possibilities. We ought not to allow our imaginations to become impoverished in this way.

If you’re hoping for a neat conclusion to round out this podcast, you’re not going to get it, because that’s not how the future works. The uncertainty of the future ought to serve as a reminder of the ambiguity of the present moment. If you’re feeling that you just don’t have a solid grip of what the future will hold, then congratulations: You have, in fact, grasped the essential nature of the future.

We worry about the future, because the only thing we know for sure it will bring is our eventual decline and death. So it is that Alexander Wehner of Goodman Marketing worries that the future could bring about a decline in our emotional life.

Alexander Wehner: I think there is some Romantic as well in the unknown, because maybe you feel uncomfortable because it’s unknown. Nobody likes the unknown. In the future, we can be more efficient and productive, but there is the danger that we lose our emotions. I think the kind of relationships we have will be not as deep as now, because of all the social networks we have built to create relationships, or to maintain relationships, but the opposite is happening now. We have maybe 500, 600 Facebook friends, but only very few real friends.

Jonathan Cook: Alexander is right to notice that that past promises about the future of digital networks haven’t come to pass. In the past, futurists predicted that social media would bring about a flourishing of communities, but instead, we find human connection is dwindling and social anxiety is on the rise.

I don’t mean to suggest that the future offers only darkness. For every bankruptcy, many new businesses will rise. Failure is a key part of any healthy evolutionary system.

If the future feels overwhelming, take Alexander’s next thought to heart. Contemplation of the future, when we abandon the effort to control it tightly, can bring a sense of release, and serenity.

Alexander Wehner: I think maybe the unknown could be a place of quiet because we have to take time to sit on a chair and think about what’s going to be next, and you don’t do it with information you got from the Internet or from any book. You just do it on your own. Relax and think about, okay, what’s going to be next, the next step? I don’t know really if it is a place of quiet, but it could be.

Jonathan Cook: A place of quiet. That seems a good note for this episode to end on.

As I’ve said, I can’t give you any certain predictions of what the future holds, but I do believe that one week from now will bring the final full episode of this first season of This Human Business.

On Wednesday next week, this podcast will look squarely in the eye of one of the most uncomfortable, yet most dynamic subjects in business culture: The issue of gender and identity in commerce.

Please come back then, and get ready to engage.