Yesterday, I turned sixty. And bought myself a pair of binoculars.
Taking a closer look. Apparently, I still have plenty of that to do.
On Friday, I celebrated my farewell with the gardening team in Central Switzerland. I’ve spent five months working alongside these colleagues. It was already the second time I’d left this team. And for the second time, what they said to me moved me deeply.
We’re like a family.
I remembered my keynote slide: “We need to become a Family and Friends Environment.”
Sentences like that are wonderful to talk about at conferences. On Friday, I felt how hard it is to leave when you’ve actually experienced that connection.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed how exhausted these past months had left me. I’m pretty good at motivating myself. But what my colleagues do day after day leaves me deeply impressed.
On Monday morning, I won’t be preparing the vehicles with them before everyone heads out somewhere to work themselves to the bone. I’ll be supporting a technical team again.
There’s another assignment waiting. Still, leaving hurts more than the work itself.
Part of me feels like a deserter. My Navy background and my preference for shared missions probably have something to do with that.
You can get a man out of the Navy, but you can’t get the Navy out of a man.
In conversations with colleagues, both within and outside the team, I encounter so much humanity that I sometimes wonder why I’m spending my time on PEOPLE FIRST.
The people are already here.
With their willingness to help, their humour, their care for one another. I encounter that commitment at every level. I believe many of the people I speak with would sign “People First” in blood.
And yet things get stuck. Sometimes badly.
Those higher up doubt those below. Those below doubt those higher up. And even side by side, we regularly manage to doubt one another.
What part do our KPIs play in this? What happens when every level has to demonstrate something different, and one person’s success means an additional burden for someone else?
I don’t have a ready answer. And at sixty, I want to look more closely at how quickly I’ve come up with one in the past.
That includes answers I’ve been carrying around for years.
If leaving a shared working life is this hard for me, even with another assignment waiting on Monday, how casually have I spoken about jobs disappearing?
I’ve talked about replacing “Bullshit Jobs”. I’ve driven automation and helped technology take over the work of entire departments.
I sang along too: New technologies have always created new jobs. People who no longer have to perform pointless tasks will finally have time for meaningful things.
Now I’m no longer so sure.
Even the word “pointless” deserves a second look. Repetitive work can be necessary. Work that can be automated can be meaningful. And even when a task really is unnecessary, it may still come with an income, a community, a sense of self-worth.
It all looks so simple from the meeting table.
People could get involved in their communities. Brave new world, I used to proclaim.
But who pays the rent?
What happened to the people who used to handle employee onboarding at numerous large companies? I replaced them with a beautiful API product. Our customers were wild about it, and we felt like heroes.
Where are they now? What are they doing today? Do they finally have time to take off and fulfil their potential?
Let me guess …
Today, companies are recruiting experts to train and evaluate AI systems using their professional expertise. We’re increasingly teaching machines to perform tasks we’ve long considered to require extensive training and experience.
How far this will go, and how quickly, I don’t know. But I no longer trust my old, reassuring answer: There will be new jobs.
Perhaps there will. But that doesn’t mean the same people will find new work in time, with an income they can live on.
And what happens in between?
We often have remarkably quick explanations for why someone can’t find work. How will those explanations change if large numbers of well-educated office workers and managers are affected? People who did many of the things we told them would give them security.
Will we take a closer look then?
Including ideas such as universal basic income, about which we so often have our minds made up?
I don’t know whether it’s the right answer. But I want to be willing to ask the question again. Along with questions about working hours, further education, and how we share the gains from automation.
We’re doing everything we can to accelerate technological development. We should bring the same urgency to caring for the people whose lives it changes.
It would be easy to eventually see ourselves as victims of this development. But I’ve helped bring it about. I continue to use AI in my work. I can hardly hand my responsibility over to some abstract “revolution.”
Shouldn’t we all be a little more willing to be perpetrators?
For my part, I want to know more about what happens to people once the savings have been achieved and the project is complete. And measure my own promises against that.
On Monday, I’ll be supporting people in a new assignment. I’ll miss my colleagues from the gardening team.
At sixty, I feel grief at leaving them. Humility in the face of what people do. And doubt about some answers I used to deliver quite convincingly.
The binoculars help me see further.
Taking a closer look is up to me.
Now, where did I put them?
