So, imagine a company hires a new employee, best in the business, who's on a multimillion-dollar contract. Now imagine that whenever this employee went to go meet with her team members, the appointments were ignored or dismissed, and in the meetings that did happen, she was yelled at or kicked out after a few minutes. So after a while, she just went quietly back to her desk, sat there with none of her skills being put to use, of course, being ignored by most people, and of course, still getting paid millions of dollars. This hotshot employee who can't seem to catch a break is that company's technology.
想象一下公司招了位新员工, 该领域的顶尖人才, 合同价值几百万美元。 现在想象一下,每当这个员工 邀请她的团队成员一起开会时, 邀请却常常被忽略或是取消, 并且在已经开始会议上, 几分钟后就她遭到斥责 或被赶出会议室。 过了一会儿,她静静地回到她桌子前, 坐在那里,技能无丝毫用武之地, 当然,被大部分人忽略, 当然,仍然要被支付数百万美元的薪资。 这个似乎无法抓住机会的最出色员工 就是公司的技术。
This scenario is not an exaggeration. In my job as a technology advisor, I've seen so many companies make the well-meaning decisions to put huge investments into technology, only to have the benefits fail to live up to the expectation. In fact, in one study I read, 25 percent of technology projects are canceled or deliver things that are never used. That's like billions of dollars just being wasted each year.
这种情况并不夸张。 作为一名技术顾问, 我看到很多公司都做出了善意的决定, 在技术上投入巨资, 最后的效果却没有达到预期。 事实上,在我读到的一个研究中, 有25%的科技项目 最终被取消,或其产出从未得到使用。 这就像每年有数十亿美元被浪费。
So why is this? Well, from what I've seen, the expectation from the top management is high but not unreasonable about the benefits from the technology. They expect people will use them, it will create time savings, and people will become genuinely better at their jobs. But the reality is that the people on the front line, who are supposed to be using these softwares and tools, they're skeptical or even afraid. We postpone the online trainings, we don't bother to learn the shortcuts, and we get frustrated at the number of tools we have to remember how to log into and use. Right? And that frustration, that guilt -- it's racking up, the more that technology is inserting itself into our daily working lives, which is a lot.
那么为什么会这样呢? 就我的观察而言, 最高层管理者对技术带来的好处 预期虽高,但并非不合理。 他们期望人们会使用它们, 它会提高工作效率, 人们也会在工作中表现更好。 但现实情况是,在一线的员工, 那些应该使用这些软件和工具的人, 却对此表示怀疑,甚至感到害怕。 我们推迟在线培训, 懒得学习捷径, 而且对需要记住一大堆工具才能 正常登陆和使用感到十分沮丧。 是吧? 那种挫败感,那种罪恶感——越来越强烈, 随着科技越来越多地融入 我们的日常工作中, 这种情况相当普遍。
Brookings says that 70 percent of jobs today in the US require at least mid-level digital skills. So basically, to work these days, you need to be able to work with technology. But from what I've seen, we are not approaching this with the right mindset.
布鲁金斯学会表示, 目前美国70%的工作岗位 需要至少中等水平的数字技能。 基本上可以说,在当今社会想要正常工作, 你得知道如何与科技合作。 但就我所看到的而言, 我们还没有能够应对 这个问题的正确心态。
So here's the idea that I've been toying with: What if we treated technology like a team member? I've been writing my own personal experiment about this. I've spoken to people from all different industries about how they can treat their core technologies like colleagues. I've met with people from the restaurant industry, medical professionals, teachers, bankers, people from many other sectors, and the first step with anybody that I would meet with was to draw out the structure of their teams in an organization chart.
所以这就是我一直在尝试的想法: 如果我们像对待团队成员 一样对待技术呢? 我一直在写自己的经验。 我跟来自不同行业的人交流 他们如何像对待自己的 同事那样对待技术。 我见过来自餐饮行业的人, 医疗专业人士,教师,银行家, 以及很多其他行业的人, 我跟任何人见面的第一步 是画出他们团队在组织架构图中的 关系结构。
Now, I'm a total geek when it comes to organization charts. Org charts are really cool because, if they are drawn well, you can quickly get a sense of what individual roles are and also how a team works well together. But if you look at a typical org chart, it only includes the boxes and lines that represent people. None of the technology team members are there. They're all invisible. So for each of the organizations that I met with for my experiment, I had to draw a new type of org chart, one that also included the technology. And when I did this, people I spoke to could actually visualize their technologies as coworkers, and they could ask things like: "Is this software reporting to the right person?" "Does this man and machine team work well together?" "Is that technology actually the team member that everybody's awkwardly avoiding?"
谈到组织架构图,我可是个行家。 组织结构图很酷,因为如果画得好, 你可以快速理解个人的角色 以及团队如何协同工作。 但如果你看传统的组织架构, 它只包括了代表人的框和线。 各项技术都不包含在内。 它们都没有被画出来。 所以对于我在实验中遇到的每个组织, 我得画出一种新的组织架构图, 而技术也包括在其中。 当我这样做时,与我交谈过的人们 可以看到他们的技术 以同事的身份得以呈现, 他们会这样问: “这个软件报告给正确的人了吗?” “这个团队中的人和机器合作得好吗?” “团队成员真的在尴尬地 回避这种技术吗?”
So I will walk you through an example of a small catering company to bring this experiment to life. This is the top layer of people who work at Bovingdons Catering Company. There's a sales director, who manages all of the customer interactions, and there's an operations director, who manages all the internal activities. And here's the people who report to the sales and operations directors. And finally, here's the view where we've overlaid the software and the hardware that's used by the Bovingdons staff. Using this amazing org chart, we can now explore how the human team members and the technology team members are interacting.
我给大家举一个 小型餐饮公司把这实验 变成现实的例子。 这是bovingdons餐饮公司的最高层人员。 有一个销售总监, 负责管理所有的客户互动, 还有一个运营总监, 负责管理所有的内部活动。 这些是汇报给销售和运营总监的人。 最后,在这里, 我们还添加了bovingdons员工使用的 软件和硬件。 使用这个一目了然的组织架构图, 我们现在可以探索 人类团队成员和技术团队成员 如何交互。
So the first thing that I'm going to look for is where there's a human and machine relationship that's extra critical. Usually, it's somebody using a technology on a day-to-day basis to do his or her job. At Bovingdons, the finance director with the accounting platform would be one. Next, I would check on the status of their collaboration. Are they working well together? Getting along? In this case, it turned out to be a tenuous relationship.
所以我最先要找出的就是 在所有人类和机器之间存在的 重要的关系。 通常,这是人们每天 在工作中使用的技术。 在bovingdons, 会计平台的财务总监就是其中之一。 接下来,我将检查他们的合作状态。 他们合作得好吗? 能够和谐相处吗? 在这个案例中,这种关系十分脆弱。
So, what to do? Well, if the accounting platform were actually a person, the finance director would feel responsible for managing it and taking care of it. Well, in the same way, my first suggestion was to think about a team-building activity, maybe getting together on a specialist course. My second suggestion was to think about scheduling regular performance reviews for the accounting platform, where the finance director would literally give feedback to the company who sold it. Now, there will be several of these really important human and machine teams in every organization. So if you're in one, it's worth taking the time to think about ways to make those relationships truly collaborative.
那么,要怎么改善的呢? 假如会计平台是个人, 财务总监就会觉得有责任管理它, 照看它。 同样, 我的首个建议是考虑团建活动, 也许一起上个专业课程。 我的第二个建议是考虑对会计平台做 定期的绩效考核, 这样财务总监就可以 对售卖该软件的公司 提供反馈意见。 每个组织都会有几个非常重要的 人类和机器团队。 因此,如果你身处其中, 花点时间思考如何让 这些关系更加和谐是值得的。
Next, I'll look on the chart for any human role which might be overloaded by technology, let's say, interacting with four or more types of applications. At Bovingdons, the operations director was interacting with five technologies. Now, he told me that he'd always felt overwhelmed by his job, but it wasn't until our conversation that he thought it might be because of the technologies he was overseeing. And we were talking that, if the operations director had actually had a lot of people reporting to him, he probably would have done something about it, because it was stretching him too thin, like, move some of them to report to somebody else. So in the same way, we talked about moving some of the technologies to report to someone else, like the food inventory to go to the chef.
接下来,我会看看图上有没有人类角色 使用了过多的技术, 比如说,跟四个或更多的 应用软件打交道。 在bovingdons,运营总监 要跟5个技术打交道。 他告诉我,他总是觉得工作过于繁重, 但直到与我交谈, 他才意识到这可能是 因为他所监管的技术。 我们讨论到, 如果运营总监有很多人向他汇报, 他很可能会做点什么, 因为他已经不堪重负了, 比如,让某些人改向其他人汇报。 同样地,我们谈到将一些技术转移到 其他人那里, 比如把食品清单交给厨师。
The last thing that I'll look for is any technology that seems to be on the org chart without a real home. Sometimes they're floating around without an owner. Sometimes they're reporting to so many different areas that you can't tell who's actually using it. Now, at Bovingdons, nobody appeared to be looking after the marketing software. It was like someone had hired it and then didn't give it a desk or any instructions on what to do. So clearly, it needed a job description, maybe someone to manage it. But in other companies, you might find that a technology has been sidelined for a reason, like it's time for it to leave or be retired. Now, retiring applications is something that all companies do. But maybe taking the mindset that those applications are actually coworkers could help them to decide when and how to retire those applications in the way that would be least destructive to the rest of the team.
最后我要看的是有没有技术 在组织架构上没有真正的归属。 有时候,它们只能在不同人之间游走。 有时候它们汇报给如此多不同的领域, 导致你都不知道谁在使用它。 在bovingdons, 似乎没人负责管理营销软件。 有点像有人雇佣了它, 却没有给它安排工位, 或任何工作指示。 所以很明显,它需要一份职位指南, 也许需要有人管理它。 但在其他公司, 你可能会发现一项技术 因为某种原因被边缘化, 比如它是时候该离开或退休了。 如今,淘汰应用软件是 所有公司都会做的事情。 但是,也许采用把这些 应用软件当作同事的心态 可以帮助他们以对团队 其他成员破坏性最小的方式 决定何时,以及如何 停用这些应用程序。
I did this experiment with 15 different professionals, and each time it sparked an idea. Sometimes, a bit more. You remember that hotshot employee I was telling you about, that everybody was ignoring? That was a real story told to me by Christopher, a very energetic human resources manager at a big consumer goods company. Technology was a new HR platform, and it had been installed for 14 months at great expense, but nobody was using it. So we were talking about how, if this had really been such a hotshot employee with amazing credentials, you would go out of your way to get to know it, maybe invite them for coffee, get to know their background.
我与15个不同的 专业人员做了这个实验, 每次它都激发了一个想法。 有时候,还更多。 还记得我跟你们说过的那个 被每个人忽略的技术高手吗? 那是克里斯托弗告诉我的 一个真实的故事, 他是一家大型消费品 公司的人力资源经理。 技术是新的HR平台, 有人花了大价钱安装它,但过了14个月, 却一直没人使用它。 所以我们在讨论, 如果这位员工真的是一个拥有 令人惊叹的资质的优秀员工, 你会不厌其烦去了解它, 也许邀请他们喝杯咖啡, 去了解他们的背景。
So in the spirit of experimentation, Christopher set up one-hour appointments, coffee optional, for his team members to have no agenda but to get to know their HR system. Some people, they clicked around menu item by menu item. Other people, they searched online for things that they weren't clear about. A couple of them got together, gossiped about the new software in town. And a few weeks later, Christopher called to tell me that people were using the system in new ways, and he thought it was going to save them weeks of effort in the future. And they also reported feeling less intimidated by the software. I found that pretty amazing, that taking this mindset helped Christopher's team and others that I spoke to these past few months actually feel happier about working with technology.
所以本着实验的精神, 克里斯托弗安排了一个小时的会议, 可能还会提供咖啡, 让他的团队成员去了解 他们的人力资源系统。 一些人,他们一项项地点击菜单。 另一些人则在网上 查找他们不清楚的地方。 其中一些人聚在一起, 对新安装的软件说三道四。 几周后,克里斯托弗打电话告诉我 人们正在用新的方式使用这个系统, 并且他认为,这将在未来 为他们节省几周时间的努力。 他们还表示,自己不再觉得 这个软件有什么可怕的了。 我觉得这很让人欣喜, 这种心态帮助了克里斯托弗的团队 和我在过去几个月里采访的其他人, 实际上对与技术合作感到更快乐。
And I later found out this is backed up by research. Studies have shown that people who work in organizations that encourage them to talk about and learn about the technologies in the workplace have 20 percent lower stress levels than those in organizations that don't. I also found it really cool that when I started to do this experiment, I started with what was happening between a person and an individual technology, but then it ultimately led to ideas about how to manage tech across entire companies. Like, when I did this for my own job and extended it, I thought about how our data analysis tools should go on the equivalent of a job rotation program, where different parts of the company could get to know it. And I also thought about suggesting to our recruiting team that some of the technologies we work with every day should come with us on our big recruiting events. If you were a university student, how cool would it be to not only get to know the people you might be working with, but also the technologies?
我后来发现这是有研究支持的。 研究发现在鼓励员工 谈论和学习工作场所 所用技术的公司里 工作的人, 要比在没有这样做的公司里面工作的人 压力水平要低20%。 在开始这些实验时, 我从个人与单个技术的 关系开始, 不过最终却引发了如何在整个公司中 管理技术的想法,这让我觉得很酷。 比如当我以同样的方式 对待自己的工作并扩展它的时候, 我会思考我们的数据分析工具 应该参与相当于工作轮岗的程序, 这样公司的不同部门就都可以了解它。 我还想过建议我们的招聘团队, 应该让我们常用的技术 出现在我们的大型招聘活动中。 如果你是个大学生, 除了知道你将与哪些人工作,还知道 会用到哪些技术, 是不是很酷呢?
Now, all of this begs the question: What have we been missing by keeping the technologies that we work with day to day invisible, and what, beyond those billions of dollars in value, might we be leaving on the table? The good news is, you don't need to be an org chart geek like me to take this experiment forward. It will take a matter of minutes for most people to draw out a structure of who they work with, a little bit longer to add in the technologies to get a view of the entire team, and then you can have fun asking questions like, "Which are the technologies that I'll be taking out for coffee?"
以上这些又引出了这样一个问题: 忽视我们每天都在 使用的技术,我们错过了什么, 除了这数十亿美元的价值, 我们还留下了什么? 好消息是, 要推进这个实验,你并不需要 像我这样擅长做组织架构图。 对大多数人而言,只需要几分钟 就可以画出他们工作环境的关系结构, 再花点时间添加技术在里面, 来获得整个团队的视图, 然后你就可以问诸如这样有趣的问题: “我将会带哪些技术出去喝咖啡?”
Now, I didn't do this experiment for kicks or for the coffee. I did it because the critical skill in the 21st-century workplace is going to be to collaborate with the technologies that are becoming such a big and costly part of our daily working lives. And from what I was seeing, we are struggling to cope with that. So it might sound counterintuitive, but by embracing the idea that these machines are actually valuable colleagues, we as people will perform better and be happier.
我做这个实验不是为了好玩, 或者为了喝咖啡。 我之所以这样做,是因为与技术协作 是21世纪工作场所的关键技能, 技术已经成为我们日常工作生活中 庞大且昂贵的部分。 而且就我所看到的而言, 我们仍在艰难应对这个问题。 这听起来可能违反直觉, 但通过接受这些技术其实 是有价值的同事的想法, 我们作为人类可以表现得更好, 也更快乐。
So let's all share a bit of humanity towards the technologies and the softwares and the algorithms and the robots who we work with, because we will all be the better for it.
所以,让我们对工作中会使用到的 技术,软件和算法,以及机器人 表现出一些人性关怀吧, 因为我们都会因此变得更好。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(鼓掌)