Automation
transforms the priorities - and therefore the skills required of - the leaders in a new age of abundance.
By offering limitless
low-cost labour it provides:
1. Immediate abundance of capacity.
2. Learned abundance of
capability.
Before the opportunity to automate - particularly the opportunity to engage ML/AI-infused automation - successful management was all about control and direction of constrained and relatively fixed capacities and capabilities. These primarily existed in the employee cohort.
Over time this extended to out-sourced cohorts which offered a
little more flexibility - but essentially capability and capacity resided in
the people you directly or indirectly employed.
The scarcity of labour made
the wise and timely allocation of it an essential business skill. That created
an entire industry of strategic planning, roadmaps, business case development.
HR and logistics to identify the need for new capacities and capabilities and
scale up (and down) accordingly.
Pre-digital it was ok to
have five-year plans. Digital typically thrust an annual cycle on leaders; the
combined effect of the cloud and of globalization has already been to rapidly close any
gap a 'strategy' may initially provide by way of competitive advantage.
With automation, there is no
cycle. Leaders can summon up or switch off entire new swathes of digital
workforces in seconds. Enabling this friction-free recruitment and redundancy
through the cloud and appropriate pricing models is the near-term competitive
battlefield for automation vendors.
And it closes the
enablement gap between strategy and execution in ways 20th century leaders
could only dream of.
But it also threatens some
fundamental relationships between the organization and work. How many times have we heard leaders proclaim 'people are our
greatest asset'. Now our leaders command a digital workforce - to both do the
grunt work and augment the decision-making and creative delivery of their human
teams.
Today's leader must become
skilled in directing an automated workforce to deliver on decisions made by a
human workforce, augmented and amplified by their digital peers.
Their choices are less
about how many people they direct to to do what, and more about carving out the
differentiation that informs what data they seek, where from and how it is
interpreted for insight.
With so much data available
to understand needs and wants, so many systems available to
listen-learn-respond to those needs and understand customer contexts, and such
limitless low-cost labour to deliver vs those needs in more and more customised
configurations, business process operations will be honed in ever-improving, self-learning and natively automated iterative cycles.
Recognising and assembling
the technologies to do this (as described by the OneOffice Emerging TechPlatform) at least places the enterprise on a level playing field with all the
others that are smart enough and fast enough to recognise how digital
transformation gets out of a strategists head and into the systems of the
organisation.
Make no mistake,
first-mover does offer an advantage here. The first to set their systems of
learning rolling will accelerate their self-improving processes, and get faster
and better at doing so - opening a gap that laggards will find hard to close.
But it is in the will to
break down silos, in the quality and systemization of change, the emphasis on
scaling their organisational digital fluency, and in the selection of a domain
to extend expertise in, that competitive differentiation will emerge.
These then are the areas
in which tomorrow's leaders must accelerate their skills. Not all come
naturally. Selecting the domain comes down to legacy purpose or establishing
one. This is where vision and belief come together to encompass both goals and
ways of working to attract employees, partners, and customers and to inform and
be reflected by the algorithms of the business - as much part of your brand as
anything.
This will require a
step-change in the embrace of data and insight for decision making, driving
process and supporting the employee and customer experience.
Tomorrow's C-suite must be
skilled and able to coach their intelligent automation processes to assist and
complement their expertise - just as much as they coach their human reports to
better support them in the future.
They must learn to trust
in, and act on, the new opportunities their systems of anticipatory insight
present them. They must accept that much of judgment now resides in backing the
real-time data - ready to press the go-button on instant new divisions of
digital labour to take advantage.
For some, the trust will only
come when they understand and believe in the decisions embedded in the
processes that deliver that data. They have to go on their journeys of discovery
right now. Because before long we will stop talking about lucky generals and
ballsy decisions.
The complete leader will be an insight-led pragmatic decision-maker, combining a scientific approach to data with the emotional intelligence, imagination and empathy to guide both people and bots towards an intended future in which the shared values and concerns of the humans engaged are brightly and clearly reflected.
Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash
