Unlocking Technology
I’ve just finished reading a brilliant book: The Technology Trap by Carl Benedikt Frey.
The book traces the history of automation to tease out some of the themes we can play forward into the future age of robotics and AI. There were a bunch of takeaways, about which I intend to write a separate post later. But one that inspired me to write an interim post was the way Frey describes the interaction between process and technology.
To cut a long (but very good) story short: technology gets applied to its most potent extent only with process redesign. The advent of electricity didn’t have its biggest impact on manufacturing until factory floor layouts were changed to harness it to its maximum effect. Similarly, single purpose robotics on assembly lines stood on the shoulders of Taylorism and the Ford production assembly line that divided complex tasks into a series of much simpler (and therefore more automatable) tasks.
It made me think even deeper about how I can really unlock the value of AI for my own work (see here for initial musings). There’s still a lot of experimentation to be done on “best practice”, but one thing that definitely won’t be the answer is simply expecting AI to map to my current workflows and ways of doing things. The whole point is to rearchitect the work itself before applying the new technology to support (or ideally automate) it.
As one example, we’re switching much of our portfolio management “system of record” away from SharePoint and into Notion, to take advantage of the AI features that can be overlaid onto it. My first thought experiment was about how to then get the Notion AI output back into Office products - Word, Excel and PPT - for the typical way I do things like reporting. The better approach - that became screamingly obvious to me after reading the book - is to reimagine how the work product and output itself could and should change to make the most of AI.
There’s still a lot of thinking to do but I love when simple concepts reframe an entire way of thinking. I strongly recommend the book, so much so that it now proudly sits amongst my Rec’s. Check it out.
P.S. Ironically, the book was recommended to me by…. AI. I was trialling Poke to see what all the fuss was about, and this was one of its suggestions. To be fair, it nailed it: I loved it.