What technology does to expertise
My car broke down. Just a flat battery needing a jump start. The mobile mechanic connected a device to the battery and an app on his phone showed that the battery needs to be replaced. A few years ago a mechanic might have used a multimeter to measure the charge and used their expertise to interpret the results. Today, the expertise for understanding the battery is with the device and its developers. The mechanic no longer needs that expertise.
Technology shifts expertise.
Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, from University of Oxford, study the future of work and machine learning. They suggested that those jobs involving routine work are likely to be substituted with automation technologies. This is technology shifting the expertise that used to be required to do a job away from those that do the work. Fixing car batteries is just one of those jobs.
The shift occurs within organisations as well as across entire economies. Communication used to take large typing pools writing the same memo on lots pieces of paper to send across the company. Today, it takes a few highly skilled people to maintain the systems that allow anyone to type an email and communicate with millions of people. This expertise shift shows as technology increasingly replaces medium skilled work, and people are pushed towards either low skilled work or highly skilled work.
These two extremes are what Goos and Mannings, a research assistant and professor at the London School of Economics, called ‘lousy jobs’ and ‘lovely jobs’. ‘Lovely jobs’ are those that require creative thinking and the ability to confront novel situations successfully. Automation will complement those lovely jobs in “performing non-routine problem solving and complex communications tasks” but is unlikely to replace them. ‘Lousy jobs’ are those that aren’t worth automating because they can be done cheaply by all those low skilled workers. A machine can diagnose a battery, and maybe one day drive the van, but opening the bonnet and attaching the device might need a human in loop for a while yet.
But, as technology progresses, and becomes more advanced, the expertise shift increases. The higher skilled workers become fewer as the work becomes more specialised. The lower skilled workers become more as the routine work that isn’t easy to automate is all that is left. This is a power law distribution of wages and worker numbers. It’s how a relative change in fewer highly specialised people commanding higher wages results in a proportional change in the number of low skilled workers.
This is the future of work. No middle ground. Increasingly fewer highly skilled specialists doing creative work, and more and more lower skilled workers doing what isn’t worth automating.
Weeknotes 344
This week I did:
Website technology strategy
Most of this week has been about applying our technology strategy model to our website to identify where to focus our efforts to get the most value. It worked really well and helped us focus on the things that will improve the infrastructure and get the value from doing so.
In the zone
Add more to productmanagement.zone. I like the filters. If you want a book on strategy or a podcast on discovery, using the two sets of filters you’ll be able to find them. One of the things I need to figure out is, for things like podcasts, should I list each episode or just the podcast. The filtering works better if it’s the individual episodes but it’s a hell of a lot more work.
Starlings and geese
I wanted to write a blog post about starlings and geese as analogies for patterns of team behaviours. Starlings are about to respond to each other and change direct quick, whereas geese are aligned and go a long way together. But I couldn’t make the blog post make sense so I just tweeted it.
Posthuman professionalism
I’m interested in Posthumanism as one of my pillars of thinking for system-shifting product management, so I went to a talk called Posthuman professionalism. It was mostly about the education system, but I found it really interesting from two angles. Firstly, it described posthumanism as post-vitruvian (appreciating difference rather than the ideal human represented by Vitruvian man) and post-anthropocentric (accepting other forms such as digital, plant and animal as equally important rather than thinking these things exist for the benefit of the human species) which is what I like about it for product management that is user-rhizomatic. Secondly, it asked the question of what it means to be a professional, whether it has to be about giving over control to an organisation or whether posthumanism shows a different way of being detached from the organisation. It gave me a lot to think about.
February’s retro
I did my retro of how February went and what I did and didn’t do.
And read:
Knowledge Production and Intellectual Legitimacy
This essay talks about the the dynamic between creating new knowledge and legitimising it as useful product. The same dynamic occurs in many places in many ways, always with the same challenge. It happens across society and institutions, and it happens within fields of knowledge and within organisations. The constantly shifting power of influences in these allow for varying degrees of balance between the new and the existing knowledge, the and the well-established practices. So, the challenge for organisations wanting to be innovative is in how they manage those tensions. Too much new knowledge too quickly doesn’t get legitimatised. Too much legitimacy prevents new knowledge from being accepted.
The Marshall Model of Organisational Evolution
The Marshall Model of Organisational Evolution describes a model for understanding how organisations evolve along an axis of “effectiveness” from ad hoc to chaordic (with effectiveness being defined around minimum waste and maximum productivity).
Toward a Typology of Critical Nonprofit Studies
I’ve thought for quite a while that the charity sector is anti-intellectual and that the ‘doing’ is based on personal experience rather than being rooted in well-established theory. This literature review shows that even scholarly work in the not-for-profit space often fails to engage with critical theories. Such a waste of knowledge that could be put to good use.
And I thought about:
Speed of work
Different types of work progress at different speeds. And the speed is better defined by the characteristics of the work than by external things like deadlines. Work that is well-known, standardised, repeatable and predictable progresses at a different pace to work that is unknown, novel and creative.
Lightweight governance
Thought a bit more about lightweight governance, that is governance that is built around enabling people by giving them the knowledge and decision-making power rather than heavyweight that uses permission and control to centralise decision-making. I’m keen to explore this more and develop it into something useful.
Team identity
Wondering about the purpose of teams, what their role is in an organisation, and whether we have the words to explain it. And how teams see themselves and how other see them, and whether those two are the same. Don’t suppose there are any answers, especially in complex adaptive organisations where those roles shift depending on the people and how they interact.