Digital Humans: Thriving in an Online World

Digital Humans

Thriving in an Online World

Paul Ashcroft

Garrick Jones

This edition first published 2022.

Copyright © 2022 by Paul Ashcroft and Garrick Jones. All rights reserved.

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For Zsanett, Benjamin, Leanne, Georgia, Leila, and Emma

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Annie Knight, Corissa Hollenbeck, Deborah Schindlar, and the team at Wiley who have been so great to work with.

We would like to thank the entire Ludic team without whom we would not be able to row our boats into such interesting ports and learn so much from our adventures together.

We also thank all our friends and clients who have worked, laughed, and cried together with us over the years, as we have brought new things to life, in particular Chris Meyer, Ella Bennett, Simon Brown, Marce Cancho Rosado, Sergio Martinez-Cava Camacho, and Juan Luis Moreno Bau.

Paul especially thanks Zsanett, Benjamin, and Leanne for their love and invaluable support during the weeks and months of being immersed with him in the wonderful world of writing.

Garrick would also like to thank Zsanett for her patience and understanding, along with Michael Uys, Michael Craig-Martin, and Francesco Manacorda for the inspiring conversations and their support.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book is about the impact of digital on us as individuals and how we organize together to get things done. It is also about what we have learned, in terms of how to make the most of all that digital has to offer whilst avoiding its pitfalls.

The book consists of our understanding of the context of digital humans – what is happening and how we understand it. We identify 23 trends that we believe are important to pay attention to. We have researched what primary research is already starting to tell us about what we have learned through the global pandemic. We look at 12 fundamentally new ways that we believe are impacting digital humans and their organizations.

The original version of this book's research was printed before the huge global experience of the pandemic. We have sought to understand the shifts that took place for organizational survival. The conditions of economies grinding to a halt and people being kept at home meant that the only way economies could survive was by adopting digital work. We have sought to update our research with what we have learned through this period and what we feel will be lasting in its impact.

The book is not intended to be an academic thesis or a technical manual. Instead, it is a document of what we have learned, our experiences, and the important principles we have synthesized through working in this way.

We have tried to avoid jargon and to write a book that everyone might find interesting and accessible. At the end of the book, we have included our ‘terms of art’. This provides our working definitions for the various technical terms that we use within the text.

It is, above all, a contribution to the conversation about our joint future, in the hope that we as humans will use the opportunities digital provides to create a future world in which we all want to live together.

INTRODUCTION

Our Digital Civilization

New technology has always propelled humans forward. Often, we are afraid of it. Take the invention of the steam train. When the Stockton to Darlington Railway, the first public steam railway, opened in 1825, people feared the worst: the human body wasn't designed to travel at the astonishing speed of 30 miles per hour and something dreadful would happen if it did (Britannica 2019). With the invention of the telephone, preachers in Sweden said the phone was an instrument of the devil (Ehrenkrona n.d.), causing phone lines to be stolen or sabotaged; others feared that telephone lines were channels through which evil spirits would enter our homes.

In his classic 1960s book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan accurately predicted the rise of mass media and the ‘global village.’ He described how ‘The essence of automation technology … is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist and superficial in its patterning of human relationships’ (McLuhan 1964: 1).

Whilst McLuhan popularized this concept, he was not the first to think of it. Inventor Nicholas Tesla in an interview with Colliers magazine in 1926 stated:

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face-to-face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket (Kennedy 1926).

Our civilization today is in the midst of a technology revolution that is transforming every aspect of society. The recent pandemic has only accelerated this revolution. We have the potential to lead richly connected lives. What type of society are we creating? Will the rewards of digital go to an elite few, or will they be more evenly distributed in a society in which everyone has the chance to play a role and join the conversation? Will we create systems that alienate the digitally disadvantaged? Will we enable everyone to participate in society in a way they choose? Will digital mean we will be able to live lives that best suit our needs, our lifestyles, and our working patterns?

We have been working with organizations that have been at the forefront of enabling this change and have sought to understand what new thinking is emerging in order to make best use of it. We have also been tracking the research that has followed the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns on us as humans. Thrust into a world where we were all surviving mostly from home, we had only the digital realm to sustain much of our cultural and economic lives. This has changed us. We look at research from neuroscience, behaviourism, psychology, and organizations to help us understand what the impact is on us.

As humans, we have a remarkable ability to absorb, use, and become accustomed to new technology. We also tend to take a benevolent view of these technological inventions. When it's our car, washing machine, hair dryer, or central heating we hardly recognize them as technology at all. Would you prefer to get on a plane every time you want to speak to your grandchildren in another country, rather than pick up a telephone? Would you smash your spectacles as a gesture against the rising tide of technology? Would you swap your central heating for a fire in every room (which you have to make and tend each day)? In the context of digital technology, why would you prefer to go to the library a few miles down the road when you can access the biggest library ever created from the comfort of your own home?

Have we already become a digital civilization? At what point will we have too much technology?

Digital Humans

At the height of the pandemic in early 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella observed that we have seen two years of digital transformation in two months. The World Economic Forum has recently forecasted that ‘half of all work tasks will be handled by machines by 2025’ and ‘COVID-19 has accelerated the arrival of the future of work’ (Spataro 2020).

Bill Gates has described how in his view most human work will soon be conducted by automated technology (Forston 2018). Our current society based around jobs and work will fundamentally shift, he argues. He asks, what will be our purpose as humans in such a world? Should we tax robots to pay for schools, care homes, and other facilities?

Many people are equally concerned about our future. The digital revolution we are currently experiencing is as profound as any revolution in history. From a technological perspective, being a human on planet earth today is a vastly different experience from what it was 10 years ago. Since Covid, being human is very different from even two years ago. We can see the impact on every aspect of our lives, including our work and personal relationships.

We believe we have already entered the age of the digital human. As individuals, we live in a digital world rich in knowledge and data. We can access more worlds than any other generation could imagine. We can lead multiple lives with a degree of flexibility we have never enjoyed before. We can establish communities around all our different interests. We have more virtual friends than those we see day-to-day. Many of us are now free to work from anywhere. Technology already augments how we work and how we live. Soon it will be commonplace for technology to become integrated with our biological bodies (in some cases, it already is). Will we one day become more digital than human?

Digital Organizations

What does digital mean for our organizations as we know them today? The fixed offices and bureaucratic institutions of the past decades in many ways already seem outdated. Will the glass skyscrapers that pepper our cities today become the empty cathedrals of tomorrow? What will become of our cities if no one needs to go into an office to work? In the meantime, what engages, motivates, and gets the best from a human workforce, whilst it is knowingly acting as a stepping stone to the next wave of technology optimization?

The modern organization today is a global network of connections, knowledge, customers, and suppliers. There is barely such as thing as ‘local’ enterprise anymore: where digital is present, every organization, everywhere, is connected globally in some way.

In the past, organizational change or transformation was something done steadily, perhaps over several years. Organizations gradually moved into new markets or focused on becoming more competitive or productive. Change was ‘done to’ organizations by smart consultants with clever models and frameworks for strategic advice or process improvement.

Transformation itself is changing. Today, organizations need to move much faster. New threats appear without notice. Consumer sentiment changes overnight. New opportunities emerge and are quickly taken advantage of by fast-moving competitors. Organizations need to sense and respond to these changes without delay. They need to do so whilst not disrupting their core business or their people. It's this challenge that has seen hundreds of well-known brands disappear in recent years.

Organizations are being de-bossed and hierarchies flattened A new kind of leadership is required for digital humans that has more in common with how biological or nervous systems operate, rather than the mechanistic models of previous years.

We have already seen the emergence of the chief digital officer(CDO). No longer relegated to just ‘head of technology’ or seen as a minor role on the board, the CDO now controls a vast domain that touches every part of the organization. When the day comes that an organization has more robots than people, will the chief human resources officer(CHRO) even be required? Will the post ultimately merge with that of the CDO to become ‘head of digital and human resources’?

Why Did We Write this Book?

It was December 2004. The world was emerging from the dot-com crash. Google had recently gone public, a new company called Facebook had just launched, and we all still had Nokia mobile phones.

Since the mid-1990s we had been involved in the development of some of the most sophisticated methods for enabling large-scale system change through collaborative decision making. It was (and still is) a set of technologies, processes, philosophies, and principles used by governments, global organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to align, make decisions, and scale. We recognized that the digital world was coming fast and the implications would be seismic. We asked ourselves the question, how do we achieve the same results virtually as those we can face-to-face? How do we enable thousands of people to work together and learn together when they are based in different locations around the world? At the same time, how can we design work so that it can fit with the way people want to work?

Our response was to design a new kind of consulting organization. One that could be entirely virtual, immediately global, and have the scale to work alongside the biggest organizations in the world. We called our new company ‘Ludic’ from the Latin ludo meaning playfulness. If we were going to invent a new way of working, it should at least be fun.

In our work over the years, we have been asked questions such as:

How do we engage our people across the globe?

How do we, as leaders, make more informed decisions?

How can we get the best from virtual global teams?

How do we ensure strategic decisions are implemented?

How do we work with diverse teams of young and old?

How do we scale rapidly?

How do we transform and innovate without disrupting?

How do we shift from a centralized to a more decentralized system?

Often, we have been asked these questions because the usual answers have been tried by others before and proven unsatisfactory. We are researchers and inventors at heart. We love creating solutions. We see our organization as a lab and our response has often been to develop something new: a software platform, a method, a new environment. We have had the privilege of working with many amazing people and clients who were prepared to try something different. Through these collaborations over the past decade, we have discovered how to activate organizations so that they can transform themselves – and what digital means in practice to the people who work with them.

Humans have achieved awe-inspiring things by working together. Digital enables us to collaborate like never before in history. It has radical implications for our global society. How have our societies in history succeeded or failed when faced with momentous changes? We are fascinated by these questions. That is why we have written this book.

References

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia (2019, 3 July). Stockton & Darlington Railway. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stockton-and-Darlington-Railway (accessed 6 April 2022).

Ehrenkrona, M. (n.d.) The telephone is the instrument of the devil. https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/communication/how-the-telephone-changed-the-world/the-telephone-is-the-instrument-of-the-devil (accessed 26 March 2022).

Forston, D. (2018). Robots will take most jobs, predicts Bill Gates. The Sunday Times, 15 April 2018. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/robots-will-take-most-jobs-predicts-bill-gates-nt9jzg2c5 (accessed 26 March 2022).

Kennedy, J. (1926). When woman is boss: an interview with Nikola Tesla. Colliers. http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1926-01-30.htm (accessed 26 March 2022).

McLuhan, M. (1964). The medium is the message. In: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet Books.

Spataro, J. (2020). 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months. Microsoft's quarterly earnings report to Wall Street. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2-months/ (accessed 26 March 2022).

Stockton to Darlington Railway, 1825: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stockton-and-Darlington-Railway

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia (2019, 3 July). Stockton & Darlington Railway. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stockton-and-Darlington-Railway (accessed 6 April 2022).

Part One

Living in Our Online World

Our Brave New Digital World

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

Rise and Fall of a Civilization

It is the spring equinox in the year 818 CE. At the appointed hour, the Mayan high priest at Chichen Itza slowly ascends one of the four staircases of the pyramid of Kukulkan, a giant temple named in honour of the feathered serpent deity. As the sun's shadow creates the illusion of the snake descending the pyramid, the priest gazes down upon the crowd of some 40 000 people. He begins a slow hand clap. The crowd responds, the clapping builds to a crescendo. The echo from the top of the pyramid reflects the call of the resplendent quetzal, the sacred bird, across the city. A human sacrifice is made. The crowd is in rapture. The gods are pleased. It will be a good year.

A civilization way ahead of its time, the Mayans thrived for more than 3000 years. They were brilliant architects, mathematicians, and astronomers. They invented the concept of zero. Their calendar was accurate to within one day every 6500 years. The Mayans had one of the most advanced writing systems of any ancient civilization. Their cities were centres for arts, science, and religion, that teemed with more than 2000 people per square mile (which is comparable to modern Los Angeles County). Their creation and adoption of highly sophisticated technology propelled them forward.

However, by around 900 CE the population had crashed. Perhaps as many as 95% of the Mayans had died and the great cities were deserted. Many theories exist as to the cause of this great decline. The leading hypothesis is that the Mayans simply overextended themselves. They overpopulated and over-farmed their natural resources, leading to deforestation and drought on a massive scale.

Like the Mayans, are we in danger of becoming the authors of our own demise? Will a future artificial intelligence record that at some point during the twenty-first century, biological humans seemed to stop building, producing, or making – they scattered from their cities and by the mid-2100s had almost entirely ceased to exist? Or will we have created a digital utopia that ensures our survival for the next millennia?

Our history is populated with stories like this. Technological change, upheavals, and the promise of new worlds all harness our dreams of a better life. Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has suggested we are currently in the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – the blurring of physical, technological, and biological domains. The First Industrial Revolution transformed production with water and steam power. The Second brought electric power and mass production. The Third refers to automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the shift from analogue to digital.

In the time of Elizabeth I and the discovery of what was called the New World, Francis Bacon published a story in which