Do Humans Confuse you Sometimes?

Some days ago, over a fine cup of coffee on the sofa in our newly refurbished office lounge I pondered on my own education, I'm a humanist. Presumably inspired by the work of Heikkilä and Niiniluoto on the value of humanistic research for Finland I started to think closer about the years to come. Right now, whether it is digitalization, solution business or automatization organizations face change. The changes are not merely technical, but have social ramifications as well. I'm not talking about society level issues such as decreased available work, but smaller-level changes.

We have wittnessed a considerable change in business logics. Companies become more service and solution oriented as the global technological know-how increases - it is a considerable competitive asset to understand your customer's business logic. Simultaneously organizations wrestle with changing work descriptions and faster adaption and adoption rates in order to stay in-tune with a fickle market - people need to be able to work independently. This is extremely important, and I don't know how many corporation get this, the era of control and restraint has ended. In order to thrive, employers must be able to trust their employees and create the premises for the employees to do their ultimate best - to create a culture that is not based on blame or scapegoating but on solutions and responsibility.

So where do we humantists come in? I would argue that there are no other professionals more qualified to mentor companies in these changes. Let's face it, many companies don't actively manage their culture, values-statements are more of a PR thing than actual guidelines for everyday actions. This is a shame since value-statements can be quite handy when an employee weighs his options, but if they are developed as a part of a marketing strategy rather than as a basis for company activity they have an inherent deficit. There are other interesting questions arising, how can companies change their management methods so that they support an agile organization? A strong asset in this situation is organizational culture. But organizational culture is a dynamic element of organizational life and needs to be managed in the sense that the activities that support organizational goals become self-evident and taken for granted. What if there was a bunch of professionals who actually study cultures, how people interact, how they create meaning and how they experience things?

GOOD NEWS, there is! Humanists study HUMANS and seek to gain a higher understanding of the HUMAN condition. And as humans, which employees mostly are, the occasional babOOn set aside, become the key assets for organizations. Humanists should become a mandatory addition to any organization, would you not agree? So when humans confuse you, call a humanist - everyone knows one!

P.S. People are confusing, that's what makes them interesting!