I Fear for Our Humanity

Artificial intelligence never pushes back. People do. And that is exactly why I worry we will start spending less time with them than we should. About two talks in Kurdějov, one conversation on a golf course, and why I want to go back to the office.

In early October I spent three days at Scale Up Your Way, the annual gathering of the Scaleupboard community in Kurdějov. I went there for ideas on growing companies. I came home with one word that has not left my head since: humanity.

The event is worth recommending for more than its content. The organisers arranged the talks so that they built on one another, as if a single author had written them.

Two of them came one after the other, and only together did I understand what they were telling me. A separate report on the whole event is coming. Here I want to stay with one idea that grew out of it.

A Company Where Joy Grows

On Friday morning Josef Dvořáček from Sonnentor gave a talk called How to Build a Company Where Joy Really Grows. He did not show a single chart. He talked about people.

About how important it is to talk with them and think about them. To take them with their mistakes and to forgive them.

Forgiveness is something his father taught him. A month before his death, he drove to see a communist who had harmed him his whole life and shook his hand. That man then came to the funeral. The whole talk radiated a humanity you cannot learn from a book.

I will admit that forgiving is not my strong suit. I wrote here that for a long time I measured people against myself and almost nobody was good enough. Josef would say I was losing the most valuable thing people bring into a company.

The Forgotten People in the Middle

Right after him came Petr Skondrojanis. His talk was called The Forgotten People in the Middle and it was about middle management.

We owners and CEOs have our communities, our training and our masterminds where we can get advice. But where does the person who leads five or six people below us go? Usually nowhere.

A middle manager is typically created by promoting the best specialist. Overnight they are expected to lead people, and nobody ever taught them how.

The next day on the tee I overheard two friends talking. “From next month I have no customers,” says one. “How come?” “I became a manager. Now I will just be running the sales team.”

I do not know his company or his boss. But one thought hit me immediately: who gave you any training? Who taught you to motivate people, develop them and speak to each of them differently?

That is exactly what Petr was talking about. We promote a specialist and fail to give them the skills that leading people requires.

AI Never Pushes Back. And That Is the Problem.

I connect both of these with what I am doing myself right now. And with what I see among many friends and company owners who have people in their teams. We spend more and more time with artificial intelligence.

I do not want to demonise AI. I wrote here about the company as code and about AI as an operational layer. Working with AI is something I enjoy. It helps me think and execute ideas incredibly fast. And above all, in most cases it does not push back. It does exactly what I want.

Now put a team next to that. There you have to work with emotions. You have to be empathetic enough to sense what mood a colleague is in. How to dose information for them, which angle to approach them from. Everyone needs to hear things in a different way.

It is much, much harder than a conversation with AI. And that is exactly where my worry lies.

When AI Is an Easier Relationship Than a Colleague

When we have something at hand that is relationally easier for us, we start unconsciously preferring it. And we start measuring people against it.

A colleague does not understand immediately. They do not respond within three seconds. They have their own opinion and a bad mood. Next to AI they will look slow and annoying, and relationships in the team will sharpen.

I am not alone in this. The day before in Kurdějov, technologist Josef Holý admitted that while writing a book with AI he grew coarse. And that he then behaved the same way toward the people around him. “I found myself getting coarse,” he said. His children apparently keep him grounded.

When someone who understands AI better than most of us says that, it is not technophobia.

Now connect both talks. If we at the top unlearn humanity, where will that middle manager nobody ever trained learn it? They will be watching us.

Home Office Does Not Help

There is one more thing working against humanity. Covid handed it to us and it is called home office.

Petr Skondrojanis put it in a single sentence in Kurdějov: managers were used to culture being made around the coffee machine. And the coffee machine disappeared with covid.

At home it is much easier to slip into a conversation with AI and pursue your goals and steps your own way. Nobody interrupts you and nobody pushes back. But if you are in a team, it comes at a price.

If we do not return to offices, I see a serious risk that our teams will fall apart. People will not understand each other and will grow frustrated. And humanity will vanish from the company before we even notice.

This is work we have to cultivate deliberately. It brings no immediate results. It hurts far more than today’s work with AI. But without it a company has no chance of functioning well.

I Want to Overhear Phone Calls Again

This is another reason for me to go back to the office. To talk in the corridor and in the kitchen. And yes, to overhear other people’s phone calls.

I am an open space person. You cannot help overhearing calls there and I take that as an advantage. I catch a sentence, part of a conversation with a customer, or someone stuck on a problem. Those are the impulses that develop me.

New topics open up from impulses like these. I go to a colleague, we talk and we look for a solution together. No prompt will do that for us, because AI does not know it should ask.

And that is exactly what binds us. That is what creates humanity between us.

In Closing

I have no recipe for this. I do not know how many days in the office is right, nor exactly how to train middle management in the age of AI. But I do know we have to start talking about it now, not once our teams have fallen apart.

AI is an excellent assistant precisely because it does not push back. People are irreplaceable precisely because they do. They have opinions, moods and their own route to the goal. And we build companies with them, not with a model.

So I will say it out loud, to myself first: fewer prompts, more conversations. Even if it is slower. Even if it hurts.

Nine times out of ten it will be the better investment.