Robotic Moments

Tomorrow night on the HR Happy Hour show we will be joined by MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, author of the recent book 'Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other'.

'Alone Together' is almost two separate, but linked works.  Today, I will take a look at the first half of the book called 'The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies', which explores the world of 'social robots'; creations as simple as LED-powered children's Tamagotchi pets, to much more complex robots developed in the MIT Labs and other places, that ostensibly are the pre-cursors to the next (or next-next) generation of robots that will care for children, the elderly, and even provide companionship of a sort for really anyone.

Professor Turkle explores not so much the technical capabilities of the increasingly complex robots, but rather our relationship with them.  The 'Robotic Moment' has nothing at all to do with feats like IBM's Watson playing (and at the moment), defeating human competitors at Jeopardy!; instead is has everything to do with our willingness to accept and perhaps compete for the attention of and connection to these social robots.

Professor Turkle describes studies conducted at MIT with advanced social robots named Cog and Kismet; robots that were capable of engaging in simple conversation, that would respond to verbal and non-verbal cues, and perhaps most importantly would seek out people in the room, make eye contact, and demonstrate what to many of the study participants felt like 'caring' behaviors. And that, is the key, the Robotic Moment.  When we think robots can move beyond simply performing according to their programming, and acting in caring and nurturing ways.

But we are misguided in these beliefs. Even the most advances, lifelike, and realistic social robots can't truly 'care' about us.  But as Professor Turkle details in the book, that may still be acceptable for many. She recounts numerous stories from her research of Grandmothers ignoring their grandchildren to attend to a robot 'Real Baby's' needs, elderly nursing home residents accepting robot baby seal-like creatures as companions, and even the developers and programmers of the most advanced robots seemingly conflicted about the true nature of their creations.

A book about robots, and the wonderful things they can do, is not really all that interesting, pehaps only from an engineering perspective.  But an examination of what the increasing development and more complex and nuanced relationships that we have with these social robots, and what it might suggest about ourselves is fascinating.

Do we want to develop better and more capable social robots as babysitters or elder care companions simply because those are the kinds of jobs that we no longer value highly enough to staff with people? And do children and the elderly seem willing to accept these robots, while (mostly) aware of their shortcomings as 'good enough' substitutes for parents and adult children that are often too burdened, too busy, and too distracted to devote the time and attention needed?

And if (or perhaps when), robots do become more a part of our cycle of life - as babysitters, assistants, emotional companions, and elder care givers, what does that say about us, and about our conception and definition of emotional connection?  When robots make the progression from 'Better than nothing', insofar as they serve as stand-ins for roles that people no longer can or want to perform;  to 'Better than Anything', preferred over humans as companions and care givers, then the Professor argues we are on the precipice of a dramatic slide. The robots are smart, they 'know' that we want to nurture them, and that we come to love the things we nurture, and nurture the things we love.

But can we really 'love' a robot?

Tomorrow, I will take a look at the second half of 'Alone Together', called Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes', which focuses on the always on, always connected world of social networks and virtual worlds. 

What is the connection between robots and social networks? Think it is sort of crazy to think you could ever love a robot?

How do you feel about your smartphone?

Feel like the walls are closing in around you?

Have you ever gotten the feeling at the office that the walls were literally closing in around you?

That you barely have room to spin around in your chair without bashing into something - a file cabinet, a cubicle wall, or an office door?

That at the end of the day when you climb in to your hip, new, and uber-green Smart Car you think to yourself, 'Man, it feels good to stretch out a bit'.

Well, you are not alone in having that shrinking feeling.  According to a recent report from the International Facility Management Association, the office and cubicle walls are truly closing in on most American workers, with the average office worker seeing their allotment of space shrinking from 90 square feet in 1994, to 75 square feet in 2010.

By way of comparison, the average size of a prison cell in a supermax facility is about 100 square feet. But admittedly, you'd make some pretty serious tradeoffs swapping your tiny cube with bad flourescent lighting and no windows for the extra leg room in the supermax. Not to mention some potentially dodgy neighbors.

So why are offices and cubicles shrinking?

The International Facility Management Association offers some expected explanations; desire for organizations to control and reduce real estate costs, the rise of virtual and telework schemes making larger office spaces less important, and the technological progress that has made computers and monitors smaller, and reduced the amount of paper that is generated and stored in offices and cubes.

Those explanations certainly make sense, costs for real estate are a concern, at least some people have flexible schemes that render permanently assigned large office spaces at least a partial waste of space, and laptops and flat screen monitors take up a smaller footprint that even a few years ago.  

But by shrinking the size of offices, and more importantly cubicles, are organizations sacrificing their employee's comfort and well-being to in order to shave a precious few feet of floor space?  At some point one would think this trend would have to cease, as there does eventually become a minimum amount of space needed to hold even a small desk, chair, and workstation.

But I think the better question is, if organizations are finding it either necessary or prudent to continue to compress and shrink the space assigned to office workers, and technology continues to render the tradtional concepts and approaches of office design antiquated, then when will we see organizations start to eliminate the office altogether?

For back office functions like HR, accounting, communications, legal, etc. is there truly a compelling case for the people in these functions to congregate daily, in a central building, sitting in personal spaces of ever-decreasing size and comfort, while generating excess costs, using energy, and with workers in their cars contributing to traffic and pollution reliably each morning and afternoon. How many days to so many information workers make the commute only to hunker in their tiny cubes all day, headphones on, coats hanging from a hook on the wall not more than a foot away from the computer?

Costs, technology, changes in the attitudes and working preferences, particularly amongst the younger generations really should be changing more of how we work, and how our organizations design and coordinate this work.

Closing in the walls around workers seems to be about the weakest response possible to these trends.

Postscript - The Smart fortwo pure coupe model is 8.8 feet long, and 5.1 feet wide, for a footprint of about 45 square feet.  So at lease most of us can still park one in our cubes.

Hamburgers as Performance Art

I mentioned to Patrick that I needed some ideas for topics to write about on the blog and he said I should post about 'burgers'.The Rocket Double

What about burgers, I asked.  What's the angle? Now, Patrick does not completely get the point of view I try to write from, but he is savvy enough of a blogger himself to know the topic needs some kind of angle, or theme to make any sense. 

He said to write about burgers that you get in 50's style diners, like Johnny Rockets.  Parick has been fascinated with the chain since we watched an episode of Undercover Boss that featured the hamburger chain's President and CEO, John Fuller.  The episode was pretty much straight out the 'Boss' pattern - the executive is out of touch with the day-to-day front-line workers, doesn't really understand how tough their jobs are, and how important they are to the company's success, and after the requisite humiliation he receives attempting to perform some of the basic jobs, emerges a more humble, thoughful, and enlightened leader.  Toss a couple of free vacations and tuition reimbursements on a few of the staffers and everyone goes home happy.

But this post is supposed to be about burgers, not leadership, or reality shows that unfold more like formulaic sitcoms.  

One of the interesting scenes in the Johnny Rockets episode is when the CEO has to learn the little song and dance routine that the staff perfrorm from time to time in the restatuants, as a means of entertaining and (sort of) connecting with the customers. We learn from the show and from dining at a Johnny Rockets restaurant, that the staff try hard to create a memorable and lively experience for the customers, one that moves beyond the simple menu of diner burgers, sandwiches, shakes, and fries. 

But clearly, the customer is to be served good, if basic food, welcomed and treated well by the staff, and even entertained a bit by music, singing, and dancing by the white shirted, bow-tied workers.

Contrast the experience at a Johnny Rockets with that at the Manhattan restaurant 4food. 

4food is a burger place unlike any other, the expansive menu of burgers, toppings, cheeses, buns, and condiments are offered with the expectation and anticipation that the customers will not only develop their own custom creations, that using a vast array of social media avenues, they will share these creations and by sharing, promote themselves and 4food.

Large screens display tweets and Foursquare check-ins, customer's creations are voted up and down in a kind of crowdsourced burger tote board, and iPads litter the restaurant to make the creation, ordering, and tweeting accessible and easy.

There are over a million possible combinations of burger ingredients, making the process for creation complex, the online burger generator reminds one of similar web-based tools for automotive sites, that enable one to build and customize their new vehicle.

But it seems clear from the overly complex menu, from the emphasis on customer participation in the burger creation process, and from the seemingly relentless barrage and display of tweets and check-ins; that the experience is designed and intended to be malleable, and to rely on the creativity and enthusiasm of the audience to be meaningful. 

We want to believe this model -  this open, flexible, and participatory model is the future, and is somehow 'better' than the old traditions.  We point to events like the uprisings in Egypt as more proof that when given the opportunity citizens, customers, or students can often if not usually outperform the traditional autocrats or hierarchies.  And no doubt for many circumstances, especially ones more important than the trivialities of ordering lunch, this will continue to be so.

But for the simpler things, the ones that consume most of our day-to-day lives, I wonder if the Johnny Rockets model still is the better way.

Sometimes you just want a decent hamburger, cooked the way you like, served by a friendly waiter or waitress. You want the 'performance' to come to you, rather than feel compelled to create at least a part of it yourself.

You want the star to be the burger, not the slightly annoying dude next to you worried about who is about to oust him as the mayor of the salad bar.

A Workplace Without Email?

In what I promise will be my last blog post about email, (really, is there anything more tedious? Except of course people who Tweet about phone calls they just had.  So annoying. I mean would you ever have an online Tweet exchange with someone and then call someone else on the phone to let them know you have been tweeting away with the first person, and how 'amazing' they are?  No one cares who you are talking to on the phone. Get over yourself.).

So anyway...

Today I saw the follwing Tweet from Sarah Goodhall (@tribalimpact) on Twitter:

Initriguing, no?  Clicking through to the link mentioned in the Tweet reveals the details of the story:

Atos Origin moves to be email free in three years. Doable?

Atos Origin is an international IT services company, and a very large one, with approximately 50,000 employees worldwide.  It's CEO Thierry Breton has come to the conclusion that email, in its current incarnation and use inside Atos Origin is no longer adequately serving the information sharing, creation, and collaboration needs of the large, far-flung organization.  

He wants Atos Origin to be a 'zero email company' within three years.

Money quote from the  Computer Business Review piece on Atos:

So why the big move? Because email is not helping any more, basically. "The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business, with managers spending between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails... We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. [So] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

Man - first time I have ever seen 'email pollution' compared to filth-belching smokestacks.  But in a way I get it.  Just like industrial pollutants fill the air and waterways, little by little, always more, more, more, our email inboxes never seem to ever truly 'empty'.

More from the CBR article:

Breton argues that social media community platforms and collaboration tools are much superior ways of letting his employees share and keep track of ideas "on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales".

That experience, he says, has prompted him to conclude that "Businesses need to do more of this - email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business." Use of such replacements has already cut email use by up to 20%, claims the firm.

Makes sense - if a reduction of email volume of 20% is seen as a great benefit to the organization, and its harried managers, then why not shoot for 40%, or 70%, or as Atos Origin is going for, an elimination of all internal email.

Can Atos Origin, a 50,000 or so strong organization completely free itself of email in the next three years?  Perhaps.  But there seems to be no doubt if they can succeed, and do indeed see increased productivity, profits, and happiness other organizations will surely try as well.

Need to run, in the 20 minutes it took to write this post, I got about 33 new emails......

Have a great weekend!

You've got mail, you know Email

The marketing research firm comScore recently released its 2010 US Digital Year in Review report that measures and analyzes trends in digital communications, social networking, device usage, and so on.  The report is a fascinating examination of the forces that are shaping and changing the way we consume, share, and even produce content and information.  

There are a ton of interesting charts and data points in the 2010 report, and several that are/should be interesting and important for leaders of organizations and HR professionals that have an eye towards how people demonstrate their preferences and inclinations in the consumption and interactions with digital content.  One of the most notable findings in the comScore report has to do with the changes in the usage of Web-based email (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and so on) in 2010.  Despite an overall increases in broadband access and total time spent online, web-based email usage actually declined 8% in 2010.

See the chart below from the comScore report:

Most notable in the results are the really dramatic declines in web-based email usage in the 12-17, and 25-34 age brackets, while the 18- 24 cohort was essentially flat in 2010. The only age groups that showed an increase in web-based email usage in 2010 were the 55 years and up groups, largely rationalized with explanations like 'C'mon Grandpa, get an email account so we can keep in touch'. For what it's worth, these same age groups also saw double digit percentage increases in their use of Facebook and Twitter.  Essentially, these older folks are getting online in greater numbers, and more or less doing the same things their kids have grown accustomed to.

What might this trend in decreased preference for web-based email as a method of communication by younger generations mean for the present and future workforce?

Well, it could mean nothing I suppose.  Or next to nothing. I mean once those 15 year olds grow up a bit and start entering the working world they will simply be forced to use email. I mean, email makes the working world go around, right?  Besides, you are the boss, not them, and if you declare that 99% of your electronic communications will be emails, then by golly that is the end of the discussion. Get with the program, Junior, just go easy on the 'Reply to all' button.

Or these macro trends in technology consumption, particularly by the upcoming generations of workers could be really important to the organization tomorrow, (maybe even sooner than you think).  Some would argue that the growing popularity and adoption of SMS text messages and social network status updates and connections as the de facto means of digital communication for a generation may and will inevitably change modern business.

The data continue to reflect shifts from the more formal and traditional means of electronic communication (email, voice mail), to more social, casual, and dynamic ones (SMS, social networks). The next set of new workers to join your organization will most likely see nothing at all unusual about sending hundreds of SMS messages a day, and looking over their Facebook news feed while brushing their teeth. 

What they are not as likely to understand, accept, and flourish in, is an environment where they might get 200 emails per day.  Emails are kind of long, mostly kind of boring, and usually have things like 'greetings' and 'salutations'.

Come to think of it, you may need to update the old acceptable use policy, to explain what a 'salutation' is, the next generation probably never heard of the term, and even Grandma is getting sick of crafting them as well.

It's a brave, strange new world out there. 

Postscipt - after finishing this post, I saw this piece on ReadWriteWeb - Smartphones outsell PCs for the first time ever. Stay thirsty my friends.