Michael Schrage
7:45 AM Thursday October 21, 2010
To heck with airbags. Prevention is better than amelioration, right? That's why Mercedes ads have car owners soberly celebrating how their smart cars alertly saved their lives. These luxury vehicles were so clever that they sensed when they — and the driver's attention — had dangerously drifted and took immediate corrective action. No accidents; no airbag necessary. An ounce of prevention is worth two tons of twisted metal.
But after seeing the ad a few times, I couldn't help wondering why my laptop and mobile phone aren't similarly supportive. Are they stupid? I want my phone and computer — not just my car — to let me know when my mind is wandering. Shouldn't an iPad and an Android be at least as smart as a Mercedes?
Innovative technologies have made workplace surveillance and monitoring employees hot-button management issues. Organizations increasingly use digital devices as their media for making sure people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Privacy advocates, unions, and regulators are alternately infuriated and intrigued by the intrusions these tools permit and encourage. As Mercedes' advertisements foreshadow, our mental models of monitoring require radical updating and upgrading.
A GPS discloses location and a video tracks actions but what's going on inside the mind? The Mercedes "Lane Keeping Assist" offers a wonderful proxy for driver focus. Cars don't drift into oncoming traffic if the driver is focused and alert. How hard would it be for Google or Microsoft to alert me that I've become distracted from my work onscreen? Perhaps I wouldn't want my Kindle to politely tell me that I'm no longer paying attention to what I'm reading, but surely my colleagues would like my digital devices to nudge me into finishing my work on time. Would I want my clients and collaborators to run apps on their iPhones and laptops helping assure that they are paying close attention to our work? You bet.
Almost 40 years ago, Nobel laureate and artificial intelligence pioneer Herb Simon observed that in an information-rich networked environment, attention is the scarcest and most essential resource. Managing people increasingly means managing their attention and monitoring their attention spans. While the technologies may not (yet) exist, the proliferation of digital devices demanding implicit, tacit, and active engagement means that management has the next best thing: network tools to analyze individual and interpersonal attention.
Even as you read this — you are paying attention, aren't you? — there's an Indian call center where an innovative company is experimenting with real-time voice stress analyzers and other physiological diagnostics to determine that employees are fully engaged in their work. Is it difficult to believe that, at Chinese and Korean manufacturing facilities, eye-tracking technologies are monitoring the gazes and blink rates of line employees in order to replace anyone whose attention has begun to flag? If you were undergoing surgery, wouldn't you want some sort of attention-monitoring mechanism assuring that the surgeon, nurses, and anesthesiologist had their minds focused on you rather than other priorities?
Quite serendipitously, the ubiquitous automobile has emerged as a global laboratory and Petri dish for innovation in attention — and distractive — technologies. Automobiles can be programmed not to start if they sense alcohol on the driver's breath. They've become subject to scores of ordinances, laws, and regulations prohibiting texting, television and talking while you drive. Every year, next-generation of sensors and software aspire to automate functions and reduce the cognitive load on drivers even as new screens and displays appear to assist driver behavior.
We're just at the very beginning of linking the digital devices that people bring into their cars with the cars themselves. The question of whether we want our Android or iPhone app to take precedence over the car's own guidance system won't be rhetorical.
The far larger question, however, is one that will soon be ferociously debated in executive suites and human resource departments all over the world: how rigorously do we want to monitor our employees' minds? We already video-record their workplace, monitor their email, and track their phone calls. Should we check up on their attention and concentration, too?
If all it takes is a few dozen lines of code in an Android or a cookie in their laptop or a cheap eye-tracking attachment to a workplace CCTV network, why not? Mercedes saves lives by investing in attention management technologies. Shouldn't your company save money and improve quality by doing the same?
blogs.hbr.org
7:45 AM Thursday October 21, 2010
To heck with airbags. Prevention is better than amelioration, right? That's why Mercedes ads have car owners soberly celebrating how their smart cars alertly saved their lives. These luxury vehicles were so clever that they sensed when they — and the driver's attention — had dangerously drifted and took immediate corrective action. No accidents; no airbag necessary. An ounce of prevention is worth two tons of twisted metal.
But after seeing the ad a few times, I couldn't help wondering why my laptop and mobile phone aren't similarly supportive. Are they stupid? I want my phone and computer — not just my car — to let me know when my mind is wandering. Shouldn't an iPad and an Android be at least as smart as a Mercedes?
Innovative technologies have made workplace surveillance and monitoring employees hot-button management issues. Organizations increasingly use digital devices as their media for making sure people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Privacy advocates, unions, and regulators are alternately infuriated and intrigued by the intrusions these tools permit and encourage. As Mercedes' advertisements foreshadow, our mental models of monitoring require radical updating and upgrading.
A GPS discloses location and a video tracks actions but what's going on inside the mind? The Mercedes "Lane Keeping Assist" offers a wonderful proxy for driver focus. Cars don't drift into oncoming traffic if the driver is focused and alert. How hard would it be for Google or Microsoft to alert me that I've become distracted from my work onscreen? Perhaps I wouldn't want my Kindle to politely tell me that I'm no longer paying attention to what I'm reading, but surely my colleagues would like my digital devices to nudge me into finishing my work on time. Would I want my clients and collaborators to run apps on their iPhones and laptops helping assure that they are paying close attention to our work? You bet.
Almost 40 years ago, Nobel laureate and artificial intelligence pioneer Herb Simon observed that in an information-rich networked environment, attention is the scarcest and most essential resource. Managing people increasingly means managing their attention and monitoring their attention spans. While the technologies may not (yet) exist, the proliferation of digital devices demanding implicit, tacit, and active engagement means that management has the next best thing: network tools to analyze individual and interpersonal attention.
Even as you read this — you are paying attention, aren't you? — there's an Indian call center where an innovative company is experimenting with real-time voice stress analyzers and other physiological diagnostics to determine that employees are fully engaged in their work. Is it difficult to believe that, at Chinese and Korean manufacturing facilities, eye-tracking technologies are monitoring the gazes and blink rates of line employees in order to replace anyone whose attention has begun to flag? If you were undergoing surgery, wouldn't you want some sort of attention-monitoring mechanism assuring that the surgeon, nurses, and anesthesiologist had their minds focused on you rather than other priorities?
Quite serendipitously, the ubiquitous automobile has emerged as a global laboratory and Petri dish for innovation in attention — and distractive — technologies. Automobiles can be programmed not to start if they sense alcohol on the driver's breath. They've become subject to scores of ordinances, laws, and regulations prohibiting texting, television and talking while you drive. Every year, next-generation of sensors and software aspire to automate functions and reduce the cognitive load on drivers even as new screens and displays appear to assist driver behavior.
We're just at the very beginning of linking the digital devices that people bring into their cars with the cars themselves. The question of whether we want our Android or iPhone app to take precedence over the car's own guidance system won't be rhetorical.
The far larger question, however, is one that will soon be ferociously debated in executive suites and human resource departments all over the world: how rigorously do we want to monitor our employees' minds? We already video-record their workplace, monitor their email, and track their phone calls. Should we check up on their attention and concentration, too?
If all it takes is a few dozen lines of code in an Android or a cookie in their laptop or a cheap eye-tracking attachment to a workplace CCTV network, why not? Mercedes saves lives by investing in attention management technologies. Shouldn't your company save money and improve quality by doing the same?
blogs.hbr.org
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου