Transcript

Rob

How do companies decide on the technology that’s driving their business and what happens when business decisions are based on faulty data? This week, we’re looking into the world of choice, tech and learning from Emily Pats of remaketherules.com as we explore the active steps that business leaders can take in choosing systems that support their operational goals and their teams, we think you’re really gonna enjoy this. OK, let’s dive right in

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Emily Pabst, remaketheroles.com. Thank you so much for joining us again. We really appreciate your time. It’s great to see you.

Emily

Yeah, my pleasure. It’s great to be back. Thank you.

Rob

Today we’re talking a little bit more on the business side of things. We’re talking about a term that you and I have just discussed called choice tech. Could you explain more about what choice tech is for our audience, please?

Emily

Yeah, sure thing. Choice Tech is a term that I started to use to kind of sum up the situation that so many people are finding themselves in, and essentially it’s digital tools that are designed to impact a person’s decision making. And it can span a huge segment of the digital technologies that we interact with, including dating apps, social media, and then also these sort of the spoke analytical tools that a lot of companies, businesses and institutions are using to to understand their processes and understand their people.

Rob

Probably one of those questions that a lot of employees have before they join a company. They get all these tools and they get told to use them, but they don’t really. Understand what the value is for the business and in some cases maybe the management doesn’t understand the value of the. The tool itself. Is there a list of things that you can point to where management goes wrong in terms of the technology that they choose for their business, where they’re sort of taking the wrong track with the kind of technology they’re using?

Emily

It it is a very difficult time to be making. Places today we live in a tremendously challenging and complicated informational environment, and most people aren’t well set up to parse that quantity of information. The quality information that they’re encountering, this is just all new ground for everyone, and the stakes get really high when you’re talking about your own business, about your livelihood. Your job and maybe even a very large organization that you are attempting to lead to make strategic decisions for. And certainly I think that the pressure really gets to people and that that is one of the first things is that there is this very big. Idea and sort of sense that there is a need For more information, more tools for this faster speed of ingesting information and and being able to have this omniscience about what’s going on and that that that expectation is really hard on people because it is very difficult to achieve. And and the discrepancy between that expectation of what we should be able to do, what we should be able to know and sort of where we are at now with our tools and our digital tools and information is really hard on people and and I think that is something I. Everywhere.

Rob

That’s a great point you make about the the sheer volume of data that a lot of companies are dealing with in terms of the amount of efficient coming in and the output they’re expected to deliver. Is that something? Where is that to just to do with the speed of technology evolution or is that to do with? The. Fact that, like as you said, it’s it’s pressure, it’s delivering results, it’s delivering outcome. Is there one thing or another that’s that’s causing that, or is it purely just the environment itself?

Emily

I think that as we integrate or attempt to integrate these digital tools. There is a sense that we should be also thinking like these tools that we should be performing like these tools and as we pull. Of these digital tools into our decision making, our decision making should be able to match them to keep up with them, to work in the same way that they work. And that is just not true. Our brains do not work in the same way that these digital tools do, which can absolutely be a huge plus, right? And that is a lot of what I work with people on is. Where thinking works best inside of a person inside of a team, right? Where you sort of delegate certain types of thinking and problem solving to people, and where you delegate certain types of thinking and problem solving to digital tools. But if you have a mismatch of which one, like where you are placing your thinking and your problem solving, it gets very challenging. Quickly can steer you in the wrong direction.

Rob

What’s an example of a decision that you would automate that you would give to techno?

Emily

Computers are great at doing math, so like absolutely let them do computational work all day long. That is a great thing, something that is incredibly routine. Great thing for computers to do. They’re great at it, humans very bad at it. So go ahead and let the computers do that stuff, yeah.

Rob

That’s a that’s a great point. It’s sort of increasingly in the digital marketing industry, at least I, I find people are leaning on a digital tools for creativity. And it’s sort of you can see the blend and the the way it’s influencing other people like you can see how that sort of bleeds into various creative areas and as as you said, it’s perhaps not the best way to utilize these technologies although you know ChatGPT and all these things have a role to play in creativity, they can create templates, they can create a foundation for humans to take on that. Creative. Work. They don’t perhaps provide the entire solution, which a lot of businesses are sort of using. As you said, these technologies, they’re sort of using it as like a a catch all for everything they’re saying. We’re just gonna give it to the technology to do and hope for the best. I find that oftentimes it’s sort of the they have to sort of validate their investment in the technology. Isn’t that the case? A lot of the time it’s sort of they’ve they’ve bought this thing and now we have to use it. Somehow.

Emily

Yeah, certainly. And I love this idea of using it for creative. And this conversation? It’ll be so interesting. We talked about a last time. Like, it’s going to be out of date in a moment, but here we are. We still gotta process our present day reality. But I think that there is a big difference between creativity as an innovation and creativity as in output and that that is a very important to keep in mind that. The ability to produce creative. Work is one thing and certainly is a whole huge conversation in and of itself, but then the ability to be innovative and to have innovative ideas is kind of a totally different beast. And there are huge discrepancies in between. What AI right now can do in those two fields.

Rob

It’s also to do with incentive structures, too. There’s a that we thought previously about how do we motivate employees to get this sort of outcome that the business wants? And a lot of companies are bringing technology into that area of their management structure, right? They’re trying to bring technology into the incentives and. Hoping that employees can sort of understand what the business needs and and the employees are sort of doing, getting away with that. They think the business wants within your work. Do you see that a lot of the? Time. In terms of how people implement incentive structures, what what is this, where the mistakes people are using when they implement an incentive structure that takes them away from what their business? He needs.

Emily

Going back to the idea, we hit on a little bit ago of the sheer complexity of operations and the sheer quantity of information that we now have access to that are meant to document or mimic or understand those operations is too much, right, too much volume. Human brains are not going to be able to look at a million data points and be like aha. This makes sense to me, right? We use computers to help us organize that information in a way that makes sense to us. And in order to do that, it by necessity is simplified. And that simplification is not, in and of itself a problem, but where things can go really wrong and about sort of these incentive structures, if you have a really complicated operations or the business that you run involves a lot of people making decisions all day long, right? So maybe they’re customer facing, they are making difficult. Decisions about interacting with people and then that information as being sort of synthesized, simplified and. Driven up towards management towards higher level leadership then there is the possibility that that translation is not being done very well and potentially can even be done in a way that is leading to misunderstand what good work looks like, what good choices look like. And if that occurs, then you have a really big problem of incentivizing the wrong types of choices. The wrong types of behavior, and that is definitely something that these very powerful tools have the potential to do, not just to help us. Make. Great decisions to better understand our operations, they can help us to understand them, have of a worse understanding of them. If if we are pulling sort of the wrong information out of it, the wrong meaning out of it.

Rob

Yeah. And I guess and meaning is a great way of putting it. I love that the idea of how do you derive meaning from that both the the technology side and what your employees are doing on a. Day-to-day. Basis, you don’t really always know what employees are doing at certain time. You’ve got tasks that they have and they’ve completed the tasks, but you don’t know whether they’ve had an issue. Leading the task or how they did it, you see? The result? How do you think managers can use this technology to to make more meaningful positive impact on their businesses? Is it simply about communicating more effectively with employees?

Emily

To I really feel for folks in supervisory and management positions right now because of the extent of changes that is just occurring in the way work is done in what counts as work and and even the remote aspect of it right is really changing a lot of the ways. That. Managers and supervisors have been able to measure whether or not their team is operating well, and I don’t think it means that teams are operating poorly. It just means that all of the ways or many of the ways in which we use to determine that don’t really work anymore don’t work in this environment because of artificial intelligence tools, because of work from home. Because of new other digital tools that that that business is using. So trying to and you know this is what I work with people on right is trying to really. Not just wrap their mind around what is happening right now and how can I determine if it’s good or not first and foremost. Very hard to. Answer Right now is what is happening, what should be happening or what I would like to happen or what would be beneficial for my goals. This company’s goals to happen very hard. To answer right now and then once you get through those two big questions, how can I determine if we are in the right direction or not? That’s the third question. By the time we actually get to the technology question, this is the third big, gnarly question that we get to. And the tools we have absolutely have the capacity to help with that and to make really good determinations with that. But we have to get through the 1st 2 questions first. So this is kind of where a lot of it is. The people stuff that is the first thing that we have to figure out and then we can get into the tech stuff of it all.

Rob

I think for a lot of people, and again I can only speak from personal experience. It’s sort of like you. You show up to work and you just think the company wants to incentivize profit. They want to incentivize the result, which is the clients are happy. My customers are happy. Everyone gets to go home, we make. Some. Money. Is there something that you’ve got to get employee buy in for these tools? Sometimes, how do we how we communicate the benefits of these tools impacts the whether employees use them effectively, correct.

Emily

For certain, for certain, and some of it has to do with legitimate concerns about whether or not these tools are meant to support the employee as. Well, like if.

Rob

Right, that’s a great point.

Emily

They are designed to be like a holistic system that that is sort of. Bringing the entire organization up or not and. That is a. Very important questions that folks should be asking and is something that can be difficult to do right again where we are designing a lot of these tools for the. This time, individual organizations can have vastly different operations, so they are literally building these bespoke unique systems for understanding their own operations, their own administration, and and it takes a lot of Labor, but it is absolutely labor that’s worth doing well. And it’s absolutely something that. Should be considered on a very large system scale, and considering every aspect of operations and administration, including. Every layer of employment at police.

Rob

Is that something that a lot of businesses miss out on? Is it just sort of they’re, they’re too focused on the end goal when they’re choosing this technology or is it the fact that they’ve got to sort of start from how can I best help my team get to where we need to be as a business? How can business owners make that decision effective for the entire organization?

Emily

Part of the challenge here is really how complicated these questions are, and there are a ton of concerns about implementing digital tools that are not just about usability. Security is another big concern, right? So you are going to have often layers and layers and layers of considerations and questions about. How to move forward, which absolutely sounds daunting and I understand that, but it can also be managed, right? And I think that it is a very challenging balance to get the operational considerations. Right. And that that is really the goal, what an organization, what a leader is attempting to achieve is an effective balance moving towards likely a primary or several primary. Goals.

Rob

You define whether the tool itself is working or how it’s a success, like who gets to define that? That’s another question that I guess a lot of business owners have got to sort of. Into if you’re, if you’re the one that picked the tool and you know you’re speaking to. Maybe if it’s a a piece of software, for example, and you’re speaking to the developers behind it, they’re of course, of course gonna say, yeah, it’s working great. Look at this arbitrary result. We’ve decided it. It’s giving you. Is that something that business owners have gotta look into too? Is, like, how do you before you even implement it? How do you define the success of that implementation?

Emily

Hopefully when a tool is researched and purchased and implemented, it is for a greater goal that presumably there is a problem that they’re looking to solve and they were hoping that this tool will solve it and certainly a continuing to say sort of grounded in that perspective of how does this work on. This discrete problem, and then how does it also impact every other part of operations outside of this discrete problem? Is is the perspective from which it should really get evaluated? Yes. Sticking with that sort of foundational. Question. But then also making sure that it is expansive to the entire operations because that’s really what I’m seeing with many of these information tools is that they never stay in the box. You want them to, right? They just don’t, especially when you’re looking at measuring productivity and how people are performing, that is going to start. Impacting the choices that people make in their day to days and not necessarily just in sort of these small discrete boxes.

Rob

That’s a great point about the day-to-day experience too, because, for example, I think about time management tools, you talk about remote work, a lot of companies now have time management tools where they track what what someone’s doing on a day-to-day basis and really. The result you want is the employee doing the work for the customer or whatever it is that they’re doing. You can sort of measure that outside of the time management aspects of it. Whether they actually did 9 to 5 or whatever hours they’re supposed to do is that an example of a tool that is being used where companies are looking at it from the wrong point of view? Or do you see value in those sort of? I guess monitoring and time management pros.

Emily

We’re often solving problems that can be pretty complicated in and of themselves, right? So there’s going to be lots of choices, lots of behaviors, lots of interaction that’s happening. And with the tools that we have currently, only so much and certain types of information can be documented well and easily. And here’s where the meaning making comes in again, right, like what of the things that we are able to document, what meaning can we actually extrapolate? From those things. Like if I can see that somebody is logged into their computer for X hours every day, am I able to accurately extrapolate from that that they are a hard working employee? Probably not, right? Because we all know that you can be in front of a screen being the opposite of productive, right? That is well within our capabilities. So. So it’s that sort of logical. Understanding of what we are making from what we are documenting is where this sort of critical questions and that breakdown can start to happen. Here’s an example of the broken down incentive structures that I would see using your example. Say we’ve got somebody who’s logged into their computer for 10 hours a day, which is more than everyone else. You’re only expected to be logged in for 8 hours a day. So because this person’s metrics are so high and they’re so, quote UN quote dedicated their job or whatever, we are going to throw them a party and let everybody know that their employee of the. But it’s possible that everyone else knows that that person is actually not working during those 10 hours, and that they are doing whatever else, right. So you have totally unnecessarily, as leadership put yourself in a situation where you are publicly throwing a party for the employee that everyone else knows. Doesn’t do any work and that is going to be very problematic for you and for me.

Rob

Yes, and you’ve alienated the ones that are actually doing the hard work for you.

Emily

Precisely. And like you know, that’s like a pretty basic, potentially obvious experience or example, but this is the danger of sort of creating incentive structures that don’t actually get the outcomes that you want because of the monitoring that you’re doing of productivity and of. Personnel time and effort.

Rob

Yeah, and you can. See just by your example the the the knock on effect of that kind of poor decision making because all of a sudden that employee is throwing parties for you may give them a promotion over another. Employee, you may give them more money and more power and more responsibility, and then they’re making bad decisions for the organization so it can sort of have a continuing effect on that. It just it just speaks to the the power of what you’re talking about in terms of getting those decisions about technology right from the get go and getting buy in from people and finding out is this the right? Am I making a decision? Based on actual tangible data, or are we just choosing arbitrary metrics to sort of define our goals? That’s such an important thing to.

Emily

With all these, you know, choice tech tools that we have, I like to talk to folks where it’s essentially like we don’t have any neighborhood streets anymore, right? We don’t have any surface streets. We exclusively have super highways. So if you use this technology right, we don’t go anywhere slowly. We go in these huge leaps and bound. We go there at 100 mph, so you better be pointed in the right direction because that that is the potential of these.

Speaker

What?

Rob

Yeah, even tools that most people use every day, something like slack, for example, a productivity tool and messaging. But so everyone sort of, you know, they sign in, they log in all the time. We know that it brings people together, but a lot of the time. What I’m doing outside of Slack is sort of creative work. A lot of my work is is content creation and design and. We have these messages in the background that take you away from what you’re actually doing. You have this sort of messaging system which is crucial to the running of the business that has to be there, but a lot of what happens is you sort of focus more of your time on communication than actually doing that. The work is itself. So it just sort of speaks to the idea of how to help employees. Make better use of their time first of all, but also making better use of the tools available.

Emily

Yeah. And that like another example, right, if you’re essentially, and I’ve certainly seen this where teams are strongly incentivized based on availability. So the quicker that a person can respond to me texting them, calling them, emailing them, chatting them, all of the above, the higher I consider that employees work to be right that they are, they’re the ones that are working really hard and it’s definitely an easy thing to measure and it definitely feels good. In the moment when you want something, you have a question and it gets answered right away. Totally get it. But it is tremendously disruptive to that deeper thinking work that people often do to the concentration that a lot of workers need to do. The actual core parts of their job. So that’s another really good example of how these digital information tools are sort of disintegrating. Some of the actual. Core processes that we need from folks.

Rob

I’m just thinking about the soft data that companies get into their systems in terms of client satisfaction and things like that. Is there a way to sort of use these tools to access that kind of data, that sort of stuff, data that has significant value over the long term growth of a business? And is there a sort of a way that companies can do that more effectively or? More more easily.

Emily

They’re absolutely already exists a way to incorporate that and then it it just kind of depends on whether or not it is digitally available information. And once it is digitally available information, then it’s just a question of how it is being incorporated into the bigger meaning making analytics, right? If it is how it is, how that meaning making is happening with sort of a combination of a lot of data about productivity or what have you. You absolutely can still. Learn a lot about a process. Without having all the information, we’re never going to have all the information. But even if you have these sort of big areas where information is not digitally available, that’s just something that needs to be understood about the limitations of what you’ll be able to learn from your digital information. And I say digital information. Because we are kind of talking about creating these analytical processes, computational analytical processes, but also there are almost certainly systems in place of these team dynamics, right where you have supervisors, managers, leadership in. Place to have relationships with folks to understand the work that they do to see what is happening and being able to make sure that that information is not ignored over the digital information. That’s really important too.

Rob

That’s a great point. Do you think that the technology has a role to play in in team building? Because team building seems to be one of the most important aspects.

Speaker

Of.

Rob

Sort of growth for a lot of different companies now because we’re not, we’re sort of working in silos. We’re sort of working separately. A lot of the time. Do you, do you see this kind of analytical technology having being used in a way that can help in the team building elements?

Emily

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, I think what technology does best on its face is connection, right? Like the fact that we’re talking right now is not something that would be feasible about this technology. Now that being said, there’s a limitation to what it can achieve. I I am sure that there are some smart, creative, capable people who are working to solve. Exactly that problem. Right.

Rob

That might be something that these sort of tools eventually evolve to become, right?

Emily

Going going back to a question from earlier that I think for the team to be on board in how and why certain metrics are being measured, right. So this idea that there are overarching goals that the team has that people are a part of that that there is investment. On what you are working on and what you are trying to achieve and move forward and that if that investment exists then too. Rules that accurately and reasonably support those goals would also be something for a team to potentially rally around, right that it is showing the extent to which everyone is. Achieving these benchmarks moving forward, creating new and innovative ideas and and that that can be part of a positive incentive structure that sort of everyone has buy in. On.

Rob

Yeah, it’s a great point. It’s also to do with recognition, right? If if people are being recognised through the technology through that prism of it’s not just about judgment, it’s about we’re going to say we see what you’re doing through these systems and that’s a great point from my previous experience and a few other industries outside of digital. And the technology was more used from a management top down point of view. It wasn’t really used to sort of. Support it’s more of a sort of like how can we best get the result, which obviously has its place, but perhaps misdirects a lot of the resources that you would have at the staff level to?

Emily

A lot of these analytics are built to essentially feed information up to a top level right, and then it would be decisions would be made at that level that would presumably kind of push their way down. And I think that what I’ve certainly seen is that that understanding.

Speaker

Of.

Emily

Communication amongst an organization. It just doesn’t work anymore. It’s untrue and it is because of these analytical structures that we. Have all levels. Of people who are directly or incidentally adding data and information to them, and then it maybe is being used sort of on a viewer standpoint. Exclusively from high level leadership, but because that leadership is making decisions based on it, creating incentive structures based on it and the folks who are inputting data into it are daily participates in it and they realize that it is actually sort of not informal. Relation making its way down from on high. It is sort of like immediately getting to all levels of an organization. So while you have information from all levels of an organization that are very quickly going up, it is the exact same way going in the opposite direction. And I think a lot of people, a lot of leaders misunderstand. That that it is a two way St.

Rob

That’s a great point and that sort of brings me to my next question. Which is. Sort of to do with how leaders are choosing their technology and how they’re making these decisions. What is one thing that every organizational leader can do when choosing a tool to measure people?

Emily

I think that a really great question is for them to ask themselves. What their current relationship and use is of their analytical tools. Do they feel like they understand it? Are they comfortable with it? Can they ask difficult questions about how it operates and what it means? And if that is something that you struggle to do, then I would absolutely. Pause and develop a stronger understanding. A stronger relationship with the information tools that are currently at your disposal.

Rob

That’s a great point that I really appreciate that sort of solidifying what we’re talking about in terms of what is the meaning behind the decision that you’re making. What are you getting from this decision that’s such a great point? So we we’ve talked quite a lot now about the the different decision making technology and the the choice tech as the the work you’ve coined there is there sort of a a final summary you can give for business owners, maybe they’re choosing a new technology, they’re just about to make that investment. Is there sort of a piece of advice you can give?

Emily

Yeah, certainly. You know, I think simplistically what we measure is what makes us so be very. We consider it be very cautious, very thoughtful about what you choose to measure, because it will be what is prioritized within your business within your organization.

Rob

Yeah, that’s a great point. As always, Emily, really appreciate you educating me on a lot of these topics and it’s it’s always great to have someone with your experience and background to sort of guide us on on some of these more complex issues. And I want to thank you again for your time. It really means a lot. Thank you.

Emily

Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s it’s always wonderful talking to you guys.

Rob

Thank you again, Emily, perhaps we make therules.com. Thank. You. A quick reminder, if you’re enjoying this conversation, please subscribe to the Mental Wealth podcast on your favorite platform. It’s a small action that can make a big, big difference to us. Thank you.