Enhancement in the Office

Now our tools are changing again, and therefore, so is our work and our human capability. As Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of the Data Group at Microsoft, told us, “Pretty much every experience today is made intelligent by data.” Pointing to Microsoft's Cortana, an AI-infused digital assistant, Sirosh said, “You will ask questions of Cortana, and it will help you, and it will understand your calendar and understand your meetings. It'll help you be much more efficient. Companies will use the data they have to help their employees succeed better and have healthier lives, manage their own effectiveness at work better, and have better work environments and social structures.”

Cortana, in effect, will enhance you as a worker.

This machine intelligence, often packaged anthropomorphically with a human name—also increasingly known as a “bot” or offered simply as a nonhuman computer service—is expanding into an increasingly wider range of tasks and processes, both trivial and profound. While meeting scheduling may still have a “big brains on small things” quality to it, helping doctors diagnose chronic conditions does not.

Enhancement in the Hospital

At the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, Microsoft is working with a multidisciplinary team of doctors and technologists on an initiative called ImagineCare, aimed at enhancing the work of doctors and medical staff with machine intelligence. As Sirosh told us, “It turns out, a lot of chronic conditions—and events associated with chronic conditions—can actually be predicted from data. If a patient has high blood pressure, and is gaining weight, we can predict with fairly high accuracy the risk of the patient having congestive heart failure. And so, if you can predict that, you can avoid that patient being admitted to the emergency room by taking appropriate precautions, such as prescribing diuretics so that the patient doesn't accumulate water in their lungs which leads to the congestive heart failure.”

ImagineCare aims to build and expand these predictive services to enhance the work of doctoring, using the new machine and the new raw materials and allowing these machine-driven capabilities to let human competencies scale higher at levels never achievable before.

Enhancement Is Technology in Service to the Human

One important but often overlooked aspect of enhancing work is to recognize the relationship that exists between enhancing a job/role/process and automating it. In many ways, automation and enhancement exist in a symbiotic, two-sides-of-the-same-coin way. To effectively enhance, one needs to automate. The teacher is afforded the opportunity to “flip” the classroom only if he or she automates aspects of the learning and teaching workflow. If the teacher doesn't automate the lesson, then there is no way to free up the time during the day to attend to each individual student's particular requirements. If the banker doesn't automate the creation of the customer's Code Halo, he or she will spend the whole time, which could be spent with the customer developing the relationship in a human way, collating all the information needed to build that full view of a customer. Automation is not the enemy of enhancement; it is, in fact, central to the ability to enhance in the first place.

In the next wave of competitive battle—at a commercial, societal, economic level—the winners will be those who continue to believe in the progress created by technology, those who enhance, those who understand the power of “tools” and who adapt to using them effectively.

Double-Down on Being More Human

The more technology enhances us, the more it creates the opportunity for a human touch. When the computer does what it does well, it allows us to focus more on what we do well: being empathetic, building relationships, and making sense of complex situations.

Think of the last time you went to a rental-car counter at the airport. After getting off your long and cramped flight and standing in line at the rental agency for 15 minutes, you finally get to a customer service representative. Were you met with a warm and welcoming greeting, followed by a quick yet thoughtful discussion of your plans, your car needs, your specific rental, and options? Or did the service agent acknowledge your presence with a grunt, followed by no eye-contact or conversation as he stared into his computer, entering information and clicking through menus for several minutes before producing a three-page contract in triplicate? The three of us travel a lot, so we know the answer: there's a 90% chance it was the latter.

In the case of the rental-car agent as well as thousands of similar roles and processes across all industries, we don't blame the employee; we blame the company. After all, the company hasn't armed this customer-facing associate to do his job properly—to be, well, human. Instead, he's been saddled with burdensome technology that, after eight hours a day, has bludgeoned the good humor out of him. Instead of getting to the essence of his job—of being the friendly face of the company and ensuring the happiness of a customer—he spends most of his time managing cumbersome systems layered on an archaic process.

This is just one type of situation that can be made more human with the new machine. As next-generation technology relieves this customer service agent's workload, requiring no more manual entry in a system of record, he will be liberated to provide a truly human touch.

We now see this in many sectors of retail, including:

• Zappos, the leading shoe e-tailer, for years has been leveraging its customer-service department. While Zappos may seem like a tech-first company, it long ago recognized that when customers reached out by calling its call center, it was the company's chance to cement a customer relationship. And how far will Zappos go? One particular call lasted 10 hours and 29 minutes! The vast majority of that call wasn't about shoes at all, but the customer's interest in life in the Las Vegas area. The Zappos reaction? “Sometimes people just need to call and talk. We don't judge; we just want to help.” Oh, and yes, the customer did end up purchasing a pair of UGG boots.⁴
• At Pret A Manger, a quickly growing, high-end, fast-food retail chain, the majority of the food selection in its stores is done by self-service, and the point-of-sale checkout is seamless. But the personality of Pret A Manger is not based on this combination of high-quality food sold efficiently and at a good price. The cornerstone of the customer experience is its floor staff, who are quirky, fun, and engaged. By driving efficiencies in certain parts of its operations, Pret has doubled-down on being more human, in giving customers not just quality food but also an upbeat and positive break in their busy, stressful workdays.⁵
• Apple has similarly changed the game in retail by radically altering the point-of-sale experience, eliminating checkout counters, and putting automated tools in the hands of its floor staff. With all this automation, what did Apple do? The company doubled-down on more blue-shirted staff who are available to consult with customers, and provide a real sense of humanity in a company mostly selling silicon and bits.⁶

As shown in these examples, more enhancement actually allows for more humanity.

Where do such opportunities reside in your company? Start by looking at those customer “moments of truth.” For Zappos, it was when an online order went wrong. At Pret A Manger, it was when a busy customer simply wanted to grab a sandwich very quickly without being snarled up with other customers' more complicated orders. And for Apple, it was when one of their nontechnical customers felt overwhelmed by their powerful machines. In looking for the human touch, don't just look for moments that are easy. Instead, look to those that are hard, when you truly solve a customer problem with a sense of service and a generosity of spirit.

In an enhanced world of more pervasive technology, activities that humans do well will become even more important in 2020 than today. Analytical, communication, and learning skills as well as the ability to relate to other people have always been and will remain vital for business success. In our recent study of 2,000 global business leaders, respondents said that in the coming years, these very human traits—things we do naturally but that computers can hardly accomplish—will become even more essential in our personal and work lives and for our businesses (see Figure 9.2).

All of us, bosses included, need to enhance our current skills when it comes to engaging with others: leading, reasoning and interpreting, applying judgment, being creative, and applying the human touch. These behaviors and activities are still far outside the purview of current and near-future technologies and will remain so for years to come, even as the new machines become more capable.

Major companies today are proving that even in a world of enhancement solutions, where people and machines work together in new ways, there's still value in being human. Our work ahead will require us to double-down on the activities where humans have and will continue to have an advantage over silicon.

Build Your White-Collar Exoskeleton

The idea of enhancing our human capabilities with technology has been the dream of science fiction for many years. In the late 1950s, Robert Heinlein imagined teams of soldiers enhanced with armored exoskeletons in Starship Troopers. Over 30 years later in the movie Aliens, Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley used a Power Loader to defend a colonist from the Alien Queen, high above the planet LV-426 (as shown in Figure 9.3).

These science fiction speculations are increasingly losing their classification as fiction; now, they are becoming fact. The idea of an “exoskeleton” is, indeed, an inspiration for a number of new technologies that assist with both physical and intellectual work.

For example, Sarcos, a U.S. developer of robotics and micro-electromechanical systems, has built a prototype exoskeleton for military personnel to enhance their physical capabilities in the field. Panasonic has developed a line of exoskeletons designed to help workers lift heavy items without straining their backs.⁷ Ekso Bionics, a company spun out of the University of California's Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at Berkeley, has created the first FDA-approved exoskeleton that gives major stroke and spinal cord injury sufferers the ability to walk again.

Figure 9.4 shows Amanda Boxtel walking with the help of an Ekso Bionics exoskeleton suit. Amanda is a paraplegic, having sustained a spinal cord injury from a skiing accident more than two decades ago in 1992, and is unable to walk on her own.

Physical exoskeletons point the way to how we can overcome our limitations and frailties. Exoskeletons designed to enhance our minds rather than our bodies may not be as visually arresting as body suits and body armor, but they ultimately may have more impact in terms of taking human performance to the next level.

Palantir Technologies is a leader in providing exoskeletons for the brain. Founded in 2004 with funders including In-Q-Tel, the VC-arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Palantir has traditionally worked with defense and security agencies to identify criminals and terrorists. The firm has always been about enhancement; it states, “We build products that make people better at their most important work—the kind of work you read about on the front page of the newspaper, not just the technology section.”

More recently, the firm has begun applying its expertise to commercial pursuits, such as the detection of unauthorized trading.

In conjunction with Credit Suisse, Palantir has formed a joint venture, Signac, to monitor trading activity in investment banks and identify patterns of behavior indicative of unlawful trading. Signac collects data from employees and external events and runs this information through Palantir's systems of intelligence (which also rely heavily on trained analysts to extract conclusions). The intent is to stop policy breaches and protect the bank's assets and brand.

It's now becoming apparent that humans alone, unless they are enhanced, simply can't keep up with intelligent automation systems for some tasks. An example is the field of radiology, which is ripe for enhancement.⁸ In fact, radiologists will soon be able to “partner” with systems such as IBM's Avicenna to improve diagnostic accuracy. The software—in another great example of a system of intelligence—is being designed to pull together massive amounts of data from the patient's family history, medical imaging, additional test results, and text notes and run it all through an AI machine that helps provide the radiologist with valuable insight.⁹ The average radiologist reads 20,000 films a year; given the catastrophic repercussions of missing something, the idea of being enhanced, not replaced, will offer tremendous benefits.

Whether it's education, health care, or financial services, a common theme runs across all the examples given in this chapter: finding a specific business process and applying a system of intelligence to that work in a way that creates a knowledge economy exoskeleton around skilled employees and associates. Similar to the approach we suggest for automation initiatives, you should start with activities that are high-volume and data-rich and that follow a generally recurring process (such as claims adjudication, identifying data patterns, etc.).