From Knowledge Work to Perceptual Work

Ensuring human value in the face of AI

Photo by Rivage on Unsplash

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

We are on the precipice of stepping collectively into a new future of work and a refreshed workplace model where success is based on being more perceptive, and not solely on being smart. This change requires the reactivation of sensitivity by way of cultivating and expanding the boundaries of what we notice. Sensitivity, as defined in this context, is the ability to heighten and refine perception for the purposes of adapting.

Creating more perception enables organizations and their employees to see situations more clearly, detect signals sooner and, literally, have access to more information and choices. This ability is how organizations will claim value in the face of AI. This increased sensitivity is integral to breaking free from the chains of misperception that inhibit workplace success, and it all starts with activating our perceptual skills.

In organizations, this means moving past traditional models of organizing to actively creating the conditions necessary for exploration and discovery. Indeed, to allow creativity to flourish untethered from outdated metrics of success. Not simply a more human-centered workplace that allows the “whole person” to show up or enhances a sense of belonging, this is a fundamental shift to a new way of conceptualizing what it means to work.

Think of it as an invitation to build intelligent workplaces where human ingenuity, collaborative effort, and continuous possibilities are realized which depends on us moving past relying singularly on book knowledge or classic definitions of intelligence. We are at a time when we need to expand our capabilities to face more complex business demands and this requires developing fresh new ways of noticing — and ultimately building a new muscle for response, and this means we need to build our skill in what I call “Perceptual Work.”

PERCEPTUAL WORK

Perceptual work is defined as the ability to generate novel observations and solutions through an increased range of sensitive perception. This transition means having the ability to move from knowledge work (someone whose job requires them to think for a living) to perceptual work by increasing awareness through honing the acts of noticing and questioning. These skills will be paramount if we are to build perceptual workers — those individuals who can collectively manage situations, adaptively respond to novel environments, and thrive alongside AI.

This transition also demands an embrace of some of the human instincts we have lost in organizations, instincts that we commonly relied on in a more slow-moving world, including deep listening, time to think, and connecting more intensely to ourselves. By reviving these abilities, we can once more learn from those who are in touch with their sensitivities and access our sensory abilities to enhance individual, organizational, and societal adaptivity in the face of increasing uncertainty and technological advances. To embrace this new model, it is important to understand how the concept of the organization and worker value has manifested over time, and entrenched views that need reexamining.

THE BIRTH OF THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION

In 1911, during the midst of the second industrial revolution, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management1 as a response to the changing world around him. Taylor’s goal was to design an efficient, predictable system that optimized the work processes necessary for mass production and as a trained mechanical engineer he saw the opportunity to study work through scientific observation to determine the most efficient way to perform tasks. His breakthrough came when he applied the notion of efficiency to human activities (as opposed to mechanical objects). This seminal work advanced the idea of organization and, consequently, the people in it as machines. Some scholars argue this was one of the most influential concepts of the twentieth century as it gave birth to the modern organization as we know it.

This metaphor of the organization as a machine of mass production has penetrated our psyches along with the terms and language that evolved to enable us to better talk about them: levers, dials, fix, scale, silos, efficiency, optimization, inputs/outputs, productivity, well-oiled, blueprints, parts, resources, headcount, pipeline.

A few years after Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, the company that would come to be known as IBM designed the first modern organizational chart to illuminate the relationships and relative ranks of its job positions through the use of pyramidal structure. This chart proved to be groundbreaking, and most U.S. companies followed suit and thereafter workers were considered cogs in the organizational machine. This assembly line mentality became integral to how every organization managed workflow and worker output.

The Purpose of the Organizational Hierarchy

The goal of this type of mechanistic structuring is efficiency. Part of the role of organizational hierarchy is to pass along directives and those whose names appear higher up on an organizational chart are the ones with the most information and control. With routine work and industrial era mandates, information and control meant knowledge and knowledge translated to power and power resided at the top of the pyramid.

Industrial era thinking still permeates not only organizations but also the systems of education that prepares today’s kids for the business world. There has always been interplay between education and work as schools prepared students for the workforce both academically and socially. In fact, social conditioning was once of primary importance to ensure that workers of the future would be docile and compliant to the organizational hierarchy. Originating in 19th-century Prussia, “factory schools” set the stage for the industrialized approach to education.2 Founded on the principles of efficiency and standardization, students were taught compliance over autonomy and creative expression.

The Difficulty of Classifying Humans as Machines

Many current educational tools are built around certainty, but today we live in increasingly uncertain environments and not every problem can be solved by using what amounts to outdated, rigid thinking. For example, with school funding declining there is an alarming increase in canceled classes in the humanities and liberal arts and along with it the loss of fostering in our children the ability to question critically, tolerate ambiguity, and look beneath the surface of an issue — exactly what we need most in modern times. The very fact that humans are not machines is something we cannot ever forget because when we fail to bolster creative genius in our children during their formative years, it’s our loss. It’s easy to say that we need to teach kids the skills to widen their perspectives as we evolve to accommodate the changing nature of work and life in light of advanced technologies and wider societal challenges, but hedging these deeply entrenched industrial era structures and philosophy won’t be easy. The dissonance between the human experience and the work experience was also quickly evident more than a hundred years ago especially to Taylor’s critics who foresaw the disintegration of personal dignity and human values. This also didn’t escape the notice of Charlie Chaplin who used humor in “Modern Times” (1936) to point out the inhumane work and social conditions created by the developments of the industrial revolution.

INVENTION OF KNOWLEDGE WORK

Enter Drucker in the late 1950s, who codified a new emerging class of “knowledge work,” the term coined in his book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow.3 According to Drucker, knowledge work relies on expertise and thinking that uses critical problem solving to address complicated issues. Knowledge workers are high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, such as investors, managers, and consultants. The invention of this categorization reconsidered worker value and it allowed workers to be recognized not just for using their body but using their intelligence. Human intelligence became the differentiator.

Human intelligence is what has led to today’s organizations being built on knowing, on objective truth. Indeed, today’s focus on competency models and skills-based development dominate how organizations grow employees. This very focus on skills and domain knowledge served us well in the periods where solving problems came by knowing enough about the issue at hand. Historically, this knowledge transfer, knowledge acquisition, and comprehensive skill-based learning has been paramount for organizational success.

When this evolved to what in the early 1990s was known to the HR set as the war for talent and, in particular the need for software engineers, It spawned the need for contemporary recruiting engines to be built specifically to seek out and secure the most valuable talent. But luring new talent took a creative turn as It became the norm for Google and other high-tech companies to offer perks like meals, onsite gyms, massages, and quirky office spaces — more akin to playgrounds — to attract the best- candidates. This is what ultimately built the Silicon Valley ethos that remains today: the most talented, educated and privileged building the next generation of engineering feats.

The term knowledge work has also been responsible for helping organizations to expand their perspective on worker value. Domain expertise may have morphed into the penultimate differentiator, however, not everyone gets to be categorized as a knowledge worker. Service workers, for example, were in Drucker’s estimate the opposite of knowledge workers, and he rightfully worried about them being left behind or devalued. Never was that fear more clearly made than in the case of society’s collective awakening to the value of “essential” workers during the COVID-19 crisis. With that in mind, it’s obvious that it is also an important and critical time to reconsider worker value across different categories of labor, including how (or if) organizations are designed to support them.

CREATING ADAPTIVE ORGANIZATIONS

Born fifty-five years after the classical management style of Taylorism, the pioneering work of Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn in 1966 built upon the notion of knowledge work to consider organizations in a new way.4 Katz and Kahn offered an alternative perspective that turned Taylorism on its head. They conceptualized organizations as living organisms and the complex adaptive system theory was born. Now organizations were not perceived as merely mechanistic and easily controlled through process, but as complex systems of humans interacting and reacting to one another.

In complex adaptive system theory the organization is a constantly changing and living organism where its various parts are interrelated and change is emergent. This approach aligns well with the modern era especially when we consider how much our home and work environment has changed since the industrial age. As illuminated in Chapter 2, it’s no secret that the world is now more uncertain and volatile and requires more individual and collective adaptation capabilities. Certainly, more flexibility than traditional theories of organizations provide.

While mostly theoretical in nature, a few organizations have tried to deconstruct some of the industrial era structures, including Zappos who tested a decentralized management process called Holacracy and firms focused on building other self-managed organization structures. Although their success has been varied and largely unscalable, the intention has opened the door for progressive organizations and has shown a light on humans not as machines, but as interdependent parts of a whole.

Kevin Kelly in a 1995 interview with J. Flower suggested that organizations’ survival in such a perspective becomes a matter of adaptability.5 “An organization’s reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment. That means that they are trying to anticipate the future in some way or another. This is true of the separate pieces of a cell, of the cells in a body, of the bodies in a society, of the societies in an economy. Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.”

To survive and thrive, therefore, requires being more responsive and coordinated, and this necessitates re-conceptualizing the organization not as a static entity but as fluid and changing all the time. With this perspective, it’s easier to understand how the behavior complexity of employees is largely a reflection of the complexity of the external conditions, and as such, the more complex the business environment, the more freedom employees need to make their own choices in order to adapt to new situations with the speed necessary.

In 2014, Frédéric Laloux published the revolutionary Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.6 He argued that the most adaptive and sustainable organizations are ones that model a new paradigm. They sense and respond, invite employees to reclaim their wholeness, and build structures for autonomy. He calls them Teal Organizations and while there aren’t very many of them yet, this change is slowly taking hold and reshaping how we conceptualize the entire notion of the workplace, its value, intent, and the workers who make it run.

KNOWLEDGE IS NOT ENOUGH

Today, we are again entering new territory. Knowledge is table stakes but not enough to ensure being adept at fulfilling the demands of the job. We find ourselves once again straining the bonds of a system that is no longer up to the task. Work evolved from industrial era efficiencies created through process, guidelines, and clarity to Drucker’s knowledge work. We went from body work to thought work and are now beginning to craft a new paradigm. Critical thinking skills have gotten us pretty far in this era of advanced technologies, startups, and profound possibilities. However, increasingly, wicked problems alongside technological advancement prove that once vaunted objective problem-solving skills are simply not enough.

Wicked Problems

Wicked problems, as the name suggests, are inherently unsolvable by traditional methods because they have innumerable causes, do not have a definitive boundary, and are intractable.7 Wicked problems often emerge in organizations when strategic plans are being developed because this situation necessitates entertaining multiple stakeholders’ assumptions, preferences, and varied views. PPG Industries shows the path to working through wicked problems is to consider their plans as living documents that can evolve in the context of constant environmental scanning, which then allows the strategy process to be ongoing, rather than rigid.8 In working through complex circumstances organizations do not know if or what strategies are appropriate or even what the consequences of implementing them will be. Smart companies, like PPG Industries, GE, and Fujitsu, conduct experiments and have learned to accept their inevitable mistakes in order to learn from them, move forward, and adapt.

While it certainly has merit, knowledge work does not work for wicked problems because it relies on traditional notions of expertise and the idea that if you are smart enough, you can find the optimal solution. This means moving beyond knowledge work as we understand it because more often than not, today’s organizations find themselves in situations where expertise and thinking the way to a solution does not suffice. In fact, every organization is grappling in some way with a continuously evolving set of challenges where the number of possible solutions is so large that it precludes a correct answer. Under these circumstances, we must not seek more knowledge but build more perception.

PERCEPTUAL VS KNOWLEDGE WORK

Perceptual work helps in making sense of novel and uncharted territory and in that way, it is profoundly useful in emergent conditions when innovative responses are required. Primarily, perceptual work is a practice of inductive thinking vs deductive thinking, the difference being that perceptual work starts with observation to get to a conclusion rather than by trying to confirm or deny an already held assumption. To understand how knowledge work differs from perceptual work, take a look at the varied approaches to problem-solving in the table below.

Each approach has its unique advantages and circumstances for use. Analytical, theoretical or otherwise high-level knowledge certainly helps move organizations forward when problems have step-by-step and predictable solutions. Knowledge work is important in arenas that are known and where people with the right expertise can design solutions that are easy to implement. Of course, you want a tax expert for April 15 and software engineers to develop your next application. Expertise is valuable to give answers and directions but seeking the “right answer” only works under certain conditions, conditions where we may soon be outpaced by technology.

SMART TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN COGNITION

Intelligence is no longer housed exclusively in the brains of human workers. Humans and machines collaborate to make decisions, bringing out the best in both and resulting in a new relationship between intelligent algorithms so we get more out of our machines and they can evolve alongside us. This isn’t a scenario where machines replace humans, but an entirely new architecture for how we work, how we belong, and how we imagine who we need to be. Our uniquely human traits — emotional intelligence, creativity, persuasion, innovation — are becoming more valued, as are the moments of true human connection at work. This new architecture requires that we consider new models for organizations, methods for developing leaders, and team practices for how we get work done.

The goal ultimately (if not unrealistically) is to advance technology by enhancing its cognitive capabilities. However, human cognition is not well enough understood to replicate it — yet. Because human cognition is informed by a complex interconnection of variables that allows us to learn and change through the interplay of stimulus and response, it is logical that sophisticated technologies, like AI, will not be truly smart for some time (if ever). Technology will certainly solve complex challenges with greater speed and ease, but even smarter computers are not capable of creative thinking nor can they make sense of or solve problems in uncharted situations, leaving the more novel problems to be tackled by human ingenuity. As technology continues to augment daily life, efficiency gains will happen through technology, not through human worker optimization. This glimpse of the future certainly offers a newfound and, to some, a very scary opportunity that requires a mind shift in what individuals and organizations traditionally focus on. It only reinforces and demands that we acknowledge and act on the need for building new capacities.

OBJECTIVE TRUTHS AND SUBJECTIVE UNDERSTANDING

The World Economic Forum predicts humans will focus on inter-human connections and create an experience-based economy, where cooking, nursing care, handicraft, and other ‘human experiences’ are valued the most.9 Workplaces, too, will be spaces for such human flourishing with emphasis placed on emotional intelligence and empathy, whole-brain thinking, and creativity. As Toby Walsh, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, outlines: “Automation technology will take over more of the mundane — hopefully, that means more importance and more time in our jobs will be spent doing more creative, blue sky thinking and allowing people the time to do those.”

But this means reclaiming the lost art of imagining, creating and dreaming of the impossible, even and especially when there is no data to back it up. We need these human skills if we are to take advantage of this opportunity, but unfortunately, organizations seem to always be on a quest to find answers through deductive reasoning, data crunching, or by bringing the smartest people together. There is a false belief that there is a right and objective answer to the issues organizations face and if we are smart enough, we will find it. This notion of objectivity has come to dominate how we understand solving problems in the workplace.

This strategy is only effective if there is a right answer to be found to the issues organizations face, but in these uncharted, unknown, and emergent times there are no right answers and often only different perspectives on what to do next., This is moving into the territory of the subjective. Although this may seem squishy and unscientific, it truly is the merging of objective truths and subjective understanding as a way of evolving new ways to function in the changing world around us. Working with the subjective helps us break free from the tyranny of righteousness into new forms of collaboration and discovery. Indeed, as the writer Colum McCann remarked, “We must embrace the notion that answers are in fact quite boring.”10

Throughout history we have relied on and used our senses, our science, and our enormous capacity for wonder to both explore and create reality. We’ve also continually prodded reality to seek out what is and pondered its implications to consider what matters. This ingenuity has been a moving force within us since civilization began as evidenced by our discovery and use of fire, communicating our history through the passing down of stories, images, and the written word, and even by way of today’s advanced technological inventions. Every explorer, whether on land, sea, or space, has utilized or invented new methods of discovery to investigate the great expanses of the unknown. Theory is produced from the imaginative mind of the scientist. Yes, it is with the help of scientific understanding and also by tapping into hunches, feelings, or desires that we have gone beyond the objective truth. This is especially true in the social sciences when what draws the interest of researchers influences what they study and how they illuminate the subjective social worlds we inhabit.

The late theoretical physicist David Bohm predicted that “This division of art and science is temporary. It didn’t exist in the past, and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.” Just as art does not consist simply of works of art but of an “attitude, the artistic spirit,” science does not consist solely in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. This is also true across many other industries and is especially obvious in the technology sector where high science meets design aesthetics; the inner workings of a mobile phone are only sellable if the design accommodates user tastes. Other examples that illustrate the importance of aesthetics in shaping our lives are interior design and architecture. Aesthetic choices are foundational, not ancillary, to the experience of whether or not we enjoy spending time at a particular resort or working in a particular office space. How inhabiting a space makes us feel matters as much as its functionality. Art, too, as we have come to know, is used to elicit feelings, build compassion, and elucidate social issues, as is aptly demonstrated by artist in residence programs.

For example, in the 1970s the first artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, used performance art to showcase the value of the efforts of sanitation workers who, until then, were largely invisible to the majority of city residents. Examples such as this also bring home the fact that even though the term artist is most used when talking about painters or sculptors, in reality an artist is any person with an artful attitude and in that spirit, art comprises anything that is created or invented and that makes all of us potential artists. By elevating the importance of creative and subjective views of the world, perceiving differently becomes possible and “the ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained,” Bohm explained.11 Nowhere is this more profoundly clear than in the discipline of philosophy.

Philosophy teaches us to question, reason, and think, not to solve the unanswerable question. Even though we know the question is unanswerable at the outset, the point is to develop subjective understanding. Somewhat ironically, we can also pull from the parts of the scientific method that focuses on discovery — experimentation. However, it is not with the intention of narrowing down to the right answer, but to form increased understanding of a phenomenon. Unfortunately, we are often used to pitting different types of knowing against each other:

Science or arts

Knowledge or perception

Objective or subjective

We have gotten so used to categorizing these against one another, that we seem to have forgotten that we truly need to appreciate different types of knowing in a complex world. By choosing one type over another an either-or mentality is created and this will only serve to keep us from leveraging the fullness of what these disciplines can offer. By converging disparate and perhaps unrelated ideas in an interdisciplinary fashion, we venture into the area of consilience, which is the idea that uniting knowledge across disciplines can lead to stronger understanding and conclusions. Linking together different bodies of knowledge builds better and more profound theories. This means science, knowledge, and the objective remain important, but we cannot let the pendulum swing too far from all the other important contributions to intelligence like the arts, perception and subjective understanding.

THE VALUE OF PERCEPTUAL WORK

The ultimate value of perceptual work is adaptability and enhanced awareness. Interestingly, the value of increased awareness has been making its way into organizations as signaled by the increasing popularity of teaching meditation in the workplace. What started out as a tool for increasing productivity has a knock-on effect of increasing ability to maintain focus and attention. The aptitude to tune into our environment with more subtlety enables our capacity to see more choices for action. This is precisely why we need perceptual workers who have the ability to increase their awareness through the act of noticing and questioning. These are the workers who are invaluable in unprecedented situations who, instead of looking at models to determine what they are supposed to do, ask “What is going on here?” and begin an investigation. Having this powerful capability to question is the root of perceptual work because questions are generative and allow new ways of seeing by widening one’s aperture through sensing.

This doesn’t mean that knowledge no longer has utility as an approach in organizations. Knowledge still has great value, but it is not the singular key to success. In one of my favorite podcasts “How I Built This” with Guy Raz, I have noticed two themes over my years of listening regarding start-up founders:

First, many attributed their lack of knowledge (not their deep domain expertise) as part of their success. “I did not know any better” is a common refrain as they broke industry rules and tried new approaches.

Second, they listened to their customers and made necessary adjustments. They were deeply tuned into what was working and what was not and shifted quickly. This heightened (sensory) perception allowed them to meet market demand when other organizations missed the same opportunity — and is perceptual work at its best.

Because perceptual work results in empathy and adaptability, both of which are essential to every workplace, this in turn makes it useful across all industries and in every role from customer service to high level executives. We see this demonstrated in real time not only through the entrepreneurs interviewed on the podcast but also by listening to people in other positions who are in the midst of breaking free from the constraints of tired thinking and learning to harness the powers of discovery to help them visualize new futures. This is available to all of us when we activate our metacognition — the awareness and understanding of our thought processes.

METACOGNITION AND KNOWLEDGE

The foundation of perceptual work is sensory perception. Just as knowledge work is powered by domain expertise, perceptual work is powered by sensitivity. The ability to perceive how we think as we think and feel as we feel is known as metacognition.

Metacognition is a uniquely human skill. This ability to be able to fix onto a metaview of any situation translates into being able to discern what’s real and what matters. Metacognition is what gives us a sense of a situation and possibilities for a course of action. This context-sensitivity and responsiveness are what behavioral scientists call hallmarks of wisdom. They propose that wisdom uniquely involves context-sensitive processing of knowledge, enabling understanding and navigating the complexities of one’s world. Sensitivity is the antenna that enhances the power of perception.

SENSITIVITY IS THE POWER OF PERCEPTION

A study asking nurses12 in the cancer and palliative care field to define sensitivity and how they viewed it resulted in them articulating two main features:

• The first was awareness. This revolved around being ‘perceptive, alert and intuitive’ to patients, their family, and significant others, as well as to their nursing colleagues and other medical professionals.
• The second was being responsive to patients in ways conducive to their particular needs.

The nurses believed that no matter how deep a person’s degree of sensitivity, its depth could be enhanced or reduced by the strength of that person’s motivation to learn through experience, observation, and other variables. Today, the ability to be sensitive is fundamental not just to the nursing profession, but to all workers. Just as the nurses perceived, the depth of a person’s sensitivity depends on attentiveness and awareness, both of which are necessary and can be learned.

What the creative arts teach us about sensitivity

The World Economic Forum predicted that by 2020 creativity would be one of the most important skills and indeed creativity is climbing to the top as a valuable capability.13 An attribute of people who are creative is that they observe more and expect fewer straight-forward answers. Creativity isn’t solely in the domain of artists; it also exists in business where the ability to innovate or create artful strategies is key to problem solving. Every one of us has the capacity to dream, explore, discover, build, question, and seek answers as subjects of our world. Just as actors, musicians, and scientists must all take inspiration from the world around them, through the simple — and sometimes incredibly difficult — act of increasing sensory awareness, so do business people.

Dr. Darya Zabelina, Professor of Psychology at the University of Arkansas, found that creative individuals have a “leaky” sensory filter; meaning their brains allow them to take in more information from their surrounding environment.14 Dr. Zabelina observed that highly creative people are more sensitive to the many noises in their environment. “Sensory information is leaking in. The brain is processing more information than it is in a typical person,” Zabelina explains. This means that this ability to take in a greater volume of information increases the chances of making distantly novel observations. This context-sensitivity is the power of activating metacognition. It is as if you are floating above a situation and collecting pieces to a yet-to-be seen puzzle. For those who are looking to increase their sensory ability, this is instructive as it shows that building up wider awareness (of both self and context) is foundational to the powers of sensitivity. This is a matter of taking more and multiple perspectives.

Reclaiming Perceptual Capacities

Perception and perspective are dependent on our way of seeing and, unfortunately, these perceptual capacities are decaying, not evolving. We have over-relied on intellect, favored data over qualitative inputs, and outsourced our sensing to technology and as a result what used to come naturally to humans now requires intentionality. Awareness requires presence; something that is in short supply. With the increase in attention seeking environments (i.e., social media, autoplay on Netflix) and email overload, we must work diligently to sense and see not only the needs of others but also the dynamics and nuances of a complex situation. The more we develop our ability to notice and examine, the more we deepen our understanding and generate more choices. As we have learned, being aware is central to the concept of being sensitive so to reclaim sensitivity requires both deep reflection and human connection. This, however, necessitates varied environments and the time and space needed for clear, uninterrupted thought. It is truly time to learn from the inventive change makers who are leading the way on how to carve out and leverage deep reflection.

The capacity for solitude is a quality that unites successful creators in that solitude isn’t just about avoiding distractions; it’s about giving the mind the space it needs to reflect, make new connections, and find meaning. In Deep Work, MIT’s Cal Newport talks about how space is needed for powerful breakthroughs.15 According to Newport, knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work, meaning tasks like emailing and logistics that anyone can do. Precious time to think has become scarce in our busy and multi-tasking world, but it is exactly what we need. Newport references Jung who had a dedicated cottage in the country where he would go to think and write. This space enabled him to hash through his complex ideas of psychology that ultimately broke Freud’s dominance in the field. Sadly, what has fueled the minds of creative thinkers and problem solvers throughout history is the very capacity for awareness and connection that is decaying, and it begins in childhood.

REACTIVATING THE POWER OF SENSITIVITY

The media scholar Sherry Turkle’s research on children clearly shows that the area of the brain necessary for developing empathy is actually not developing in children who are technology saturated.16 Young brains are not developing empathy because the need to “feel” what others feel is short circuited when technology acts as the intermediary for communication and emotional intimacy. Sensing and responding to the subtle cues and reactions of others is what creates the human capacity for understanding one another. People who share a common physical space can literally sense what another person is feeling. The attentiveness to others that comes with this ability to sense what another is feeling is part of what leads us to find our depths of compassion.

This connection to one another is a critically important consideration in the context of the future of remote work. Creating nourishing, empowering, and healing workplaces in the 21st century is challenging because it means finally paying attention to how we relate to one another when intimacy and compassion often feel in short supply. In order to successfully work across the digital landscape, we all need to pay more attention to becoming better at showcasing compassion, deep listening, generative questioning, and caring about others. Simply, to achieve a more effective way of connecting with our fellow humans at work and beyond, we need to embrace and promote sensitivity.

Sensitivity is elemental in driving this transition to a flourishing work life as the future of work will not be determined by technological advances or business economics alone. Human compassion, ingenuity, and collaboration, by how we imagine, and how we relate to and trust one another is what needs to change. This can be achieved by tapping into what we already possess and reclaiming sensitivity as it was originally defined.

Endnotes

1. Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & Brothers
2. Ylimaki, R. M., & Wilmers, A. (2021). Historical perspectives and contemporary challenges to education (Bildung) and citizenry in the modern nation state: Comparative perspectives on Germany and the USA. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 257–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211004659
3. Drucker, P. F. (1959). Landmarks of tomorrow. New York: Harper.
4. Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The social psychology of organizations. New York: Wiley.
5. Flower, J. & K. Kelly (1995) The structure Of organized change: A conversation with Kevin Kelly in The Healthcare Forum Journal, vol. 38, no. 1, January/February 1995.
6. Laloux, F. Reinventing organizations: a guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness. First edition. Brussels, Belgium.
7. Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (2018). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Classic Readings in Urban Planning, 52–63. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351179522-6
8. Camillus, J. C. (2014, August 1). Strategy as a wicked problem. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 24, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2008/05/strategy-as-a-wicked-problem
9. Weber, V. (2018, February 28). What impact will automation have on our future society? Here are four possible scenarios. World Economic Forum. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/what-impact-will-automation-have-on-society-four-scenarios/
10. Berger, W. (2019). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Langara College.
11. Horgan, J. (2018, July 23). David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and enlightenment. Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-bohm-quantum-mechanics-and-enlightenment/
12. Sayers, Kirstine & De Vries, Kay. (2008). “A Concept Development Of `Being Sensitive’ In Nursing”. Nursing ethics, no 15 (2008): 289–303. Accessed May 25, 2020. doi 10.1177/0969733007088355.
13. The Future of Jobs. World Economic Forum. (2016, January). Retrieved January 24, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs
14. Kaufman, S. B., & Gregoire, C. (2015). Wired to create: unraveling the mysteries of the creative mind. First edition. New York, New York: Perigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
15. Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: rules for focused success in a distracted world. First edition. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
16. Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. United States: Penguin Publishing Group.