Can we develop a mindset of seeing technologies as colleagues?

More importantly, collaboration with technologies. In this less than 12-minute Ted Talk, Nadjia Yousif, a top-notch consultant, has used an experiential learning to throw light on the need to look at technologies differently. Otherwise, the return on investment of large sums of money on the latest advanced technologies will get wasted.

What this means is typically, any organisation expects investments in technology to yield measurable outcomes such as productivity gains or efficient allocation of resources. But would it not be wise to start considering tech as colleagues, is the question that Yousif throws at her audience. Her rationale is simple: “I’ve spoken to people from all different industries about how they can treat their core technologies like colleagues. I’ve met with people from the restaurant industry, medical professionals, teachers, bankers, people from many other sectors, and the first step with anybody that I would meet with was to draw out the structure of their teams in an organisation chart.”

This enables a firm to partner with technology rather than let it sit idly as an investment but not fulfilling its potential. Yousif’s explanation is profound and makes one think about being considerate to the tech function that is going to in some way or the other dictate a new-age worker’s life.

As a technology advisor, Yousif has found that “so many companies make the well-meaning decisions to put huge investments into technology, only to have the benefits fail to live up to the expectation. In fact, in one study I read, 25 pc of technology projects are cancelled or deliver things that are never used.

That’s like billions of dollars just being wasted each year.” Her talk concludes, making a case for workers to “share a bit of humanity towards the technologies and the softwares and the algorithms and the robots who we work with, because we will all be the better for it.”