How to manage people? #

We don’t, not on the level that question implies.

We are not all white men. We are not all in perfect health until the day we die, or sick in a way mainstream medicine can label and solve. We don’t all easily stomach opportunism to gain our survival, prefering to live life simply or humanistically or in some other modality that does not put money first, and are tired of barely squeaking by because those who embrace opportunism use it to argue for more-from-your-less. So, in a state of culture where we want to believe that humanity can survive all the twists and foibles of the universe, first we need to wrap our heads around supporting the full breadth of humanity.

The biggest reason why: we do not know the full breadth of the universe, and the only way we survive the unknown is through diversity. Diverse biology, diverse thought, diverse ideas, diverse cultures, and diverse, robustly healthy systems of information.  

Since money is currently our primary reason for doing, what does this mean for business? For the bottom line? How do we reconcile shifting to a standard of diversity in the face of a powerful monoculture?

There are a two key things we need to bubble up in our perception:

• Understand business is a tool before it’s a profit center, even if that’s lost in the dopamine kick of wealth;
  • Expect people when dealing with people, and then honor them.

Tooling #

Information technology is a tool.

While we tend to think tools are inherent agnostic (a hammer works the same way for everyone), information is complex and tools have historically remained static through time.

Complexity is a breeding ground for manipulation. Wow, have we manipulated. Deceptive design details it better, more fulsomely, and will be actively maintained, and yet it only deals with the manipulation in interfaces.

The manipulation has spread throughout the system.

It's in all the marketing shoved in messaging labeled something else: "hey, your purchase is on the way, buy more!"

It's deep in the code. It's in the manipulated information surfaced in social media, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It's deep in the equations and processes, as described in Weapons of Math Destruction.

It's in the data sets. We have mills of people earning pennies to crunch through unprocessed data just so it can feel magical and seamless to users.

It's in greenwashing, in manipulated ESG reporting and not actually shifting to processes that help our future survivability. It's in the mass gaslighting of the effectiveness of recycling.

All of these are instances of information manipulation expressly for an uptick in profit, and barely scrape the surface of what can be done with information technology.

That's the current substrate of our information tooling. Because it's out of immediate focus, all it takes is a few people to affect the lives of millions. Put bad actors in, near, or overseeing those positions, and manipulation becomes the prioritized purpose.

The only way to deal with it is to understand the mass impact of the tool; to accept that bad actors are part of us; and to decide that humanity is more important than profit. Shift the tool to prioritize humanity, develop system transparency so anyone can check (so someone will check), and instill individual privacy standards so manipulation isn't so freaking easy.

And

Data is static to the moment of it's creation. Information is not. And just because Tuesday at 2am the temperature was 25 degrees Fahrenheit does not mean that's the only temperature forevermore, or the only temperature for 2am's, or the only temperature for Tuesdays.

Information is a tool, just like a hammer. It's not as static as a hammer.

Information cannot be moribund and be effective. We have to start building for emergence in information. That is so far from where we are today that I know the knee-jerk, mass reaction will be that it's so unapproachable as to be ridiculous. Even genAI depends on the static nature of data, and confabulates our data history to be all information. Sometimes the future-data is acknowledged as a statistical probability, but even that is predicating the future as only possibly the outcome of all that's come before. Emergence is a formulaic concept, but not a keystone that could happen organically from our meat experience.

Most people are so used to thinking of the future as untold that they ignore the gap, focus on the information they have, and call it all-and-everything-forevermore. The codes reflect this, and assumes it only needs to find patterns in what already exists.

Emergence is a huge nut to crack, not just in our data structures and technologies, but in our cognitions.

We cannot treat information technology like a static hammer until we bake in emergence. Until then, we need to always be re-checking our system architectures. We need to maintain them, shift them with our cultures and emerging data, even though the systems will prove to have faulty and failing information structures.

People #

Expect people when dealing with people — the difficult, the easy, the confused and brilliant, angry and laughing. Understand you are dealing with them within the construct of the future-sense anticipation of the tools you are trying to convince them to pay for.  In other words, stay focused, be honest, and develop ways to adhere to reality instead of narrative or perceptual truths. Don’t expect one size fits all to actually work long term.

This takes a massive investment in integrity.

People are people. Companies might be able to get a whole bunch to do what they want, but there will always be someone who won’t follow the path laid out for them. It’s a balance: simple, or flexible enough to deal with any eventuality. It depends on the process, and how willing the business is to take the old-vine bet. Some businesses can’t see past next quarter; they will uproot the vine to plant radishes, and they’ll even wonder why the radishes start to fail when they don’t care for the soil — why their growth and then profits recede when the distribution of wealth is far out of whack.

In healthy cultural and social environments, persuasion only goes so far; same with punishment. As a business, punishing users doesn’t pull them into line, it just makes them angry. Persuasion without follow through also makes them angry. Excluding them for want of a process also ends at anger. Promising something that is never delivered will end in fury.

In the complexity of emotion we can often find some subset of fear, joy, anger, or sadness. Betting on the whole spectrum is smart, but depending on fear or anger is ultimately self defeating.  Fear expands to encompass more. Anger gnashes backwards as well as forward.

People do not have an easy, solitary answer. When we interact, where we butt heads, is not a simple answer of right/wrong, good/bad, truth/lie.

People as inhabitants of society #

Most business process isn’t actively, central-focus building society, but it is contributing to it. Every unnecessary frustration adds to the emotional makeup of the whole. Every exclusionary behavior promotes the idea of top-down hierarchy impressed on human behavior, with some rarified person getting to say who is recognized and who is not — who gets ease, and who gets suffering. And when part of the behavior tools is to pretend like no other paradigms exists to get to a solution? It’s eating away the reality adhesion of their process. Eat away reality adhesion, and the business has to depend more deeply on hype, gaslighting, outright lies, and monopolist behavior just to tread water. 

Top-down has it’s benefits, and situations in which it shines like a beacon. Top-down doesn’t work as the solitary information architecture for people as people, though. Forcing people into a single top-down behavioral architecture will result in failure in the long run. 

People are network. Hierarchies can be lensed from network to meet particular needs and ease transitions, but the network never goes away. 

Trying to cull the nodes that don’t fit is, ultimately, the source of our -isms: racism, ableism, agism, sexism, any and all we have recognized or will.  

People are network. A society, agnostic of culture and smoothing over cultural frictions, should aim at network. It’s that simple, and really fucking hard.