'Selvesware:' Bots Are Designing More Productive Versions of Ourselves

Reprogramming humanity? JL

Michael Schrage reports in Harvard Business Review:

Better bots and digital assistants aren’t going to determine productivity’s data-driven future. Tomorrow’s most effective executives will merge and marry workplace data and analytics to digitally design more-productive versions of themselves; less about “artificial intelligence” and more about “augmenting introspection” to help workers develop optimal qualities. Personalized analytics become lenses for refocusing professional effectiveness.Alexa and Siri only perform tasks; our digital selves will determine and define those tasks. Think of them as “selvesware,”
Siri is super, Alexa is awesome, and Cortana’s quite clever, but better bots and digital assistants aren’t going to determine personal productivity’s data-driven future. Tomorrow’s most effective executives will merge and marry workplace data and analytics to digitally design more-productive versions of themselves. Those digital “selves” will shape how work gets done.
Virtual agents like Alexa and Siri only perform tasks; our digital selves will actually determine and define those tasks. Think of them as “selvesware,” analogous to recommendation engines for books to read or movies to watch. Selvesware will deliver actionable, data-driven insight and advice on what to say, when to speak up, and with whom to network, for example, suggesting bespoke options for better communication, collaboration, and facilitation. Selvesware invites workers and managers to digitally amplify their talents and attributes, while monitoring and minimizing weaknesses. Simply put, selvesware helps people identify, manage, and measurably improve their best, most productive selves.
Consider, for example, the obsessive get-it-done-now! executive whose 360-degree performance reviews point to a brusque and alienating communication style. The exec might use selvesware such as IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer, which doesn’t just analyze Slack chats and emails but also recommends tonal and textual edits that preserve substance while enhancing style. The tool might suggest that the executive start an email with “Hi Michael” rather than the brusquer “Michael:” or that they soften their “Tell them to do it by 5 PM” to “Could your team get this back to me by 5 PM?” The executive still gets to choose what’s sent and shared — but now they can literally see analytics describing how their more empathic “self” could better communicate and connect with colleagues. Data-driven selvesware sparks self-awareness that lets people get out of their own way.Similarly, a technically competent but aesthetically uninspired UX designer might need digital selves that safely challenge creative boundaries and limitations. The designer could run their designs through “visual recommendation engine” selvesware that offers bolder, more energetic styles based on their sketches and use cases. The productive outcome: edgier imagery and animations that spark better UX conversations with clients.
Data-driven selvesware could help the global project manager hoping to foster greater cooperation and camaraderie within their team. While their normal managerial style might default to “command and control” and directive, perhaps the manager aspires to be more collaborative and facilitative. Their selvesware could perform social-network analytics, prioritize project milestones, and draft post-meeting communiqués designed to get their team interacting more with each other. The desired result: a better bonded, more cohesive and productive team that hits all of its deadlines.
In this data-rich future, enterprise AI is less about “artificial intelligence” and more about “augmenting introspection.” The more creatively, comprehensively, and innovatively these selves can be digitized, the greater the opportunity to help workers develop and deploy the optimal traits and qualities they desire. Personalized analytics become mirrors and lenses for refocusing professional effectiveness.The ongoing adoption of wearable devices and sensors promises to further boost workplace awareness and productivity. Just as they do for physical fitness, technologies tracking steps and heart rates already capture actionable inferences about individual energy levels and moods. Jawbone, Fitbit, and other mobile apps can easily play important roles in assessing mental acuity and attention. The day is near when wristband monitors and personal dashboards will physiologically sense when people are not in the mood to take advice or concentrate on details. “Your heart rate is the highest it’s been this week,” the app might display after a stressful meeting. “Should you take five minutes to de-stress?”
If software servants like Siri get augmented or supplanted with selvesware, executives and employees alike could be empowered to craft high-performance variants of themselves — selves that are measurably smarter, bolder, more creative, more persuasive, and/or more empathic than their “typical” or “average” (in other words, actual) physical selves. Tracking which selves deliver the best performance and outcomes could become a new KPI. Quantified selves could supersede the quantified self. This should not be seen as creepy or invasive. People already correct their vision with wearable lenses (or even laser surgery) and enhance moods and cognitive prowess through chemistry. Selvesware is physiologically less invasive and may well prove to have an even greater effect on workplace productivity.
The technical ingredients needed to create custom multiple selves largely already exist. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, with their digital sophistication, bona fide algorithmic innovation, and commitment to human capital development, seem positioned to lead selvesware revolutions. The chance to make more people more valuable worldwide is a market opportunity that could and should prove bigger than bots. Selvesware will then become a medium, mechanism, and platform for getting greater value from machine learning, AI, and internet of things (IoT) investments.
For example, as part of its IoT digital transformation efforts, GE embraced “digital twins” as a key productivity technology. A digital twin is a virtual model of a process, product, or service. A digital simulation of a robot could be connected to its real-world physical counterpart — a thermostat, say. This twinned production thermostat could be instrumented to help predict the most cost-effective ways to heat critical chemicals in a production process. Pairing the physical and the virtual creates opportunities to test and explore different productivity settings and scenarios. But why stop with industrial assets? The next step is obvious: Enable digital twins — or triplets, quadruplets, septuplets — to help GE’s human assets become more productive and efficient, too.
The critical organizational challenges going forward revolve less around technological implementations than around data and analytics governance. Principles and policies defining data access and sharing of personnel data and workplace analytics will therefore become paramount. For instance, do data-enriched “boldly creative selves” at work belong to employers or employees? The answer to this question becomes even more opaque when our digital selves are created or managed on company devices and networks. Should companies be more comfortable with proprietary, portable, or more “open” productive selves? Loyalty and professional development may be determined by how generous employers become in helping their people craft and curate their best selves.
Only a few years ago, mobile computing in the enterprise was BYOD — Bring Your Own Device. Will tomorrow’s personal and interpersonal productivity be BYOMS — Bring Your Own Multiple Selves? Serious organizations will surely revisit their governance policies and practices to facilitate faster digital innovation, likely embracing the following criteria:

• Management should commit to cultivating multiple selves as part of their human capital, professional development, and productivity agendas. Use regular performance reviews, 360-degree job reviews, and workplace analytics to help employees identify specific cognitive and behavioral attributes for digital augmentation, amplification, and mitigation. Preserve the Start, Stop, and Continue behavior assessments that are essential to an effective performance review, but embrace digitalization by assessing how well, or how poorly, people’s selvesware extensions perform.
• Enterprise data governance policies should explicitly encourage both transparency and data set availability — whether from chat, emails, presentations, profiles, social network analytics, etc. — to train “recommender” and “advisory” algorithms that instantiate data-driven “better selves” development, deployment, and improvement.
• Organizations should create and support searchable multiple selves directories, analogous to software repositories and enterprise bot directories, to promote cross-functional interoperability across the enterprise. Provide metadata, APIs/SDKs, and documentation enabling multiple teams of multiple selves to productively collaborate.
• Require networked KPI dashboards for multiple selves management and oversight. Workplace analytics should explicitly monitor multiple selves performance as well as the bots and other software agents they employ. These metrics should inform ongoing feedback as well as training for individuals, teams, and their algorithms.
• Give special attention to multiple selves that might positively or negatively impact and influence customer and client UX. “Customer-touch” employees — salespeople, customer service representatives, account managers, etc. — may need additional tools, training, and oversight to ensure that customers experience only their employees’ “best selves.”

As the volume, velocity, variety, and value of data increases, so does the importance of governance. To better deliver the productivity essential to growth and the creativity essential to customer experience, executives must acknowledge that technology has rendered a classic aphorism anachronistic. “Know thyself” needs to become “Know thyselves.”