The Future of HR: Human Relations not Human Resources

Those who know me know I have been saying for years that we have to get away from systems models of businesses and cooperatives and instead stress relationship building between the people that make up the cooperative.

In hierarchical society, systems make complete sense. businesses are machines (or biological or ICT equivalents) into which human resources are slotted and controlled by an elite of executives.  Who justify their privilege by the use of management practices that treat people like cogs or organs or algorithms.

Open any management textbook from Ansoff to Senge and you can see this model, sometimes naked as in Michael Porter's 'work' (Value Chain Analysis). Sometimes covered up by metaphysical  such as Pete Senge and his learning organisation ideas.  In all, the telling sign is that the organisation comes first and the people are slotted into preconceived roles. The boss is in total control (in theory).

Even the modern fad of 'engaged employees' assumes they should be engaged with their employer and not with each other. (as one cynical employee was quoted as saying "In the old days they only tried to control my body. Now they want my heart and soul as well!")

None of this works in a worker cooperative run as a flat hierarchy, equal status collective. Such as my coop Suma, Superbly successful as a business and pretty good as a democratic cooperative too. Without the authority of the hierarchy none of these systems based methods are suitable.

Having struggled to use them and gone looking for something else I discovered the alternative model of the firm. That organisations are merely the sum of all the communication relationships going on in them. This thinking goes by the cumbersome name of Complex Responsive Processes of Relating.

I sometimes simplify this to say that an organisation is merely a big conversation. A complex ever changing web of communications by speech, gesture, email, data, exchange, working arrangements etc.  It's a big intentional family in other words.

This model fits worker coops to a 'T'.  Because it says the better we communicate (relate) with each other the better our businesses will perform. Immediately all manner of improvements spring to mind, how to remove blocks to communication and how to improve our ability to communicate and relate to each other. One of the most powerful blocks is the ability of the powerful to block communication by the less powerful, of course.  An ability that is crumbling day by day as personal social media devices become more powerful and more discrete.

Blocking, restricting and controlling communication is exactly how the Coop Group executive elite operated.

So what does this Relationship model mean for HR? Simple - we replace the Resource with Relations. HRM becomes Human Relations Management. Because groups of people do need to be coordinated and facilitated to communicate otherwise a free for all ensues.  But this is not management leadership. It is facilitation of the wishes of the people who make up the group.

Interestingly some of the senior gurus of HR seem to be waking up to this revolution even if they don't necessarily understand the political significance of it.

Prof. Dave Ulrich has long been considered the foremost global HR theorist. He invented many of the concepts of modern HRM, all systems thinking. How to tinker to make the machine operate better. Recently he has been talking about Relations Management and referring to concepts from personal relationship studies particularly the work of John Gottman

http://www.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/2015/03/24/the-future-of-hr-is-about-relationships.aspx?

1 Share a common purpose 

Partners in a relationship have different roles to play, but they succeed when they realise that they are stronger together than apart because they have binding goals such as raising children. In a business the challenge is to find a unifying purpose that brings together these different parts into a greater whole.

2 Respect differences

In couples therapy, each partner is encouraged to identify and appreciate the strengths of their partner. Couples succeed when they communicate more positively than negatively. Gottman found a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments in successful couples.  Couples succeed when they know and respond to what matters to their partner. 

3 Govern, accept, connect

A large part of relationship success comes from managing expectations. Researchers have found that 65-70 per cent of relationship problems are never “solved” but “managed”.  Most of the early problems in a relationship are worked around (for example, spending habits, raising children, doing household chores). It is important to solve the solvable problems and not obsess about those that seem to persist. 

4 Care for the other

In relationship therapy, the most important questions that solidify a relationship are: Can I rely on you? Are you safe? Will you be there for me when I need you? Without positive answers to these questions, relationships will crumble under pressure. With positive answers, partners build trust and celebrate others’ success. 

5 Share experiences together

In any relationship, things go wrong. Personal or professional disappointments or stresses that pull them apart. To build stronger personal relationships, partners are encouraged to turn to each other in times of difficulty, to yield to the influence of their partner, and to be emotionally vulnerable to share deeper feelings with each other. Spending time together and investing emotionally in each other strengthens relationships.

6 Grow together

Anyone in a successful relationship over five or 10 years can look back to see progress.   Relationships morph and each partner learns and grows. Some of this growth comes from constantly learning, from focusing on the future and what can be, from letting go of grievances, recognising vicious cycles and breaking them. Couples with positive relationships recognise growth and change.

1 Share a common purpose

2 Respect differences

3 Govern, accept, connect

4 Care for the other

5 Share experiences together

6 Grow together

These sound like pretty good guidelines for Human Relations Management to me!

Information Pollution in Financial Capitalism

Reading John Lanchester's book 'Whoops' about the international financial crisis whilst on holiday (its a laugh out loud read, not many books about financial capitalism you can say that about). He writes about how banksters invented derivatives to outwit the financial regulators and create the impression of low risk for loans based on junk mortgages which they sold to all and sundry.

A brilliant metaphor he makes,  comparing the regulators to lifeguards who weren't asleep but trying to cope with swimmers who were pouring blood into the water because they thought a few sharks would make it more exciting!

All the Collatoralised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps and even CDOs 'squared' (read the book for an explanation and to realise how we were all conned by these legalised crooks) created such a fog and confusion,  the whole banking system blocked up.  Money ceased to be reliable.

It made me think, In the 19th century the same process happened with industrial capitalism. Mills and factories created such pollution that they could not operate.  Water was too dirty to be used to wash wool in Bradford for example.  The already rich industrialists had to bang factory owners' heads together to impose the first environmental protection laws to control pollution.

The same happened with public health because they were running out of labour due to the high death and disability rates caused to the working class. Free laissez faire enterprise had to be controlled to prevent a clogging up of free enterprise.

They used physical resources.  21st century financial capitalism uses information as a resource.  CDOs and CDSs pollute the pool of information.  But whereas all industrial capitalists wanted a low pollution environment,  financial capitalists actively try to pollute the information environment. It's the way they create the tiny differences between buying and selling prices they exploit to make their profits in huge computerised purchases and sales many times a second.

So the financial regulators have a much tougher job than the 19th century equivalents.

What's this to do with coops? Lanchester speculates about business that exists to serve need rather than just to make money by any means. He suggests those days are over.  He also says financial capitalism is a near dead duck. It is irrecoverably polluted.  But he doesn't mention coops once.  Coops exist and survive only so long as they serve their member's needs.  And can survive when capitalism is so polluted by financial dodgy dealings it is having another in its series of heart attacks.

People laugh at Marx's belief that capitalism is its own grave digger. He didnt just think this would happen when labour organised, as people commonly believe.  He also predicted the suicidal dynamics of financier capitalism. He may still be proved right.

But capitalism is a master at cliff edge thrillers so what will they do next to protect their right to our wealth? Are the shocks coming so hard and fast that the financial doctors cannot keep the raddled body alive?

A few years ago (before the financial crash) I was at a reception in the House of Lords and heard the Tory MP for the City of London, Mark Field, say the party was over. The 150 year reign of the joint stock company (the corporate legal person) was coming to an end. It was no longer fit for purpose in an age of international computerised finance. (No one was listening in his own party.)  His solution?  Mutuals and Cooperatives which exist to serve and provide needs directly and not as a by product of uncontrollable corporations.

Financial Management for Worker Co-operatives - We Can Do Better Than This

My experience of talking to finance people in worker co-ops is that a fair bit of the orthodox methods of internal financial management and reporting are not right for worker co-ops where the priority is communicating with internal members, many of whom don’t understand these normal methods. 

Much financial management is designed to report financial performance and results to financially able senior managers and external funders and investors who can also call on expertise (or at least have a vested personal interest in learning how to read a balance sheet and P&L). 

There are accountants who say that normal financial management is actually a tool for control by higher management with vested interests in keeping control, rather than freeing up entrepreneurial behaviour; see http://www.slideshare.net/LESSConf/11-12-what-is-bb BB seems more suitable for collectives to me than the normal methods.

We may have to abide by certain conventions in our external reporting but internally we can do whatever we think is appropriate. Even externally, conventional reporting underplays the financial and non-financial output benefits of worker co-ops. (Return On Capital Employed (ROCE) does not take into account profits distributed in premium wages and therefore under reports the financial performance of our better managed worker co-ops. Some of which are outperforming Apple in terms of the total financial outputs they are achieving.)

The American employee ownership literature is full of articles about how to engender an ‘ownership culture’ and much of that is 'How do you report financial results and forward plans in a way that ordinary employee owners can understand?'. So that is why this topic is of such interest to me. Money is the only undisputed common language inside our co-ops (much as I dislike that) but only some members can speak it with all the consequences that flow from that. 

The worst of which is that the finance people do their jobs and aren’t understood and other members blunder around in their financial ignorance, not aligned behind one understanding, not able to intelligently argue a common case. Result - too many co-ops which are just surviving against the odds with inadequate business and financial performance.

So, if we had forward planning or coordination of finances which all member could understand (the reason for) and could commit to and reporting of financial performance ditto, then we can have more collective understanding of the business and what members have to do to make it a success ( or just to survive).

It would help enormously with collective performance management ( because members would have their fingers on the pulse) and emergent business development ( where groups of members identify and develop good new business development without a CEO master plan) and contingency planning ( members would spot risks and react quicker if they had easy to understand financial metrics).

There's a project here for a radical accountant. Volunteers?

The Problem with Co-ops - No Boss

Britan 'does' big co-ops, like the Cooperative Group with its strong corporate culture and executive hierarchies. But Britain's record for small co-ops is poor, especially egalitarian collectives. In the 1970s and 80s thousands of worker co-ops were started by young people as a response to the last major recession, a decade of mass de-industrialisation when the normal jobs for young graduates in middle management disappeared. Where are the Mondragons and Emilia Romagnas that should have resulted.

My co-op, Suma, was started in the mid 70s. In 25 years Suma created 100 good cooperative jobs. In the same time Mondragon created 10,000.

Why don’t co-ops start and grow in Britain? Because British people don’t know how to behave and work together cooperatively? They only know hierarchical behaviour. They like the idea of cooperative behaviour but baulk at actually doing it. If they do start coops they mostly still don’t take advantage of the model because they ‘do their old jobs’ in the coop, behave as controllers or controlled, executives or operatives, because that is the way they know and it is safe. So coops in the UK operate like badly run ordinary businesses, ones which have ineffective bosses, instead of well functioning active democracies.

Giving such organisations hard business tools and opening up access to finance is inefficient, they can’t use them or it properly. Like giving someone a toolbox but not teaching them how to use the tools. It’s a typically British disease to under prioritise competency. The cult of the amateur is a very British delusion. We want to just have a go and learn by muddling through.

I would say that British cooperative development assistance has contributed to this by sticking to hard skills delivery and hoping someone else does the soft skills. In effect we assume there is a ‘hidden boss’ who will make people cooperate and make things happen once we go away. Many of our recommended procedures rely on 'committees' to plug this gap. In philosophical terms this is known as 'infinite regression'. We never actually pin down who we expect to be in charge with this systemic model of governance. In practice no-one is unless a boss arises or some form of collective governance is discovered.

Those co-ops which have found a way to resolve the lack of competency in cooperative behaviour skills out perform everything else. They can take and adapt other hard skills, recognising where they fit and where they don’t fit a cooperative business environment.We see this all over the world where cultures are less hierarchical and more egalitarian. The ideology of class runs deep in Britain.

>Essentially it's process versus system. Most management theory is based on the idea that organisations exist and are controllable systems, therefore executives can focus on the hard skills, planning, control, organisation, development, marketing, and the operatives service the systemic processes.

The new kind of post–systems process theory says the organisation does not exist as a 'reified' thing. Organisational reality is the (web of) relationships between the people and specifically the interplay of responsive communications between them. This merely gives the illusion of a system. (A web of) relationships cannot be controlled but it can be coordinated and facilitated. (The concept of a web is also a reified systemic concept, a social object which has no independant reality outside of our ideology, use with care)

Hierarchical organisations (including large corporate co-ops) can force people to fit the illusion. Collective cooperatives cannot. So systemic tools, hard skills, don’t work by themselves in egalitarian cooperatives.

Much cooperative development support is like generic business support and fails to address the soft skills, the relating skills ( communications. decisionmaking, collective working etc) without which small coops struggle to action the tools and plans. Because British people do not know how to relate to each other cooperatively. Its not in our culture unless it is oppositional, reactive and defensive, eg trades unions or football fandom.

Consequently we help people set up co-ops to struggle in a swamp of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. No wonder they fail to grow as businesses or abandon cooperative principles in order to grow ( by instituting hierarchy and it's attendant alienation).

Thankfully new form of organisation arising from the activist movement are addressing these issues, group facilitation, concensus decisionmaking, non violent communication, emergent strategy are not alien concepts to the post systems generation even though they remain so to ours. Maybe they will see the need for a priori soft skills training.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace BBC2

This thought provoking series by Adam Curtis on the BBC (watch it on iplayer) sets out to dismantle 'the great myths of our time'. Namely that self-organising human systems always end up as repressive, whether 70s communes or 2010s ukuncut networks. ( Google 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness' for a classic view of what goes wrong)

Curtis' mistake is trying to apply systems based organisational thinking to organisations which are not even quasi-systems but complex networks of relationships. You need to use complex responsive process thinking to understand them (see previous posts).

Using the term 'self-organising systems' to describe human organisation is a category error. You can use it with ants or bees or other non-sentient creatures but not humans with free will.

Many organisations looked like systems because hierarchical power forced the people in them to behave like automatons in a predictable and controllable system for the purpose of extracting value for the owners. So Curtis talks about feedback loops and cybernetics. And the first ideas about ecosystems which were systems based thinking.

Let's go back to thinkers who were,nt tainted by our prejudices and assumptions. Kant said that it was ok to view assemblages of things in the world 'as if' they were systems (ie that the 'whole' governs the constituent parts) but you could not prove they were. And you could never assume that human organisations were systems because humans have free will and can choose at any time to not obey rules. Therefore human organisations cannot be systems because systems require rules. No rules=no system.

All this old cybernetic stuff is now failed and discredited in relation to human organisation. It was those ideas which led to the horrors of soviet communism and fascist communes. Individuals didn’t matter, only the whole. Using systems based logic these 'systematic' organisations MUST result in repression, it's the only way they can work, logically, within systems theory. You have to have a 'controller' even if it is an elected dictatorship. And then the system tends towards autocracy.

The first computers permitted much more complicated systems management and hence more complicated systematic oppression of humans into limited choices. That was a quantitative change permitting multi-national capitalism to emerge. web2 is a qualitative change because it enables complex communication relationships not merely complicated broadcast and response communication relationships like web1.

The modern network 'connectives' as these new organisations are being called, are not based on systems thinking at all. They are based on communication and processes of relating.

We can now have this type of organisation because communications technology permits real time relating for large numbers of people, at a distance from each other and asynchronous (ie not present at the same time) for the first time in human history. So we don’t have to simplify human relationships to that of master and slaves, boss and employees or even executive leadership team and associates, anymore. In our work and political relationships, we can be as human as we are within our smaller family and friendship groups .

Which is why this is the age of cooperation and not capitalism (at least as we have known it).

Unfortunately while people are acting increasingly as complex relating humans in their public lives, they are still thinking like systems theory restricted automatons. The error made by Adam Curtis. But it's still a fascinating series. The film of Ayn Rand being interviewed....my medic wife said 'that woman is clearly psychotic' and she was Alan Greenspan's guru.

Humans are Not the Dominant Species on Earth

We have created artificial intelligence and it is destroying our world and the means of our existence. This chilling piece is from http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/10-hypotheses-about-abundance-and-the-commons/2010/11/21

"Unfortunately, we created corporations and gave them life before Asimov drew up his Three Laws of Robotics. The First Law was: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” The Second: “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.” We would be much better off today if all corporations – which, like robots, are man-made automata – were constrained by these laws.

Our legal systems instead put into these business automata a single urge – to seek profits. This one-track mind has made them take over commonly-held sources of abundance – from seeds, to land, to knowledge – and turn these into monopolies because it is profitable to do so. What they could not take over, they have undermined or sabotaged, to create artificial scarcity. Corporations have destroyed the fertility of our soils, substituting commercial synthetics in their place; they have stopped the natural flow of mothers’ milk in favor of commercial formula; they have bought out independent seed companies, to force-feed us with genetically-modified toxic foods, all in pursuit of profit. They have become, in Wolfgang Hoeschele’s words, “scarcity-generating institutions”.

We conceded to corporations legal personhood, turning them into a de facto man-made species of business automata. They have become super-aggressive players in our political, economic, and social worlds. Beating us in our own game, they have taken over governments, economies, and media. Having become masters in domesticating Homo sapiens, they now house, feed, train and employ tamed humans to serve as their workhorses, pack mules, milking cows, watchdogs, stool pigeons and smart asses.

Thus, I will argue, corporations are now the dominant species on Earth. They routinely ignore human orders, injure human beings and foul up ecosystems in violation of laws for automata; these man-made mammoths now occupy the top of the food chain and have become the greatest threat to our well-being and the survival of many species on this planet

We face, it seems, three fundamental and interrelated challenges in the twenty-first century:

First, we must reacquire a species consciousness as Homo sapiens and reestablish our connections with the natural world. With our conscious mind, unique intelligence and creative powers, the human, says a new story of creation, is the Universe’s way of looking at itself and appreciating its own beauty, origins, evolution and grandeur. For this, we carry a huge burden of responsibility to the rest of the living world, now dying under a great wave of extinctions.

Second, we must free ourselves from corporate control. This basically involves learning to keep ourselves healthy through the right natural environment, food and protection from the elements, and raising our young under the new mindset, without depending on corporations. We must rely instead on each other and on commonly-held sources of abundance we ourselves can build and maintain.

Third, we must reestablish control over corporations. This involves reprogramming them to obey Asimov’s three laws for automata, and hunting down disobedient corporations. Eliminating the disobedient from the corporate gene pool is the first step in reclaiming our role as stewards of the natural world and masters of our own creations.

Given the powers of the corporate species, these are daunting tasks indeed. But they are also tasks worthy of Homo sapiens."

Hmmmm that's thought provoking.

Redundancy Efficiency Creativity

For centuries human organisations and endeavours have sought to be efficient, to use as few resources as possible to achieve the ends desired. It is the number one goal in 20^th century management theory, underpinning that whole systems theory based ideology.

But what if this was just a symptom of an age of scarcity? In nature, biological systems are rarely efficient in the way that Ansoff (the father of strategic management) or Taylor (of scientific management fame) would recognise. Millions of sperm but only one 'succeeds' to use 20^th century thinking. Gazillions of bacteria, if they all succesfully reproduced we would be buried under mountains of them.

It is the reproduction costs that have caused our obession with 'efficiency'. If the reproduction cost of a book is several years of a monk's life, you want efficiency. You don't want lots of rewrites. When the cost of reproduction is zero or close to zero, as it is in this digital age, efficiency is no longer a determining factor. Or more importantly, a commercially significant factor in competitive performance.

Think about this. To be competitive in the 21^st century, if you can change your business to be information based (and most can be shifted towards selling information with the hard goods being a decreasing part of the operation. The classic 70% customer facing ; 30% backroom personnel split), you no longer need to be efficient. Because it doesnt matter, because you aren't wasting anything. If redundant activity generates benefit, you are in net gain.

What is the advantage of this? Creativity and novelty. In nature, redundancy is the necessary by product of evolutionary change. Novelty arises due to inefficient reproduction. Not all sperm are identical. In some, reproductive mistakes have occurred to create variety and novelty. Just as Nature cannot predict which 'sports' (as farmers call accidental mutations) will be more 'successful' until they are tried in practice, the sperm which due to a 'malfunction' in its chemical pathways is able to swim a tiny bit faster than others, so we cannot predict what new ideas will be successful in business. Many have tried. Many 20^th century strategic choice theorists, Michael Porter for example, have tried to design 'betting systems' by examining the form of the market and betting on specific directions for business development.

In practice, the evidence of the effectiveness of these games is slight. In my practical experinece (30 years across public, private and social economy sectors) they just dont work. They don't predict the future in any meaningful way. Analysis, review, hindsight, certainly, but looking into the future they are no better than good old MOTS (do More Of The Same). This is the view of post-systems management theorists such as Ralph Stacey and 'just do it' pragmatists like Tom Peters. Planning works for dinosaur businesses which can dominate markets but not for the little mammals trying to get out from under their feet. And when the environment changes......

In my prevous blog I wrote about swarm intelligence, how ants use seemingly redundant behaviour, wandering about 'aimlessly' plus good communications to construct highly complex behaviour patterns. They find something good or bad, communicate it and provoke a collective response by communicating the information.

Humans have spent many years avoiding this. Stuffing our fellow humans into non-complex processes in factories or call centers, causing stress and unhappiness as a consequence. Because we can't use swarm intelligence? Because our class based society has a horror of redundant behaviour (if it costs the boss money 'stop the talking on the production line'. Even though much of this apparently idle chat may be about correcting the errors that otherwise clog up Quality Control at the end of the line.)

The problem for bosses is that self-initiating, self-directed behaviour undermines control. Who can tell what would happen if operatives were encouraged to talk to customers and suppliers and design their own work? Is this another reason why executive directed, elite controlled businesses are so 'last century'?

And what would businesses which behaved in this organically redundant fashion be constructed like? Instead of linear business information processing we would have to see 'at the point of need' flexible IT support with underlying and automated billing procedures. So that the operative/ marketeer wouldn't need to know anything about how the business admin is going to get payment or effect delivery for that little bit of extra business. If he did it would not be efficient.

So what should we be looking for as our guiding light in an age of redundancy and low/no cost production. Roberto Verzola, at the International Conference on the Commons, Berlin, Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2010, says it is reliability.

He says that in an age of abundance (of information, data, relationships, networking) what people now want is reliability. He says we live in a new age of information 'commons'. Unlike old style grazing grounds our e-commons cannot be degrade by over grazing (although Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom showed that the 'tragedy of the commons' was a fabrication if commons based economies were left to find an equilibrium). The more these new data commons are used the stronger and more sustainable they become.

Reliability means customers get what they actually want, when they want it and whenever they want it. Personal service, at their convenience, predictably for an indefinite future.

The law of requisute variety says that the onlt way to ensure this complexity of demand is satisfied is to use a systems controller of equal complexity, human minds. Any IT system must be less complex (the human mind is the most complex thing in the known universe).

Wasteful processes are often more sustainable because they are, like natural processes, more diverse. 'Duplication' that horror word for old style business process engineers, can actually be a good if it ensures there are alternative channels for production if the main one 'goes down'.

Many 1990s management studies highlighted the importance of social capital in maintaining sustainable business processes. The implicit knowledge actioned by participants in their organic relationships with colleagues, without thinking, that keep business processes running. For example, Jenny just knows that if Johnny is on holiday she had better check that Jilly knows about Jackie's foibles in how she wants her order. You can't keep track of the complexity of those kind of relationships. Implicit knowledge cannot be 'surfaced' and written down, Many attempts at doing so have failed.

These elements of the complexity of human thought and behaviour can only be practiced, they cannot be prefigured and designed. But we can design dehumanising production lines.

This is why business process re-engineering was such a disaster with 80% of BPR initiatives resulting in decreased performance, because it destroyed the social relationships and social capital that kept old 'inefficient' processes running. BPR is fine for production line drones but not for any creative customer facing business. In that you need the complexity of human behaviour to meet the complexity of human behaviour from customers.

In an age of redundancy and ever faster change, production lines are too slow to change. We must rely more on duplication and redundant behaviour to find new and better ways of doing work. Even work which is resource costly.

For example a warehouse collating orders for customers. It can be designed so that order pickers just do as they are told brutally efficiently. But what the customer wants is the best fit with their current requirements. A brutally efficient operation delivers what the customer thought they wanted when they placed the order. It is conceivable to have the order pickers wired up with real time stock levels for different products, new 'just in stock' products, and with access to the latest CRM information for specific customers, in real time communication with customers and collating their order in collaboration with the customer.

Undoubtedly many suggestions would be redundant but this active relationship marketing could generate far higher sales than the production line of 'old information' order fulfillment of today.

What would you do if the Amazon order picker rang you up on your mobile as you were on your way to work and said, I can give you your favourite author's new book at 50% off because I'm about to pick his old book to fulfill your order and the new one is in the next bin and did you know this author likes that music and you might like it too. This is already done by Amazon of course using IT intelligence at the ordering stage (when it is easy to ignore). Many other businesses could do it using humans, a vastly more complex tool than any software.

But the core of this argument is that prefigurative , simplifying, predictive, set, business processes are no longer fit for purpose, even in normal business, that is, outside of information reproduction enterprise.

Business which are class based, with controllers and controlled, are less likely to be able to adapt to this new redundant work style.