Seth Godin knows that “When you get an email from a faceless corporation speaking in the second person, someone is hiding.” He suggests, “it’s slick but it’s not real.”
I love that line—it’s slick but it’s not real—because entrepreneurship and free enterprise are hallmarks of a free people and a flourishing society. But when capitalism becomes strictly about the bottom line, it is only a race to the bottom from there.
When an organization or business forgets the reason that it exists—for human flourishing—and seeks to achieve maximum efficiency, it will naturally and eventually begin to implement unethical and inhuman processes, procedures, and practices.
For example, in order to achieve maximum efficiency, some businesses try to automate as much as possible; and if it can’t be automated, it gets outsourced to someone in a call center with a script.
Think about the experiences you’ve had with a vending machine, an automated car wash, customer service on something you bought online, or even self-checkout stands at the grocery store.
In my own experience, only the self-checkout had a competent human being to help when something went wrong.
And, I can’t tell you how much money I’ve lost to vending machines and car washes over the years–or how much time on the phone trying explain the problem with someone who only knows their script, but is truly incompetent otherwise.
Experiences that are automated and impersonal are cold and frustrating.
And yet, we still see organizations trying to implement more of this, and not only in behemoth corporations, but in churches, schools, and healthcare too.
I concede that there are times when automation is convenient and saves some time. But I would like to propose that just because we can, and just because it might save us money, and just because it might be convenient in one particular way, doesn’t always mean we should.
In my experience, some of the organizations that have been the most effective in terms of their mission are less “corporate,” and more into “personal connection.” They’re less “slick” and more “real.” It’s not that their work becomes personalized, but their service to customers is much more personal. And that often makes all the difference.
If you’re unsure of that, consider why organizations that remove the corporate element and put the customer in touch with real human beings are doing so well? Think, organizations like AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and the numerous decentralized educational platforms, like Kepler Education, that don’t abdicate to technology but instead they leverage available technology to make real human connections.
Unfortunately, being more human and less AI takes a lot of emotional labor and personal responsibility, so few bring themselves to take that route.
The alternative is, at first and on the surface, more attractive. In other words, automation, AI, and scripts may be cold, but they’re efficient if all that matters is a company’s bottom line.
But if human flourishing is the goal, then we can’t hide behind automating technologies and corporate bureaucracies; we need to strive to be more real and less slick.