I have been talking to a number of people recently about the risks and opportunities of automation and augmentation. If automation gets rid of jobs, augmentation should help us become more successful by automating the routine part of our job and providing us with tools to be more productive. One area of interest in many organisations is decision support.<\/p>\n
I was talking to a client who were attracted by this idea and optimistic about new technology improving the decision processes.<\/p>\n
To temper their enthusiasm, I asked them \u201cwhat is your experience with existing decision support technology?\u201d When they told me they didn\u2019t have any I asked if they used Excel?<\/p>\n
Excel has tremendous functionality to support decision-making. As well as the traditional spreadsheet we can also perform sophisticated statistical analyses and display information in a range of different ways. The trouble is that 90% of people don\u2019t know how to use it properly and many find it difficult to ask the right question or understand the outputs of analysis.<\/p>\n
One of my colleagues found significant errors in a business planning spreadsheet and when he tried to point out the problem to its users many people just didn\u2019t understand the concepts \u2013 including one who struggled to understand an average.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of people have never been trained to use this very fundamental tool that they probably use every week. So my number one tip for preparing for augmented working tools is to get training the ones you already have \u2013 your word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and virtual meetings technologies.<\/p>\n
We run a program called compelling virtual facilitation to show people how to design re-engaging and participative WebEx or Skype for business sessions. It\u2019s evident that the vast majority of people have never used a small sample of the engagement tools. A significant proportion don\u2019t even know how to login successfully.<\/p>\n
If we expect more sophisticated tools, and I\u2019m sure they\u2019re coming, we need to start building the behaviours and skills in three critical areas<\/p>\n
Without these abilities we will simply be generating more data and people will be increasingly swamped with information they don\u2019t understand. Longer term perhaps artificial intelligence will develop the ability to ask the right questions and understand the answers but I think that will be a long time coming.<\/p>\n
For a good start right now, why not get people trained in the tools they use every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been talking to a number of people recently about the risks and opportunities of automation and augmentation. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":21294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","type-blog","training-virtual-teams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n