Credit Management magazine April 2018

TECHNOLOGY
pretty basic and rarely worked properly.
Computers were no exception to the rubbish
tech rule of the 1980s and back then we were
certainly easily amused. During Christmas
1983, changing the colour of my screen
from cyan to magenta on my Commodore
16 was perceived as the absolutely height
of technical sophistication and if you could
make it automatically flash between the two
colours you thought you were destined for
great things! We called it technology but to
my eight- and six-year old sons it seems only
one up from fire and inventing the wheel!
They think Dot Matrix is a Great Aunt!
As basic as it may have been we still
spent hours upon hours being told by the
grey box that there was a ‘syntax error’
or the ‘string is too long.’ These days of
waiting for things to load (sometimes I
would have my tea while I waited!) hang
long in my memory. If my Father reads this
I am sure he will remember how 80s Tech
brought anguish and anxiety to 80s families
trying to help their frustrated children. He
would spend ages trying to fix that syntax
code for me just so I could go ‘ooooh’ at a
coloured pentagon for a few minutes before
I got bored!
TANGIBLE ADVANTAGES
However, as basic as that all seems, there
were the tangible advantages of learning
some skills from this early technology. To
achieve those fairy steps in technological
advancement you had to actually use your
brain, which would mean working through
something and then enjoying the fruits of
your labour when you got to the end of your
programming task. As Heinz used to say
when selling its ketchup in the 80s ‘the best
things come to those who wait’ and believe
me it did and it does. We sometimes would
cheer when something actually happened on
that computer!
The point is that back then you had to
understand a set of rules and be able to apply
them to get your reward, a bit like practising
law which is what I do. Practice of course
makes perfect. Doing a task which requires
a degree of thought forms and fuses the
synapses in your brain until the familiarity of
experience eventually turns a beginner into
an expert - which importantly for business is
a person you could turn to when things get
confusing or require a judgement call to be
made.
What concerns me massively is that I am
witnessing a silent shift in the way in which
we all work and we are watching it float by
us, hoping it won't cause any harm. Nobody
has realised that every expert was once a
beginner and AI certainly hasn't figured this
bit out! The modern-day advantage of having
access to libraries of online information and
tools to work quicker and more efficiently is
currently failing, in my opinion, to defeat the
negative outcome of a worker’s opportunity to
become an expert as described above. It is also
damaging the worker’s positive experience
of work, which is a crucial aid to learning. I
mean whoever did well at school in a subject
they didn’t enjoy! To get the most out of a
workforce they have to enjoy what they do and
the monotony of repetition AI tends to create
will not achieve this goal. Dumb it down with
AI and your workforce will switch off so you
have to find a balance.
EXPOSED SITUATIONS
A junior worker's ability to be exposed to
situations where their neural pathways
become deeper as their experience and
exposure to solving their particular set of
bespoke work problems is very important
but this opportunity is quickly diminishing
faster than ever because all this technology,
we are hell-bent on convincing ourselves
must be the answer without questioning it,
is reducing those important opportunities to
learn. It is happening in every sector - not just
law and credit where I work. The opportunity
to master something is not as present as it
once was and instead of having that precious
time to wade through the treacle of a problem
and wrestle with it, it seems that the T1000 is
taking workers by the hand and tip-toing with
them across their neural pathways, leaving
little impression on them. The end result is
a frustrated worker who doesn’t understand
or even remember how they got to their
destination when completing a task. A worker,
who as a consequence loses his sense of
achievement or worse still, never experiences
it. They just punch their keyboard day-in, dayout
because the computer tells them to - we
need to stop this.
During Christmas 1983,
changing the colour of my screen
from cyan to magenta on my
Commodore 16 was perceived
as the absolutely height of
technical sophistication and if
you could make it automatically
flash between the two colours
you thought you were destined
for great things!
The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / April 2018 / PAGE 18