Is Another Wave of the Productivity Paradox about to Engulf your Team?
The productivity paradox is generally attributed to Nobel laureate Robert Solow following his quip that… “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”[1].
He made this quip in 1987. If we apply Moore’s law that computing power doubles every two years, computers should now be over five hundred thousand times more powerful [2].
Have we converted computers with half a billion times more power into similar productivity increases? Certainly not.
Instead of creating hyper-productive teams, we have unleashed this computing power into our worlds and blurred the distinction between work and home lives. The snip on this article of screen time includes working solidly from 8-11.45pm.
It is recognised at the top of the tech industry, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stating “Eighty-five percent of the managers think their employees are slacking off work, 85 percent of employees think they are working too hard and are burned off. And it’s real data!”[3].
Leaders have a role to break this cycle and learn how to create an environment where the computing power serves their teams.
And the time for action is now. People are talking about how we can unleash Artificial Intelligence to make people more efficient… But just take a minute to think about how life will get for your teams if we accidentally use the AI algorithms to amplify the inefficiency they come across. Those burn out rates could get close to 100%…
But help is at hand, in the Luxembourg School of Business’s new one day workshop ‘Productivity for Industry 4.0’, we will explore the novel approaches to management to help your teams build an actionable plan to surf the wave of new technologies away from the productivity paradox into more meaningful and satisfying work.
[1] Robert Solow, “We’d better watch out”, New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, page 36.
