There was an article I was reading about how all of the HR tasks might be augmented or taken over by AI. The part about how L&D might be helped by bots coaching people made me think about the power dynamics exist within feedback systems within organizations.
The issue will be who owns the bot coach.
If it is the company there will be coaching given based on what the org (and the manager) wants from the employee. If you think a PIP is hard now, just imagine a bot watching your every move and critiquing it and judging whether you are in compliance with your PIP.
I feel uncomfortable about any PIP because of the power dynamics. Why isn’t the manager on a PIP because the employee isn’t performing? But as my coach reminded me the other day: “what if the manager is on a PIP?”
It feels like the real agency is whether your methods of change is based on your consent or coercion. Feedback shouldn’t be based on someone else’s version of how you should perform. As complex agents what people really want are complex beings that will expect them to do great things that they don’t expect.
That also requires them to fail and do the wrong thing sometimes. As Turing said:
“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
I’ve struggled to explain this to people I’ve worked with. Having a “growth mindset” doesn’t mean you will always act on everyone’s feedback. Sometimes it means you will listen to the feedback and say “think you but I’m not going to take action on it.” The leaders I told this to laughed and said that wasn’t the growth mindset.
We have a real issue in the way we deal with feedback and the need to performance manage people. More bossware isn’t what we need. We need more love that goes along with the power of management (and HR).
Axioms at play here:
Issues around agency, impact, and power are fractal.
Doing something that doesn’t fit shouldn’t be something that is bad for an organization—it should be a wake up call.
Feedback is different from judgement.