By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The master narrative being test written in many board rooms today features a new digital world. This new world presents modern executives with challenges not entirely dissimilar to those described in Dean Acheson’s autobiography Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. Truman’s Secretary of State and his colleagues were confronted with a post-War world very few understood and which was new to everyone. That world required new maps, new mental models, new skills, new institutions and new roles. Members of the C-Suite today may similarly be thought to be present at the creation of a new digital world. In most enterprises today the New Digital World narrative is incomplete. The chapters associated with what has changed are well on their way to completion. The chapter related to what should be done about these changes is still in the conceptual stage.

The ancient Greeks with the 15,693 verses of the Iliad and the 12,110 verses in the Odyssey had a foundational text which set forth “thought models of honour, proper conduct and correct language” [S.A. Paipetis, The Unknown Technology in Homer Location 68]. Dark Age Christians had The Ladder of Divine Ascent which described the thirty stages of spiritual development by which monks and hermits could achieve spiritual salvation. Unfortunately no such “what to do” manual exists for New Digital World success.

Are We Doing Digitization Wrong?

Futurists in England [see Richard Watson, Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing Our Minds, Why This matters and What We can Do About It] warn us that our children, our teenagers and non-working mothers are spending way too much time in front of computer, phone or mobile screens. He cautions that large portions of the population have become “google-eyed…scrolling through our days without thinking deeply about what we are really doing or where we are really going.”

Steve Davis, the dazzlingly brilliant chief architect emeritus at Disney is a deep strategic thinker who routinely collects data regarding how technology is being used in the modern workplace. He was surprised to learn that very few organizations bother to analyze how employees actually interact with the technology.

Former editors at The Harvard Business Review worry that “Google is making us stupid.” And as if that is not enough, research conducted at the University of Connecticut by Donald J. Leu documents that a separate gap has emerged, with lower-income students lagging more affluent students in their ability to find, evaluate, integrate and communicate the information they find online.

Is There a “Right Way” to Think about Digitization?

Don’t let a couple devices, some headlines and a documentary or two fool you. Despite protestations to the contrary – society, while surrounded by technology, while supposedly defined by the digital cornucopia – has not fully embraced and is in no way ready to go all-in regarding digital transformation.

There is technology and there is technology use. There are technologists and there are technology users. It is time we bring these two communities together. This gap is not new. Peter Freese & Charles B. Harris in The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction remind us that:

the Balkanized relationship of art and science, which British physicist-cum-novelist C.P. Snow christened the “Two Cultures” in his [in]famous 1959 Rede lecture, has remained a persistent theme in cultural criticism for the past half-century.

In that lecture Snow described a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” existing between literary intellectuals and scientists.

In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut – whose early novels had first appeared as paperbacks because their SciFi themes disqualified them as “serious” literature – lamented that universities appeared to be institutionalizing antagonisms between scientists and humanists:

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works…[…]Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged […] to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day.

Leadership’s next chapter will be to bridge this gap.

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