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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Hidden assumptions have power — more power than evidence, than logic, than the formal axioms and postulates required for mathematical and geometric proofs.

We use them to reach conclusions just as surely as Pythagoras relied on the parallel postulate, and because they’re unconscious we don’t know we’ve based our decisions on them.

We’ve been talking about the so-called digitalization of business and one of its most important but rarely mentioned driving forces, the ETG — the embedded technology generation. The ETG stands one of IT’s hidden assumptions on its head, namely that your average employees paint Wite-Out® on their computer monitors to correct word processing mistakes.

So listen up: The ETG has never heard of Wite-Out®. And while very few generational generalizations hold up to even the shallowest scrutiny, this one does: Your average member of the ETG doesn’t think twice about learning new technology. That’s assumed, and often fun.

And they certainly don’t worry that different systems have different user interfaces. That’s assumed too — otherwise, having learned how to use Reddit they’d get all flustered and nervous over the prospect of also figuring out World of Warcraft.

But they don’t. There’s a reason the iPad doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and it isn’t that the iPad’s user interface is so intuitively obvious that anyone who picks one up automatically knows what to do with it.

Nope. It’s that the iPad’s early adopters figured they could figure it out by just poking around, and anything they couldn’t figure out that way they could Google, just as they can Google cheat codes for a game if they get stuck.

Apple understood this mentality and took advantage of it. That’s Apple’s hidden assumption.

Your average IT shop, on the other hand, is built on the assumption … the hidden assumption … of widespread employee technophobia.

There’s one place this assumption does partially stand up, though, and that’s in many companies’ executive suites.

Understand, this isn’t because the executives in question are stupid or ignorant. It’s because (and I’m going to hate myself for explaining it this way) they only understand the technologies underpinning the digital revolution (social media, big data analytics, mobile, and all the rest) in their heads. That is, they can and often do understand the evidence and logic supporting their importance.

But they don’t get it in their gut. (See? I told you I’d hate myself.)

Here’s what I mean:

In his groundbreaking Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kanneman explained where non-linear-logic-based thinking is entirely reliable, and even preferable. The perfect exemplar: recognizing people you know. You don’t need to create a logical narrative to prove the person you’re looking at is your old friend Frank. You recognize Frank’s face and that’s that.

For you, that is. If you want to prove it’s Frank to someone else, that’s when you need to produce his driver’s license.

Relatively few corporate executives are members of the ETG, and as a result they need the driver’s license. They don’t have an internal picture of how it all hangs together and makes easy sense. No matter how receptive they might be to the idea of a digitally transformed organization, they can’t live the reality the same way they recognize a face.

Does this mean they have to start hanging out on Facebook, sharing photos with Snapchat, and arguing with total strangers on Reddit, tossing out f-bombs while they do?

Mebbe, mebbe not. A lot depends on where their customers hang out and how they spend their time.

Either way, IT doesn’t have to be all that involved.

It’s like this. Many television programs now sport interactive websites that are complements to the show, to be experienced concurrently, in real time.

If someone had asked my opinion of the idea, I’d have waved it off as pointless. I want to be immersed in a program I’m watching. Visiting a website? It destroys the experience.

For me, that is, along with my fellow neocodgers. Programming aimed at us shouldn’t have real-time mobile or website accompaniment.

But the ETG multiplexes by long habit.

I imagine they do while at work, too. You aren’t just selling to the ETG. You’re hiring members, too, and they multiplex when they’re your employees, too. Have your workplace policies kept up?

Too often, our industry’s prognosticators talk about digitalization as a portfolio of discrete, possibly complementary game-changing technologies.

But it’s more profound than that: It’s a different mental model of business, one in which pervasive technology is assumed, not decided.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The leisure society was once a science fiction staple. These were stories built on a world in which production was so largely automated, and society was, as a consequence, so wealthy that most people lived comfortably on what amounted to but wasn’t called welfare.

Speaking arithmetically but not politically or macroeconomically, here in the U.S. of A., with an average annual per-household income that exceeds $110,000, we could live in this society whenever we chose.

And as a society we might need to start a serious conversation along these lines fairly soon. Why?

We’ve now reached pre-crash employment levels, but that’s the number of jobs.

While corporate profits are way beyond their 2007 levels, the annual compensation for your average job is much lower. The logical conclusion? Companies didn’t need many of the high-paid employees they laid off during the Great Recession in the first place.

You can be sure automation is an important reason, in spite of the suspicion common among business executives that left to its own devices, IT would spend on “technology for technology’s sake.”

IT never did spend on technology for technology’s sake, of course, although it did operate under the assumption that automating manual work made a company more efficient … an entirely reasonable assumption.

But accuse someone of something often enough and they’ll become timid and defenseless, so IT stopped actively looking for automation opportunities and instead actively participated in the establishment of increasingly elaborate governance mechanisms designed to prevent a problem that had never existed in the first place.

Enter Generation Whatever. Call them Millennials. Call them Recent Teenagers. Call them the Embedded Technology Generation (ETG).

Businesses are increasingly virtual. More and more employees have no employer-provided office. Taking my colleagues and myself in Dell Global Business Consulting as an example, we’ve all met fewer of each other face-to-face than otherwise, and yet we’re able to function in teams more or less on demand.

And none of us belong to the ETG, which means we’re somewhat less likely to use all the tools available to us to collaborate remotely, compared, that is, to employees who consider Facebook, Twitter and texting to be How People Share Ideas.

The ETG changes things. It’s time for aged managers to stop reading nonsensical articles about how, for “them,” it’s all about “me.” Of course it’s about me. This is capitalism — being all about me is a bedrock assumption, one that, in other contexts, business leaders celebrate.

It’s time for those of us in leadership roles who find ourselves geezing from time to time (you’re geezing when you criticize how others live their lives instead of enjoying your own) … where was I?

If you’re geezing too, here’s how to understand the difference between us and the ETG: your last rental car. Did you panic when you got behind the wheel, because the car’s user interface was different from the one you drive at home?

Of course not. You took a minute to orient yourself. You found the wipers, turn signals, headlight switch and so on, and whether you had to insert a key or just push the start button. And off you went.

That’s how the ETG thinks about technology. They don’t just figure it out — they expect to figure it out, and then they use Google to find possibilities they weren’t able to figure out for themselves.

I say “they” because I’m only about halfway there, and I say this with some regret.

Here’s what’s even more regrettable:

In more companies than not, information technology adroitness isn’t even considered important enough to be part of an employee’s performance appraisal. Sending documents to team members as attachments is, for example, considered just as acceptable as sending links to the central SharePoint copy, no matter how much more difficult it makes merging edits and new sections, and no matter how much chaos it creates in the form of everyone having to figure out which version is the current version.

The thought of authoring a project deliverable as a wiki? What’s a wiki? Of creating a client presentation with Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Uh uh. Prezi isn’t company-standard software, and besides, what’s Prezi?

Astonishingly, in many companies, it wouldn’t occur to someone who doesn’t know the answer to Google it to find out.

Meanwhile, the ETG would have installed it at home and figured it out, because that’s what you do with interesting technology.

If corporations are people too, maybe they should start to think this way, too.

It’s time for corporate America to join the ETG.

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