Wanted: a definition of Human Centric Organizing
Organizations fulfil two quite distinct roles in our civilization. First, they are social technologies for collectively attaining what is individually impossible. Second, they are also communities of connection, meaning and shared purpose, the natural habitat of homo sapiens.
The difficulties organizations face in fulfilling both roles simultaneously seem to have grown steadily with industrialization. It is possible they will grow further as organizations become infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies -which I take here to include everything from predictive analytics to generative AI. Of late, nearly every discussion in a classroom I’ve had about the use and impact of these technologies has eventually surfaced the same question: How can we ensure organizations remain human-centric in the age of AI?
Two challenges immediately arise in thinking about this. Let’s dispose of the minor one first, which could be posed as follows: why should we care about making or keeping organizations human-centric? If they are efficient at generating value and can pay their members enough (one might argue), won’t these members simply take the cash and seek community elsewhere? This is however a vacuous argument in a world in which intrinsic motivation is valuable for production and labour market frictions are real. As every manager comes to recognize, pay is important, but hardly sufficient to get an organization’s members to work their collective magic. Unless you can also offer a social context that they value and want to belong to, you are likely to be dealing with a collection of sullen individuals bound together only by a pay cheque, doing the bare minimum you can coerce them into doing, and looking for the first chance to exit.
The second and more fundamental challenge pertains to defining “human-centricity”: if we are talking about ensuring that organizations continue to offer what humans value (besides pay), what are these attributes? And which humans are we talking about? What, if anything, is universally true about what humans want from the organizations they belong to? Given the enormous variation across cultures and demographics, is even seeking to define human centricity just a form of cultural imperialism?
These are hard questions, but I don’t think we can duck them. The anthropologist Robin Fox once noted that “We could not plead against inhuman tyrannies if we did not know what is inhuman”. If we take the stance that we are all different, and nothing universal can be said about what we value in the organizations we belong to, the risk is that we will fail to take a collective stance against the applications of AI that will end up dehumanizing organizations for all of us. We may recognize, too late, a fundamental unity in what we value — which we might, by then, have lost. Why not try now?
Seventy-five years ago, after the horrors of World War II, the United Nations oversaw the drafting and announcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It was controversial when adopted (eight countries abstained from voting) and remains so to some extent today. Yet its impact is not in doubt- though it has no legally binding status, it has influenced law in many countries, and is seen as the cornerstone of the international human rights regime today. But what I want to highlight here is its intellectual ambition- which was to define what humans universally value (besides -equally ambitiously- advocating that they should get it).
The UDHR is written as a set of rights (e.g., the right to freedom of expression), but one can reverse engineer the assumptions about universal human values that make these rights worth having. This I did, and generated one set of candidates for universal human values that are relevant to organizational life.
Another set of candidates can be derived from the extensive research conducted by psychologists and anthropologists on what are known as “human universals”- human values that seem to exist across nearly all cultures. This does not mean they are equally important everywhere, and there is also significant variation across individuals even within the same culture. However, they do seem to exist, and it is believed they might originate in our shared evolutionary history as a group living species (though is it is also possible that they are the results of convergent cultural evolution or simply diffusion).
The joint consideration of these two sets yields, in my view, a promising set of six candidates for what humans, regardless of their culture or demographics, may see as desirable in the organizations the inhabit. (The usual caveats apply- not all are likely to be equally valued by all). Consider this my hypothesis about what nearly all humans do value positively to at least some degree (and indeed may trade-off to against each other and to some extent, even against pay). These attributes could collectively define what it means to be a “human-centric” organization. These are:
1. Fair treatment (including fair pay)
2. Autonomy and the possibility for participation in organizational decision- making
3. Achievement - opportunities to establish competence and win acclaim in the eyes of others
4. Connection — the opportunity to form close ties and collaborate with others, and feel related/affiliated to them
5. Purpose and meaning- to feel one’s efforts contribute to some objective that is relevant for individuals and the organization itself.
6. Curiosity- opportunities to nurture and fulfil a need for novelty and knowledge.
The implication is simple: if you care about preserving the human-centricity of the organizations you lead (or regulate), ask yourself how the adoption of any particular AI technology- whether to automate some work processes, to hire or promote, or to assist in decision making- will affect the attributes listed above. If the impact is likely to be adverse, you should at least pause. Either steps to mitigate the adverse impacts on these attributes should be taken or in the limit the technology must be foregone. But disregarding these and pressing ahead with adoption under the logic that “if we don’t, somebody else will” seems to be a myopic recipe for collective harm.
In the spirit of making them part of the solution, not the problem, I asked my “committee of AI advisers” (GPT4, Bard and Claude2) to take my list of six attributes and each independently produce a draft for a “Universal Declaration of Employee Rights”. I then integrated their responses by having them comment on each other’s outputs and finally used Claude2 to produce an aggregation by taking the elements I liked best in their individual efforts.
I like the result enough to ask the next set of CEOs who show up in my class why they would not consider adopting it. Do you?
Universal Declaration of Employee Rights
Preamble: Recognizing that all human beings have inherent worth and equal rights, this Declaration affirms that all employees, regardless of role or position, deserve to be treated with dignity, equality, justice and human compassion in the workplace. All people have universal preferences for fair pay, autonomy, recognition, connection to others, purpose, and fulfilment of curiosity. These aspirations are the foundation for the following employee rights:
Article 1: All employees have a right to just and favorable pay commensurate with their skills, experience, and contributions. Wages shall provide a decent standard of living, with equal pay for equal work.
Article 2: All employees have a right to meaningful participation in organizational decisions affecting their work. Open communication, representation, and transparency shall enable shared authority and autonomy.
Article 3: All employees have a right to impartial evaluation and opportunities for advancement based on merit. Recognition shall be given for achievement, initiative, and dedication to their roles.
Article 4: All employees have a right to comradery and collaboration with leadership and coworkers. Human connections shall be fostered through mutual understanding and teamwork.
Article 5: All employees have a right to derive purpose and meaning from their work. Leaders shall provide clarity of mission and enable employees to see their contributions to society.
Article 6: All employees have a right to ongoing education, development, and creativity. Curiosity shall be encouraged through opportunities to gain new knowledge and skills. These universal rights empower all people to realize their full human potential with dignity and justice in the workplace. They are the foundation for cooperative, thriving, and socially responsible organizations.
(The ideas in this essay are drawn from Human-centric Organizing: A Perspective from Evolutionary Psychology by Jayanth Narayanan, Phanish Puranam, Mark Van Vugt :: SSRN and my new book Anthropify: How to put humans at the heart of organizations in the age of AI — coming out in Fall, 2024, Penguin Random House)
