We’re all scrambling for practical solutions for the uncertain future of work. However, there’s a mental shift we need to make, too.
We live in a winner-take-all world and loser ends up with nothing. As kids, we grow up competing for attention in our families, for marks and friends at school and for triumph in sports, theater, debates even in fashion and boy/girlfriend. Later, as we enter the world of work, we learn how to win others over. But we are told that we must always play to win, for losers have no respect in our society. Management literature is full of instructions for “how to win a customer,” “how to win a pitch” or “how to win in the stock market.” In business, politics and most other fields, victory is never bittersweet, and losing is always sour.
We may be able to “fail fast,” as Indian Startup gurus’ advocate it, before a quick pivot — but failing is a far cry from losing, which can be agonizingly slow, with no possibility of full recovery. What has failed can be fixed; what is lost is lost. And it’s a problem. For Generation X, Y and the millennial generation, losing is actually a lost art.
For decades, we’ve been narrowing the space in which we can lose without social stigma. Our obsession with winning has enabled a tyranny of efficiency that views what Eric Clapton called the “space between the notes” not as music, but as waste. Mckinsey smart a*** will view the white on canvas as a potential to increase productivity; it can’t be an art, it’s just a missing color. In an increasingly urban society the only remaining art is the “art of the deal,” where the winners are the best dealmakers, and where everybody gets only what they pay for, is a failed society.
So a dealmaker Donald Trump is a success – even if it means risking word peace –, even social sector workers like Kailash Satyarthi and ‘Medicines Sans Frontiers’ are recognized only after receiving the Nobel Prize. In a climate that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, we are starved of the material and spiritual resources we need to thrive. Economic principles now invade all aspects of our lives. From a market economy, we have morphed into a market society in which business logic consumes the heart of politics and our civic fabric. We have normalized a transactional, zero-sum view of the world.
In the future workplace, losing will become an even more critical trait. Not just as a way to show and form character, but as the character of our times. Work will become a far less reliable vehicle for distributing wealth, assuring economic stability and affirming our identities. With AI, Machine Learning, Software, Automation and Robotics are predicted to replace up to 700,000 in next few years of the human workforce(better expression could be not bots) in the next two decades, we will see many jobs disappear, employment cycles shorten and the gig economy soar. In this new super-flexible workplace, we will have less status, less authority and less control over our work.
Most of us will find ourselves at an unfair disadvantage in competing with ever smarter machines.
What we need to realise is that smart machines are built by the smartest among us; in fact we pick up the smartest for each process and add his/her prowess into developing a solution/AI tool which becomes the basis for all action forward. Faced with machines’ relentless mechanisms of winning, forced into becoming smart machines ourselves, the ultimate bastion of humanity may be our ability to lose. Machines simply stop functioning; they can fail, but they can never lose. Unlike the machines, we can choose to act morally, even and especially if it’s not worth it, if it’s an argument that can’t be won. Winners don’t fight for a lost cause. The rest of us should.
We need to create systems, rituals and supports that allow us to find ourselves even when we lose. These might include peer-to-peer mental health services, career transition counseling, communities that sporadically assemble and offer us shelter from the paths of linear logic. Some basic beginning has been made; Silicon Valley has a fledging club called Fuckup Nights(a loose version is also practiced in shared working spaces in Gurgaon and Bangalore also), global spoken-word series of public confessions from startup founders and business leaders who failed and all the talks are about the failure. Going forward, we will desperately require leaders who have the humility to acknowledge that their wins are never achieved with a great deal of effort (justified most of the times but Pyrrhic at several other times)
The task for all of us will be to lose with class and dignity in order to remind us of something more worthwhile than winning. And the great opportunity ahead will be to understand losing as essential to the human condition: “I lose therefore I am.” In the last football world cup, a majority of us remember Brazil’s 7-1 capitulation to Germany. Brazil Boys were quickly renamed from "CANARINHO" ("LITTLE CANARY") to carrying the “Lanterne Rouge,” a term that recalls the red lantern hanging from the rear of a train’s rear-end. We just don’t have a place in the society for losers. Isn’t it true that the guy at the rear sees a lot more of the race and hence has a lot of rich stories there to tell. Had it not for Morgan Freeman (Ellis Boyd 'Red' in the movie) we could have never heard the story of “The Shawshank Redemption”
As a human race, as we concede ground to the machine thinking, let’s try to look at our lives as one long, evolving concession speech. We ought not to view the professional defeat or the personal loss as just a bump on the road, but embrace the fact that losing is the very basis of our shared humanity. Every day, it becomes more obvious what we’re losing when winning is the only option: everything.
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