The Groaning Drones That Clone

The 18th century is one of great reckoning for the human race. It is then that stalwarts like James Watt and Samuel Crompton who dreamed of going beyond the confines of human limitations. They devised methods  of compounding limited intellect with compartmentalization to produce mass scale.

Each blue collar employee had one great fault. It could not combine efficiency with speed to produce effectiveness. There was a payoff between the two and either one had to be compromised to effect the other.

The industrial revolution changed that formula. Speed and quality were now directly proportional to each other rather than inversely. This was the game changer that took us from bullock carts to mechanized cars. Each single worker focussed on a task or function leading to specialization. Different such functions created an optimized process. A hive of such processes created an efficient factory of effective cost benefit ratios.

The job of the white collar was now devoted to mind rending while the blue collar was limited to muscle  bending. The executives created the processes that employed standard procedures. These procedures were then drilled into the shop floor to bring about uniformity. Workers wore uniforms and worked in uniform with their colleagues to mass produce goods for consumption that had homogeneity in dimensions, be it size, smell, taste, feel, or use.

But in this cycle of repeatability and reproducibility a critical natural skill was forcibly suppressed. Personal creativity lost out to cluster confined commerciality. What was created is a workforce of drones programmed to run mechanically from clock-in to clock-out employed to run the same job at the same interval to produce the same output.

Today, the 21st century reveres the spinning mill tenets. Competition has created a need for cost-effective environment where all functions and their underlying processes are industrialized. Every task, job, and interaction is scripted for efficacy. The mantra has crossed the border of product manufacture into the realms of services and non-tangibles. Personalization is a cost factor and so is creativity. Yet organizations seek ways to vault over their competitors. How can they create new winning formulae without innovation. And how can innovation occur without creativity? And how can creativity flow from a mindless workforce employed for efficiency?

How can the groaning drones running jobs involving cloned processes to expel planned outputs ever create a new way of being? Do we dare think or just go about doing our jobs?