Posted by Who among us has not dreamed of having a double at home and occasionally sending him to school for a class, to work if we happen to have a difficult conversation with the boss, or to clean our room for us while we go to the movies. There have already been many feature films about the creation or existence of characters similar to us and feeling the same emotions, such as “The Double” (“The Double”) directed by Richard Ayoade, “Vertigo” (“Vertigo”) by Alfred Hitchcock and “Person” (“Persona”) by Ingmar Bergman.
Even I had my double for a while, when I was running a training company and my fellow camera operator Jacek Nawrat decided to clone me in this film:
As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, one of my favorite books from my childhood is the book titled. “The Double of Professor Rawa” (“Sobowtór Profesroa Rawy”) by Alfred Szklarski, which tells the story of a brilliant professor who builds his double in a laboratory in his home. A dozen years later, I graduated with a degree in management and a degree in electronicsz and then began to work on replacing the manager with a robot. Still later I became a university professor. For years I forgot about my favorite book, and it was only when I showed a close friend this blog and told her about what I was doing that she realized that “The Double of Professor Rawa” (“Sobowtór Profesroa Rawy”) was the beginning of this path.
If you are a manager, how then can you build your double?
The answer, of course, is beyond the capacity of this one blog post, and part of the answer is contained in my book “The System of Organizational Terms” here:
Therefore, I will now write a short recipe for your manager’s double, and you will find the details in other blog entries:
- Construct as many online managerial tools as possible that you will use to solve various organizing problems in your managerial work. The more tools there are and the more they cover with their functionality what you do, the better. Of course, you then have to use them.
- Build into these tools a mechanism for monitoring your behavior – everything you do must be recorded. Every click on the screen, mouse movement, word typed in tables, and it would even be good to connect other sensors, such as location: where you are, who you are physically meeting with, and when you are conducting a meeting, whether you are walking around the room or sitting at your desk. None of this data should ever be overwritten by other data.
- Make your online management tools available to your team members. They are, after all, working alongside you, so they need to use them as well. Their work also needs to be monitored.
- Work with your team on a project or on the cyclical activities of your company for a longer period of time using these managerial tools, for example, for a year. A system that includes online managerial tools will gather knowledge about what activities you undertake, when, how long it takes, who you work with, what content you develop, what results you achieve, etc.
- Develop methods for (a) pattern recognition and (b) machine learning so that (a) after a year’s work you can determine what behavioral patterns you have (you certainly have them, just as you have your habits when you go to work in the morning), and then so that the system can learn (b) new situations and what managerial actions to trigger in a given business situation.
- Stay in touch with the system containing online managerial tools, but let the system act for you. Teach the system, but let it take action on your behalf. It is, after all, already your manager’s double!
Although the above list of tasks leading up to the robot manager may seem like a fantasy to you, I accomplished some of these tasks using the TransistorsHead.com system http://transistorshead.com/. If you want to see how it works, email me.
In future posts, I will graphically depict the above tasks and show the results of the research I am doing to build such a manager double.