Who wants to buy a double manager? Part 3

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In previous posts I described how you can make yourself a double manager. “To yourself” I write in quotation marks, because of course it is not a task for one afternoon, but it is also not very complicated. It only requires perseverance, knowledge of managerial techniques, knowledge of the System of organizational terms, programming skills, as well as pattern recognition techniques (supervised and unsupervised), machine learning… Add some self-discipline on the part of the manager and his team, so that they want to use online managerial tools long enough and… uff… manager double ready!

As I mentioned earlier, behind anything simple in appearance or operation, there are thousands of hours of work. This is also the case with the robot manager. I have already done some of these hours of work, and therefore I wanted to show now how the double manager I created managed the new team. And it was like this.

Stage 1.

In June 2021, a team of students (team A) was doing a small project using online management tools on the TransistorsHead.com platform http://transistorshead.com/, which consisted of designing an entertainment program in the format of a Talent Show on the YT channel. Team A had complete freedom to complete the task using the online management tools on TransistorsHead.com. The tools recorded 8 of their management activities. The entire job lasted 36 hours, from 9 a.m. on day one, until 9 p.m. on day two. The team worked partly in one room and partly in a distributed and remote manner. All the work was recorded with the help of online managerial tools, and the managerial actions taken by the team’s manager were cleaned of partially chaotic actions and arranged into an algorithm for dealing with this type of task. Thus, a manager double of this human manager was created, able to carry out the same project.

Stage 2.

In December 2021, Team B was asked to cooperate with an artificial manager posted on TransistorsHead.com. The sequence of managerial actions that the double manager took was the result of analyzing the managerial actions taken by Team A’s manager. In other words, the TransistorsHead.com system was taught by Team A how to perform a task, and during the second part of the study, the system played the role of the artificial manager to Team B. During the second part of the study, the members of team B saw on the screen what managerial actions to take at the moment and 5 managerial actions that the artificial manager wanted to take in the future, along with the time to start them.

It turned out that the manager double, or an artificial manager, was mostly ignored by Team B. Very few managerial actions taken by team members coincided with those imposed by the robot manager. Only 17% of them were initiated within 5 seconds or less of the artificial manager’s command, including 8% by the artificial manager’s assistant designated by the researcher. Team B members simply ignored the artificial manager’s commands. For example, the artificial manager gave the command to set (or re-set) goals 157 times, while team members took this action a total of 111 times. The artificial manager instructed to create, correct or simply see what decision options could be considered 212 times, while team members responded only 76 times. Interestingly, Team B members attempted to prepare a meeting as many as 4 times, while the artificial manager did not once mention this managerial action. Admittedly, the sum of the instructions given by the artificial manager to all the managerial actions taken by Team A is similar, but their structure and timing is completely different.

The hiring of a artificial manager for Team B, being a manager double of Team A’s manager, was a complete failure. The study participants themselves – members of Team B – said that the artificial manager simply bothered them!

One may wonder why this was the case. Perhaps it was the form of the artificial manager – completely inhuman, that is, simply a table with tasks to be done. Perhaps if my manager could take the form of a humanoid, could move, speak like a human, exert pressure by his presence, Team B would work according to his instructions.

So, in order for a artificial manager to truly lead a team, do we need to construct a physical figure for ourselves?