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for a Duke Corporate Education (Duke CE) oneday conference to discuss the key element that will make – or break – the future: humans. What was the theme that brought everyone together? The Human Difference – Leadership in the Digital Age. Speakers included banking executives, a candidate astronaut, Google and renowned neuroscientist Dr Vivienne Ming. Typically, forward-looking conferences tend to focus only on technological developments in the workplace of the future. Duke CE’s Johannesburg event, however, takes a different approach. The Human Difference conference seeks to explore how leaders can empower and enable human beings to work with technological developments to achieve great – and good – things.
Prepare for change
Opening the conference, dean of the Fuqua Business School at Duke University, Bill Boulding, tells Dialogue: “I’d like to see people leave the day totally energized, with a sense of excitement about the opportunity, and energized by the responsibility of being human, and bringing human values into our present and into our future at a point in time when it’s easy with technology to push aside humanity and say, ‘We’re going to replace humanity with robots, machine-learning or artificial intelligence.’” Duke CE’s Africa President, Sharmla Chetty, echoes Boulding’s remarks. “Our job is to help executives and their teams prepare for change in a constructive and engaging way, and not through fear,” she says. Chetty adds: “We have seen the results of this approach in the way large corporations suddenly see the opportunities ahead and adapt their organizational culture accordingly to meet the future head-on.”
Voyage of discovery
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One woman who exhibits the spirit of which Chetty speaks is Dr Adriana Marais, one of 100 people selected from around the globe to compete for a one-way ticket to Mars. Dr Marais has signed up to the Mars One project which aims to establish the first human settlement on the Red Planet. “Exploration provides us with the opportunity to find new ways of doing things, new techniques, better and more efficient ideas,” she says. Mars One plans to send several unmanned missions to Mars prior to the arrival of the first humans, the intention being that robots will have built a habitable settlement ready for their human colleagues to populate. Rather than fear a Mars journey, Dr
B R A I N O P T I M I Z AT I O N One key characteristic that fundamentally differentiates humans from sophisticated machines is empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, from the other person’s frame of reference – the ability to place yourself in somebody else’s shoes. This, for now at least, is something that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot do. To experience and openly express empathy, however, a human brain must exist in an environment that:
Four elements make up the optimum atmosphere for the ‘human’ brain
BO NDIN G
B E LON GI N G
HUMAN-C E N T R E D INNOVAT I ON REQUIR E S T H E R I GH T ENV I R ON M E N T IDENTITY
MEANING
exposes us to others’ emotion, i.e. others are encouraged to show emotion feels safe enough to empathize and express empathy ourselves allows us to identify the person – or audience – with which we are trying to empathize gives us the tools to extract meaning from that empathy In other words, we can only be human in an environment that is conducive to humanity. And the responsibility of nurturing such environments, Human Difference 2017 conference organizers argue, falls to leaders. Together with psychologists and behaviour specialists, Duke CE introduces delegates to their new educational course in building the right environment for a humancentred approach: Neuro Signs Immersion. Delegates are handed light-reflective blindfolds and
nightclub-style glowsticks on entering the blacked-out, fabric-swathed cavern that houses the experience. With guidance from the Duke CE team, randomly selected teams are blindfolded then guided through a maze of challenges and experiences designed to break open the mind to expose its human core and permit true, pure innovation. The immersion delves into human behaviour and the need to create social safety to optimize performance. The Neuro Signs model proposes that the optimum environment for innovation and ‘human-centred’ thinking provides employees with four key experiences: bonding, belonging, meaning and identity (see above).
Robots could build a habitable settlement on Mars for humans to populate. Had Marais been born 50 years ago, Mars would be out of reach
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