Productivity before permission

Society has always been uneasy about new ways of working. Way back in the sixteenth century, painters began experimenting with the camera obscura. Not a camera as we know it today but an optical device that projected an image onto a surface, allowing an artist to trace its outlines with unprecedented accuracy. We simply don’t know how many of the masters of the time used it as painting moved towards realism. The technology was useful to artists long before its use was accepted rather than seen as somehow cheating.

When I was growing up, doctors were legendary for their bad handwriting. It was a hangover from an earlier time, now overcome by computerisation. The indecipherable prescription, interpretable only by the equally skilled pharmacist, was almost part of the profession. Sometimes what was being prescribed was little more than a placebo, at a time when patients were told far less about their treatment than we would consider acceptable today.

Technology alone wasn’t enough to change the way medicine worked. Prescribing practices that had evolved over generations also required changing expectations about what patients should know, government intervention and the active promotion of new technology. The technology arrived long before the norms around its use caught up.

Today’s students would recognise the conflict. I made a comment in a recent interview with Bloomberg that travelled much further than I expected. I said too many university students see AI as cheating, creating challenges when they enter the workplace. A recent study of university students captured the resulting dilemma perfectly in its title: “Everyone’s using it, but no one is allowed to talk about it.”

Students are using it, but they are learning to use it secretly. Then those students graduate and employers have to unteach much of what they’ve learnt about AI. In the workplace the question is less about whether technology was used and more about whether the work is accurate, useful and accountable. We want an email or memo to be factual and clear. we don’t particularly care how many hours it took to produce.

This creates a much bigger problem. We are simultaneously asking businesses to lift productivity and workers to embrace new technology, while maintaining social norms that punish people for admitting they have done exactly that. If using technology makes someone more productive but admitting to it diminishes the perceived value of their work, keeping quiet becomes entirely rational.

Productivity has always involved doing more with less effort. Yet culturally, we often use effort as evidence of value. In years gone by, a typed document was itself taken as evidence of the quality of the content. Moving from handwritten notes to the typing pool cost money and was generally saved until the final production step. Later, professionally typeset and graphically designed documents became another signal of value. Word processing and desktop publishing progressively disintermediated both.

Nowhere is the link between effort and value more obvious than in professional services. Labour hours as a unit of value for lawyers, accountants and consultants have been under threat for almost as long as these professions have existed. For centuries, English barristers’ fees were treated as an honorarium rather than an ordinary commercial debt, and a barrister could not sue a client to recover an unpaid fee. Treating payment as an ordinary commercial debt went against the gentleman’s code. Whether or not that professional norm ever made economic sense, it survived for centuries and persisted well into the age of modern commercial professional services before the law finally caught up in 1990.

Given how many centuries that norm took to overcome, we should be careful assuming that valuing professional work by the hour will disappear quickly. In 1998, accountant and pricing theorist Ron Baker predicted that the billable hour would disappear from professional firms within a decade. Nearly thirty years later, lawyers, accountants and consultants are still filling in timesheets. Yet the growing investment in technology to support their expertise is putting new pressure on a model that charges for the hours consumed rather than the value of the outcome.

This gap between what technology makes possible and what convention considers acceptable is how we end up with a secret technology economy. From the camera obscura to doctors’ scripts and technology-enabled services, new ways of working emerge long before the conventions around them catch up. Productivity arrives before permission.

I’ve written for years about this gap between technological possibility and business practice. Information standards can follow commercial adoption rather than lead it. Communications technologies can remain isolated long after interoperability becomes possible. Digital, cloud and big data were around long before businesses learnt to combine them in useful ways. Ultimately it takes someone to turn convention on its head and try something new. Without that impetus, the way business is done can lag its productive potential by decades.

The secret technology economy has probably always been with us. It is where people experiment before convention gives them permission, where shortcuts become techniques and techniques eventually become accepted practice. The next productivity revolution may already be there, waiting for convention to catch up.