Jack Haigh

Content Creator // Researcher

Are We Over-Automating?

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

I don’t know about you, but Slack Workflows have been an absolute game changer in my day to day, particularly in a remote world. Our team have used them regularly to help automate team checkins, standup reminders, as well as receive external APIs to post information and notifications. I’ve personally even used them to help me Mind Dump into Notion at the end of my day. Could this over reliance on automation be our downfall?

Sprinkle it, don’t replace it!

There’s definitely a place for automation. My ethos is to sprinkle it into your day to day tasks, and help take away some of our more repetitive tasks. The key word there being to ‘sprinkle‘ it, let it fill in the gaps, not replacing the process altogether!

Replacing the process to full automation means we end up in a world where some of our fundamental business functions are placed in the hands of an algorithm that cannot possibly replicate human emotion and ‘gut-feeling’.

Let’s think with our gut…

Take a risk assessment as an example, a lot of what makes a well thought out assessment of risk is 80% data driven, and 20% gut-feeling. I call that 20% the “I don’t know why, but I just know” feeling. No matter how much data and real world examples we funnel into our automations and algorithms, that’s just not something computers can replicate (for now).

I love automating things. I love taking some of the repetitiveness out of my day. I love being able to turn a 20 minute task into a 2 minute task. While that’s great and all, at what point do we take pause and acknowledge that we’re performing negatively as a result of what the results of an algorithm says.

Individuality, debate, opinion is what excels a person, their team and their company. Sprinkle those automations, don’t replace them!

You should totally use Slack Workflows though, they’re awesome.

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