I know I have been obsessing over Pleo’s recent Finance and Business Synergy Report, but, guys, I have one last nugget of awesomeness for you.We are in this together, and it matters exactly because resources are finiteAccording to the report, 39% of us would rather work with AI than our colleagues.The number is 48% in Germany, which I have a lot of questions about, including: what’s up Germany? Or is it just that Germany is more honest than the rest of us?Because I shared this fun statistic with a bunch of friends recently, and they all said, “Oh God. Me too.” And none of those friends were in Germany. So maybe the real number in reality is even higher. Because the reality reflects the fact that not all is love and cupcakes in our offices.People are tired and tense and relationships can be shallow at best and fraught at worst. And that’s before we get into the dangerous waters of talking about misaligned incentives… rewarding us for not collaborating. Rewarding all sorts of bad behaviour, in fact.That’s before we get onto the fact that, if we are colleagues, we are all on the same boat in every way… and yet.Try asking people to act like it and see what happens.That’s before we talk about the divide and conquer tactics of some leaders… the management practices that still survive in pockets of ‘coopetition’, whereby teams inside the same organisation are made to feel like they are in competition with each other, bringing Lord of the Flies vibes right into your boardroom. And that’s before we talk about the wide-ranging pernicious effects some individuals can have (all on their own but also on top of all of the above) with their backstabbing, rumour-milling and empire building.But taking a look back at that number from the report, I believe that if we dig a little further, we will quickly find that the number is not about how much starry-eyed hope we all bring into the mix about how AI will do all the things better. Rather, I think it’s an admission that, sometimes, working with colleagues is so hard that we will take the computer itself as a desk buddy in the hope that it may actually say no less often.What am I talking about?‘Computer says no’ was a catchphrase first used in a sketch on the TV show Little Britain. In 2004.It was the default answer of public-facing customer service representatives who were deeply unwilling to even contemplate being helpful and, without even listening to the question that was being asked, they found a way to say no that had no recourse.The answer is no and it’s not me saying it. It’s the abstract power of ‘the computer’. You can’t argue with the computer. And it said no.‘Computer says no’ has become one of the most popular phrases in Britain because we all have been at the receiving end of its infuriating unhelpfulness. Whether it is because someone is choosing to blindly follow a process, because they are choosing to not reflect on what you are asking, or wh
Gio. Feb 6th, 2025
