Author: Martin Dvorak

In my previous post I elaborated on the digital impact on people. We’ll take it from there.

Becoming aware

If you enter a new level, you first need to clean up. So how to straighten things with yourself and not with others? A deep cleanup of yourself brings you to the profound mystery of yourself. It will encourage you to follow your heart because you will recognize the pressure from outside such as globalization, digitalization, etc. and the pressure from inside such as your DNA, your origin, your source, your behavior patterns, your fears, what makes you happy, etc. The pressure releases fears which is like memories in your cells, which you are not really aware of. These memories even contain the fears of your ancestors. Hence, a good clean up also looks at your origins and ancestors.

Like in my case, my grandmother who was Russian escaped in 1918 from the Bolshevik Revolution. My grandfather suffered from World War II when he was held in a concentration camp and my parents escaped 1968 during the Prague Spring when the Eastern Block armies invaded Czechoslovakia. So you could say the 1918, 1939 and 1968 historical events require a triple clean up in my cell memories. New scientific research argues that it can take up to 7 generations which impact your DNA.

In your daily life, injuries from the past can suddenly pop up, depending on which buttons are pressed. Therefore, it is vital that good managers provide more frequent feedback. Forget about your yearly appraisal review, this is an alibi and will disappear in a couple of years. We enter a new period where companies will react on the large wave of burnouts, pressure and reduced productivity by considering the health factor of the individuals. Social and technological progress go hand in hand. Look at the expression “Human Resources”, which today is more related to exploitation. How about changing the perspective and see our employees are worth gold?

Friendly cooperation always pays off and this sort of teamwork puts a different attitude in place. Like Richard Branson’s quote where clients do not come first but employees. If you take care of your employees, they will care of the clients. I would say, companies need to enable their employees to take care of themselves, especially when the gap between the mental impacts of digitalization get bigger in the future. And I am not talking here about wellbeing programs like yoga at work and employee benefits. They are nice but only scratch at the surface. You can see this when employees return from their holidays and are trapped again in resistance when opening their email and wait until the inbox is filled up with the 386 emails during their absence.

What is your truth?

We cannot drive digitalization without the people. Digitalization does not work without people. This is not the same like robotics for example in the Private Banking. I am more thinking of a new perspective. A result from our clean up. A meaningfulness of what you are doing. Do you agree with your company, what they are doing, their values, their culture, how they deal with their people and customers? Who is in the center? People or machines? The subject “human being” cannot be digitalized. The way you talk, your emotions, feelings and contacts may be simulated by a machine but cannot be replaced. People get sick when humanity is missing. If you can combine this with a solution instead problem orientated behavior, you will be able to solve the complex problems. Start from the person being affected to the person who observes. Observation calms you down. You become less identified with the situation. Concentration and stillness rise. How can we get there?

There is an easy entry point. How do you feel right now? Where in your body does the feeling arise? Our breath and body awareness are the entry points for stillness. In this present state, your actions become much more powerful. You will start to feel your momentum. Wait for the signs in your inner level before following your impulse. You will perceive mercy beyond your mind. You will experience when spending your day that 10% of what you are thinking and doing is coming from your awareness, whereas 90% is driven by your subconscious, your autopilot.

The parts we have forgotten in ourselves reconstruct back to our real wholeness, who you really are. This is not what your personality thinks who you are – this is bringing you into presence. It’s like a full contact with your soul. You will become a maximum responsive human being. Compassion rises. The mind excludes, the heart stays connected. You will look at things around you with the eyes of your soul, with a kind of healing presence. And if you are in this oneness, your access to your intuition enables your creative forces. Your perception gets sharpened and you can differentiate between reflection of reality and truth. Digitalization has nothing to do with truth, it only tries to imitate and simulate a fraction of reality.

To keep the momentum, ask yourself every day a couple of times: Is what I am doing right NOW really closer to my goals? If not, stop doing it.

Doing your inner clean up exercise pays off in the long run. You will stay more connected to yourself and less to the things around you. Send your mind on a vacation from time to time. The mind should serve for practical things. You will intuitively know what truth is and what is not – your soul will help you to see behind the curtain. If your heart speaks up, listen to it and once you know where to go next, stick with it.

Your successful approach to dealing with change will not only give you joy, your actions will also become a blessing for others.

Do you remember the „New Economy“? This was the buzz word in the late nineties when my colleagues were talking about this kind of internet driven economy. It may look bizarre today, but at that time, the internet started to catch on commercially. Soon, things became crazy. You could have a dump idea like “I wash your dog.com” and could raise $2m startup funding capital. Since greed eats mind, speculators got out of control about their blind investments over the “New Economy”. Soon, the dotcom crash happened in 2002.

Today, the mainstream talks about “Digitalization” or “Industry 4.0”. However, since some people learnt from the dotcom bubble, it is slightly different. Or put it that way: the bubble is less obvious, it’s more a dark side which we do not see at first sight. You could even say it is sneaky. Why?

I cannot be wrong if I follow the crowd. Really?

Everyone knows the game about cost savings. You don’t cut only costs, you also cut common sense. One alternative is moving your IT into the cloud. What first looks like cost savings is in fact giving up your independence. You give your power to your IT vendor and there is a strong argument in favor of this: As an entrepreneur, IT is not your core competence, you want to focus on your business and decrease your IT costs. Hence, let the professionals take over your IT. The same is with digitalization. Managers can hide their mental overload and pressure to perform with “Digitalization Initiatives”. Even the politicians, at least in Switzerland, support the digitalization. However, they support in fact a kind of dependency and it may turn out to be late when you realize this. Remember that those, who have been elected have nothing to say and those on the top who were not elected are the ones, who decide in the background.

Like with the dotcom story, not the whole truth is told and things are more glorified. In the meantime, rules are set up towards egalitarianism. In the old system you were a kind of second-class citizen. In the brave new world, you will become an animal while the playground is newly organized. See this also in the context where the top 0.1% control 90% of world’s wealth. I thought the digitalization and the internet will give us more flexibility and freedom? In some ways yes, but not really. We are moving towards an ideological correction. Things are changing depending on which ideology is presented. For example, around 30 years ago, the shareholder value was the child of neoliberalism. Today, things got out of control and perverted. There is something on the horizon, whether it is a crash or a soft landing change. For sure, there is large pressure in the economy and society and an irrevocable paradigm shift is ahead. This challenge develops in a strong dynamic and overwhelms us.

The human being cannot cope anymore and falls into powerlessness. You need to change your position and become an observer. You need to follow your truth and inner qualities.

What does the digitalization do with us?

Artificial intelligence, Blockchain, IoT, Smart Analytics, Fintech, automated trading systems, Insurtech, cloud, E-ID, IT security, mobile payment, agile transformation, etc. – you name it. All is part of the new ecosystem and part of psychological problems, which lead to exhaustion and burnout. Managers keep more pressure on their employees. In today’s corporate worlds, a constant accessibility is seen as normal. Are we still able to set our priorities?

Digital detox is luxury for those who become aware and for the others, the manipulators take care of keeping us busy or entertained in the virtual world. In the past, companies were more friendly and liberal. Nowadays, we feel the pressure because the pace becomes faster. So one thing is the pace, the other thing is the increased complexity. It is an illusion to think that with digitalization, things are done when pressing a button. Employees are expected to analyze quickly highly complex problems within our globalized world.

Human beings are not machines

Managers do not only put pressure on employees, they put pressure on themselves. Stress leads into fear and pain. A downward spiral, which causes more resistance while condemning others.

One solution to cope with this new environment is endurance. Giving up resistance and providing more room to the pressure also needs some overcoming: you need to show your fear, your pain, your stress and overload. Some managers will understand, because your will be their mirror.

Apart from body symptoms such as exhaustion, burnout and mental problems, companies realize their loss of productivity. Some care, some not. If companies think they can just replace their leavers with new resources they forgot about the demographic change. In some years, there will be a shortage of skilled manpower. Of course, you can outsource and play the game of offshore enabling if you want to extend the problem.

It takes two to dance tango

The global markets, competition, companies and managers are not only causing the pressure. That is only half of the game. The individual employee contributes the other part.

The pace of the digital transformation does not correspond to the pace how we behave and work as human beings. It takes time digesting a new process, a complex task or achieving a target. Changing your attitudes takes longer if you are in resistance to the change. This is mostly the case when blaming the circumstances, the company you work for, your boss, the situation or even yourself.

Human beings follow a natural rhythm because our species are part of nature such as animals and plants. The digitalization follows its own rhythm – it is much faster. The artificial intelligence does not differentiate between night and day. How much time do you spend in the nature? We work under artificial lights in our offices and violate the natural cycles. There is obviously a conflict between the fast digital rhythm and the slow natural rhythm. It is like a clash between two physical laws.

In this constellation, the individual is determined by the digitalization, similar to the threat felt when we are micro managed. If perceived badly, this can have some serious impact on our stress level. This conflict may seem to have a relation to the job or company we work for, but in fact it has not.

People bring their own ego and authority when joining a new assignment. You do not see this track record on their CV’s, they will act according to their beliefs and character and will attract conflicts or harmony. If conflicts arise and you do not address the underlying cause, either the manager or the employee will get sick in the end. As a manager, you have the pressure from the top, however, the question is how you behave and how you lead your team.

In the next blog I will talk about how you can manage yourself in the technology transformation puzzle.