Can humans and businesses grow together?

A little over two years ago I decided that in order for me to continue to progress in personal development and accommodate my interests and changing skills in a changing world, I needed to remove myself from the static and consuming environment of 9–5 corporate jobs. I had previously done this around 7 years ago in order to make a return to art studies and visit my country of birth, Brazil but this is for another post. After some investigation I decided that the best way for me to become an independent, geographically and carrier agnostic individual was to become a digital nomad; a lifestyle which has been heavily glamourised over the past 5 years or so.

One of the easiest ways for me to experiment with the digital nomad lifestyle was to work contractually, sometimes for shares for young to medium size startups, adapting my roles accordingly (tech lead, CTO, UX designer, product owner and tech strategist) and by helping them grow their businesses and developing their product, I begun to see the parallels between individual growth and business growth.

Finding your passion will not necessarily bring about a sense of purpose because until you apply this passion and interests into a defined set of goals, a passion is remains what it is, a passion or interest/hobby. Once you find how you can put your passion, interests and skills to the service of a cause, it will enable you to grow through accountability or redirection as you get a sense of competence and autonomy by playing a key role within your niche. By discovering your purpose you are able, not only to assert your identity but get a sense of clarity about which segments of your core interests and skills you will need to develop, change or focus upon in order to grow in your chosen path.

Business growth vs individual growth

Putting all of the above into consideration from an individual growth perspective makes a lot of sense, but so does putting it in a business and user experience context. Purpose and tribalism do not have to be limited to a long-term goal, but also immediate ones, purposes may vary for individuals, context, products and services. Whilst working as a UX designer and information architect, I have tried to apply this level of broad individuality to the personas or users of client’s products and apps at a top level. It can be useful from a top level perspective, but the problems arise when trying to categorise users on the basis of needs and behaviour patterns and my question is, in order to group purpose and tribes to individuals, are we forced to label them?

In order to understand this obsession with labelling in today’s world, I have had to take a look at the global economical system. When working as a lean product development consultant I develop roadmaps from which I can design user experiences with “change”, predictability and specialisation in mind whilst trying to adhere to the expectation of “BUSINESS GROWTH” to stakeholders and investors. In order for any business to survive in today’s world, we use “growth” as measure for success for businesses and products. The problem is that growth in this context, is often geared around profit/scale and and the expectation that users will somewhat behave in a predictable, specialist way. If every business success story is measured on the basis of expansion and predictability, how long will we be able to sustain such a system whilst remaining responsive to individual user development and unpredictability of change? How will today’s economy and technology industry evolve if financial growth and deep specialisation is what validates it?

Using Artificial Intelligence to recognise growth patterns

There must be new ways of defining “growth” in this exponential economy which becomes increasingly intertwined with technology as the great saviour of all things. With technocrat god-like personalities such as Elon Musk, we live in a world where everything goes so as long as we follow certain behaviour patterns that can be measured, categorised and catered for via the use of technology and consumerism be it information, goods, services and personalities. In the meantime, machine learning continues to ensure that we remain as predictable as possible by aggregating these categories and creating our consumer personas for us to “wear” and shape the economic, social, political and sexual habits of the future. It is shocking how an information pool as immense as the web has such a limited array of variety on a daily basis for each one of us. No matter how much access we have to information and people, we still remain pretty much locked in predictability and confirmation bias.

In this way this new tech-driven economy will continue to push for this non-stoppable market growth through stunting our creative output capacity as human beings and worrying more about a limited handful of easily measured consumable items rather than encourage contribution from a diversity of individuals and cross-pollinating tribes.

If this continues humans will not only cease to grow but will become reliant on machines to perform any choice or task on a daily basis. It is time to worry less about singularity as a reality where machines become like humans and more about the fact we are increasingly becoming like machines.

To me growth is about learning, experiencing and sharing. Economical growth is a consequence rather than destination. If we could only measure a company’s success on how it changed the world for a better place instead of how large it has become, I feel we could genuinely use technology and A.I for solving real problems rather than unsustainable profit growth. Every time I learn something new, and I try to it do so as often as I can, I make an effort to pass it on as quickly as I can or put it to the test. It is a scary process as the chances for error and change are much higher, but this is where lean delivery comes at hand by giving the reigns to a collaborative process of development and growth through fast iteration and combined ownership.

In an information overload age, it is important that we are able to use only what is necessary to our purpose and not fall in the trap of relying on input rather than take the “human” initiative to output. Having worked in the tech industry for more than 17 years now, it is not unusual for me to spend months on a project/technology/team only to have to “unlearn” or at least temporary park what has been consumed with previous clients so avidly so as to make space for more “learning” and understanding of new user needs. I also learned that in order for growth to happen at a business level, you need to delegate and entrust individuals with a “growth mindset” to help your purpose. Gone are the waterfall days of relying on distributing aspects of a product between disconnected specialist teams who have no visibility over the big picture.

Having relocated myself to Canada after spending most of my life in the old continent in different lifestyles, job titles and pursuits I am met with a world where specialisation thrives even more than back in the UK thanks to the latter’s more thriving diversity and multicultural needs. Whilst waiting for projects I was able to explore other working opportunities and finding myself hitting an impressed but confused wall of interviewers who cannot quite put me into a neat “square” box. It got me thinking of the kind of “persona” I will become in this country and how I will grow. The role of the “persona” extends beyond consumerism, we need to belong to a category in order to be part, not of a tribe but some kind of faceless human supermarket with economic growth rather individual growth with our own price tag. This supposedly gender/ethnic/social neutral land where having a free for all attitude on how you categorise yourself is not only encouraged but practically: “enforced” as some kind of economic experiment. I struggle to understand a system who supports neutrality and tolerance but contradicts its very principle by prompting you to “label” yourself nevertheless so that “gentle” discrimination can be applied to you socially, ethnically and professionally. Luckily having my main “octopus” head as a UX designer, I have a little bit more leeway when it comes to diversity of skills, experience and interests as part of my job is precisely to try to empathise with a variety of individual experiences whilst designing applications and products. This is what has permitted me to survive in a world of predictability and normalisation but I will never sacrifice my remaining tentacles in order to better fit professions or a social profile.

Whenever I speak to someone about my skills as an artist, designer, techie, UX lead and product owner and I am asked how long have I done each for and which qualifications I have in order to practice them, what follows is often the question of which of these “different hats” do I officially identify myself with. No one seems to take into account the fact that in a real time, exponential industry and belonging to a generation who not only lived through both pre and post facebook/twitter but also through 2 Dotcom bubbles, my identity will vary as I seek, just like most transient individuals who are curious about the world and desire to “grow”. I will always explore new opportunities for myself and others in what should be an enriching, interesting and satisfying user experience of all things, including “life” in and most importantly “people” for what are we without each other?

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