– A commentary by Manfred Wolff –
Do you know this: Nothing works like it used to! And it’s getting worse. Recently even payment terminals. The usual reliability of flights, train connections and hotel bookings is already gone. Lufthansa is currently canceling more and more flights due to a lack of spare parts. Craftsmen are hard to come by and when they are, bills are usually above ground and the services are below ground. Who would have thought that call centers of service and product providers could get significantly worse again? Nobody cares anymore. Let the annoying customers help each other in the FAQ section. Or quit. The Bundeswehr is completely broken, even though its current budget is the same as Russia’s? The reasons? Diverse. The complexity of existence increases exponentially. Who still understands the interwoven commercial, technical and legal requirements? Professionals from the mid-level in companies are dismissed for short-term profit maximization, if they have not already personally resigned enervated themselves. Corona crisis. Ukraine war. Supply bottlenecks from China. Bloggers and influencers (German “Schreihals”) are already not doing the work of designing, communicating, taking responsibility/liability and implementing themselves. They croak for quota only out of the private bubble. Strangely enough, our economic and social order rewards this more than the many others who are still trying to maintain performance processes in organizations. Top executives, in turn, turn to consultants’ fairy tales. The new magic word: “Dark processing”. This means that performance processes, of which we already do not understand exactly how they interact in detail (AS 400 still in action), should run better in the future with artificial intelligence, like “fairy dust”. I.e.: We shift the control even further away because we do not operate and understand it. It will work out somehow. Fairy Dust. With 35 years of professional experience as an entrepreneur, inventor, consultant and dedicated working group person, among others, I find this dangerous. Only the back-breaking work of ongoing documentation, the systematic search for improvement with decentralized responsibility with the concession of also being allowed to make mistakes and respect for the performance of the management mid-level staff offer a chance to solve the upcoming problems in system operation in all areas of life in the near future or at least not to let them get worse. Conclusion: We need a complete realignment of our current Western economic and social order. Because, sorry to say: fairy dust does not exist.