LET'S BE COURAGEOUS

Prof Dr Miriam Meckel (MM): The term ‘courage’ is in every Indo-European language and always has something to do with having the decisiveness to dare to do something and take a personal risk. These components are important. When I hear: “It’s totally brave to have tweeted something”, I think to myself: no, it might be disrespectful or provocative, but it has nothing to do with courage because there’s no commitment. In that sense, I’m rather wary about this constant inflationary use of the word courage or brave these days.

Petra Scharner-Wolff (PSW): Yes, I agree with the idea of it being inflated. But it doesn’t bother me as much. We talk a lot about courage in connection with the Kulturwandel in the Otto Group, it’s one of our main focuses. Courage is the opposite of fear and we can see that it’s much easier to work with the idea of courage than fear. Everyone is happy to talk about courageous decisions. When it comes to admitting to fear, things quickly become painful and inhibited.

MM: Yes, courage is a driver, fear is a brake. I think of what Kant said here: “Have the courage to use your own reason”, perhaps the most important sentence used with regards to enlightenment. It also makes clear where fear comes from. If you suddenly have to make a decision for yourself and it might go wrong, that’s much more stressful than just having to listen to your boss all the time. However, it’s also important to remember that courage is only one side of the coin. The other is humility. Anyone who constantly claims to be brave is probably only foolhardy. Courage also means having respect for risks and sometimes deciding to avoid the danger.

PSW: The first thing that comes to mind is our first internal “fuck-up night”. It’s a while ago, but it stands out particularly for me because it was the first time I stood on a stage in front of an audience and openly and honestly talked about a huge professional failure. It took a lot for me to do it.

MM: I do something every year that I haven’t done before and sometimes it’s well outside my comfort zone. And it’s deliberate. Last year, I dived from a five-metre board.

PSW: Yes, through a sensible lived culture of admitting to mistakes. What do I do when something goes wrong? If you’re not afraid of failing, you’ll be prepared to try something new.

PSW: Setting an example is a decisive factor in a professional context. If managers themselves admit to mistakes and don’t punish colleagues if something goes wrong, everyone will have the courage to risk more. You have to make it very explicit and live your everyday life that way.

MM: There’s a lovely story from the history of technology. Thomas Alva Edison invented an insane amount of things, he registered for 2,300 patents. In his research journal, he also wrote about all his inventions that went wrong. And he clearly says that these mistakes were a necessary learning step for the next success.

PSW: In my experience, you mustn’t make too big a deal of it. There’s always a way out, for example people come to help you. When you consciously think about it, the fear disappears.

MM: I’m interested in what happens when humans and machines, when thoughts and software keep growing closer together. Everything is connected to the Internet these days: refrigerators, cars, hearing aids. Very soon, we’ll be directly connected to the Internet ourselves. As soon as that happens, we’ll have to confront the fact that it will be possible to read thoughts.

MM: There are already medical trials running. A brain implant will enable locked-in patients to communicate again. That’s fantastic, of course. But then there’s been an announcement by Facebook: they’re working on a device for us to wear on our heads that will be capable of deciphering our thoughts at a speed of 100 words a minute. There are a few questions here about invading human privacy and freedom. And these need to be considered now, not when the things are on the market.

PSW: I sometimes find it quite shocking how fast there has been a change in awareness here. It’s crazy how much data we voluntarily share these days, via fitness trackers and similar devices. I grew up in a time when taking a census was a major event in Germany. That’s laughable these days. I think it’s vital to debate all these things. However, it shouldn’t be shaped by excessive fear.

MM: Yes, it seems to be. It could come from the nostalgic melancholy of the Romantic era, which makes us Germans look back at the past. But there have also been studies that confirm in demographic terms that ageing societies are more fearful. That’s quite natural: they want to maintain the status quo and are sceptical about changes.

PSW: One problem is that there are hardly any forums these days, except perhaps church congresses, where everyone – those rushing forward and those holding back, courageous people and fearful people, young and old – can come together to make their voices heard and listen to one another. Online discussions take place in a bubble and the space for discussion is heavily polarised and polarising.

PSW: I’m looking forward to driverless cars.

MM: Me too. I’m really looking forward to being able to read in the car. Or sleeping in it.

MM: I’m worried that everyone’s behaviour will be turned into a single mainstream way of life. And if that doesn’t just mean the results of analyses, but the cornerstones of life itself, we’ll have a society that’s incredibly standardised. You can see it today on many levels. We tend towards humanising machines, while human behaviour becomes more like machines, more standardised.

PSW: We’ve just been with the Executive Board to Israel and it’s fantastic how normal it is for young people to be coding there. It has something to do with the school system. It’s not necessarily that they’re being taught coding, but that they’re being given the ability to pick up complex problem-solving strategies very quickly. 

MM: I was recently in China and I’ve got a lot of respect for how fast development is progressing there, albeit under very different conditions than here at home. Shenzhen, for example, used to be a special economic zone, now it’s the location of the headquarters of Huawei. The Chinese are consistently driving forward technological developments and using them. I don’t understand the German and European policy of regulating everything and damping everything down.

MM: Facial recognition: it’s no wonder that the highest-rated start-up in this sector is based in Shanghai. There’s nothing like it in Europe. And one day this technology will be so fully developed that it will be used all over the world – you’ll be able to open your office door and get your coffee with facial recognition. And then we’ll be dependent on technology from China. I wish instead that the European policy here would be more courageous and less led by fear.

PSW: Through practice. And easily accessible offers. Training sessions don’t run for an entire day anymore; there are short video tutorials instead. Or we take VR glasses to campus and let anyone who’s interested try them on. It’s meant to be fun. The other thing that worries people is that they might be replaced by machines sometime in the future. Again, we make contact with all our colleagues and show them in workshops and seminars that everything can be changed so that we remain fit for the future. Our aim is to reach all our over 50,000 employees with these programmes.

MM: I find social communication about the subject incredibly difficult. There are studies that “calculate” that 50% of all jobs will be made redundant by AI in the USA. That’s outrageous! History teaches us one thing after all: all the major technological breakthroughs were difficult, but at the end of the day they generated more new jobs than the number of old jobs they got rid of. I’d be in favour of tackling this subject more courageously. Why aren’t we thinking about using the gains in productivity brought about by AI to break the classic link between wages and productivity? It doesn’t have to be via an unconditional basic income. Creative and social activities that are currently underfunded could be cross-financed. No one is talking about that, the only subject is the worry scenarios.

MM: By explaining things. We’re convinced that the digitisation isn’t a matter of technology, but of civilisation. In a few years’ time, everything will be connected. We describe how digitisation integrates into your professional and private life. And we want to show that this will bring a huge range of perspectives and opportunities with it. For example, we report from Denmark where robotics are far more integrated into everyday working life than here at home. And no jobs have been lost as a result; in fact, it has created a lot of new ones.

PSW: It’s incredibly important to us to make our employees fit for the digital future. We find the project very exciting and have noted before, not least in the Kulturwandel programme, that it’s a good thing to be open to other companies too. Cross-sector learning is, after all, a typical digitisation issue. Before, you only operated within your set area and focused solely on your colleagues in that sector.

MM: Yes, it’s becoming increasingly clear how you can create a different and highly productive mindset in dialogue. You learn that there are similar problems everywhere, but quite different solutions. We want to encourage this exchange of views. And if this results in more technological ambassadors who courageously foster a feeling of excited interest in the future, then we’ll have reached our aim.