Innovation and Automation

Paul Satchell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138326378
• eBook ISBN: 9780429832017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998, this book links the forces of innovation and automation positively by shifting the focus on human-machine interactions from the current, technology-centred approach, to one where sharing is evolved and creativity is no longer suppressed. It provides a unique way of understanding innovation in organisations, by using an environmental interaction approach to understand creativity and its translation into innovatory behaviour. The current dampening of creativity in organisations is made meaningful by explaining organisational behaviour in terms of rituals. The author succinctly assembles the current evidence that the prevailing technology-centred approach to automation is in part responsible for the inability of humans to be creative in work situations. Many of the behavioural constraints necessary for this type of automation paralyse the translation of creativity into innovatory behaviour. In producing an antidote to the technology-centred approach, he moves beyond current human-centred thinking, to an approach where humans and machines share by using the same processes that underlie the sharing between humans. This sharing-centred approach to automation is explained and illustrated. Throughout the book the current state of human-machine interactions is illustrated with vignettes from aviation, medicine and from organisations. The book also discusses three pictures of future human-machine interactions of the flightdeck, in primary care medical practice, and in boardrooms of major organisations. The main readership includes all who are interested in innovation and organisational development, especially in the technology based industries and services such as healthcare, transportation, manufacturing and information systems; it provides essential new ideas for senior executives, strategic consultants, specialists in organisational behaviour and human resources, members of regulatory agencies and other government facilities, and academicians and researchers.

1 Introduction

Innovation is an important factor in organisational competitiveness. Competitiveness also depends upon automation. Innovation and automation have been pursued simultaneously but often independently, the assumption being that their differences exclude them from affecting one another. Increasingly, interactions and interdependencies are appearing between innovation and automation, though their compatibility has been little considered. Current approaches to blending innovation and automation are failing to comprehend the consequences for humans or machines.

Central to this book is the proposition that organisational success will depend upon optimisation of the interaction between the organisation's ability to innovate and the manner in which organisational functions are automated. It is possible that evidence for or against this proposition will be difficult to obtain, because of our primitive understanding of the behavioural and attitudiual changes induced by and required for useful automation and innovation. However, our inability to measure these changes does not mean that the trade-off between innovation and automation should be ignored. Indeed, the converse is true. Innovation and automation are interlinked in ways, assumed to be beneficial. Often they are not, and frequently have been mutually harmful. The need for both has occasionally produced interactions which have been unexpected and disastrous, as evidenced by some commercial aircraft accidents, industry incidents and other untoward events in medical care systems. This is reason enough to consider innovation and automation and their interactions in some detail. There are many other interactions which have not produced disasters, but which have resulted in unforeseen consequences sufficient to question current approaches. At present, both innovation and automation are topical, although most fail to appreciate their potential for affecting each other. A proven approach for pursuing them simultaneously does not exist.

This book develops a framework for understanding the interactions between innovation and automation. It starts by considering each as distinct entities. Innovation is considered first, its importance, and its current place in organisations. Our understanding of innovation has not been helped by confusion about its contribution to organisational competitiveness and by the variety of explanatory schemes. In addition to reviewing these schemes, the process underlying innovation is considered at the level of human creativity, as this is the key element. Unfortunately, our understanding of creativity has been too much gleaned from studies of creative individuals. This conceptual framework has recently been modified by viewing creativity in an environmental context. Thus, for each individual there is an interactive environmental effect, composed of the individual's reaction to the environment and often the environment's reaction to the individual This requires little modification for those who are not 'creatives'. The environmental view is particularly apt, because creativity in organisations is not the creativity of a particular individual in isolation, but reflects a mixing of the creativity of many people in social networks, faced with challenges specific to their work place Understanding the organisational context for creativity is vital and can be described in relation to prevailing behavioural rituals. Rituals vary in their capacity to act as a starting point for creativity with many factors in organisations contributing to rituals that dampen creativity, and hence innovation.

Having considered innovation, creativity and ritual in organisations, the book next addresses current approaches to the process of automation. Despite automation having a myriad of beneficial effects, it has frequently proved disappointing, even impinging harmfully on creativity. Harmful effects are contained within the current technology-centred approach and its propensity to control without providing feedback. It is associated with a variety of complex behavioural responses which alter motivation and involvement. A key behavioural response involves humans being distanced or peripheralised from their surroundings, with damaging effects on the capacity of individuals to continuously engage with changes in their environment. Thus, there have been general unwanted effects from automation which have been unexpected, costly and have reduced usefulness. As well, there have been specific effects on an individual's capacity to deploy their creativity, because of automation's capacity to disrupt interaction with the environment. To a large degree, these consequences reflect the underlying value that the technology-centred approach has ascribed to humans, which manifests as humans and machines being seen as comparable. A new approach called human-centred automation has tried to break free from viewing human-machine sharing in terms of comparability, but has struggled with achieving what many have desired for a long time, namely true complementarity. Current approaches to automation are at best neutral in their effect on the capacity of individuals to be innovative, but more often than not have been harmful.

In illustrating the benefits and harm that come from the interaction of automation and innovation, this book uses many examples. A number come from the aviation industry because of automation's seminal role in this work environment. Examples from other industries are also used, selection depending more on opportunity than on an impartial sampling technique. Aviation is a particularly useful industry for understanding the interactions and interdependences between innovation and automation, in that it provides a picture of what will happen to other industries well in advance of their current practice. Despite innovative behaviour being rightfully frowned upon on modem highly automated flightdecks, the flighdeck is a work place where humans and machines will always share tasks, because the human will always be required to provide creativity. Creativity is in much greater demand in other industries including health systems, but automation is less thinkingly being used than in aviation. Most industries have not come to terms with the unwanted interactions and interdependencies between automation and innovation and the failure of these two vital processes to he compatibly with one another. Nor is it apparent (hat the means for enhancing the benefits and reducing the harm of these interactions is at hand.

In the last section, this book develops a framework for bringing about a more useful coexistence between innovation and automation, A further development of the human-centred approach to automation is proposed where complementarity in sharing tasks between humans and machines is a feature, but where the process of sharing between humans and machines is made similar to the process of sharing that occurs between humans. There is nothing specific for promoting creativity in this approach to automation, for it is the basis for addressing all attempts to have machines assist humans with cognitive, rather than physical activities. It is from this base that it is possible to tailor approaches to automation and innovation where the key asset that must be nurtured is creativity. Features of this tailoring are illustrated by a series of examples which draw on present and mooted developments, and involve people and technology in organisational contexts. Without this blended approach, there is little chance of organisations and individuals realising their innovative potential in the presence of, and hopefully because of, advancing automation.

2 Humans and machines I

This chapter provides some examples of humans and machines sharing tasks. In each example, the reader should consider how well tasks are shared. This means how well the machine and the human share a common purpose, how much trust there is, and how easy it is for the human to provide uniquely human contributions. In each, the reader should also try to appreciate the balance between creative and routine involvement, and the balance between human and machine control. The examples in this chapter describe sharing between humans and machines which have beneficial outcomes, though the creative potential of humans may not be folly tapped, and the benefits from automation may not be folly realised. Sharing which produces undesired outcomes is considered later (Chapter 8).

2.1 Flexible control automation

Human-machine sharing occurs in the control rooms of refinery complexes. The following example illustrates sharing in a refinery on the outskirts of a capital city¹. The sharing is noteworthy on a number of grounds, particularly the flexible use of automated systems, and the ease with which improvement, and even innovative contributions, can be made.

Example 1. Dark screens, alarms and patterns

The operator scanned the panels of the Aunovat Systems 8500 control panel. The control room had been added to the refinery about seven years ago and was considered to be halfway though its operational life. The refinery had been built well beyond the city limits about thirty years ago, but the rapid spread of the city had surrounded the refinery with light industry and dense housing estates. The refinery produced nearly half of the city's petroleum. The issues of safety, profitability, and the community's need for fuel, dominated decisions related to control room operating procedures.

The Aunovat System 8500 was the central control unit for the whole refinery, almost all refinery processes being interconnected to control units, servo modules and display systems, all housed within a concrete bunker. At the hand over from the previous shift in the mid afternoon, refinery systems had been performing satisfactorily. The control panel reflected this happy state, eleven of the fourteen visual display units being blank, the three remaining screens showing flow charts and control systems which were under manual supervision. The 8500 series had 92 alarms, consisting of buzzers, bells, horns and voice tapes. Eighty of these remained armed, protecting those processes not visible to the operators.

There was an alarm and one of the screens automatically lit up. The operator cancelled the alarm. The visual display unit showed the key components of a heating system which altered the viscosity of the crude oil before entering a catalytic cracking unit. The operator used his keyboard to bring up the heating unit's prior performance, noting that the operations team had decided that it should be allowed to run near the lower control limit and that alarm triggering had occurred intermittently during the last shift. He carried out the standard operating procedure of logging the problem and resetting the alarm via his keyboard. The screen went blank. Within ten minutes the lower control limit was exceeded again. This time the operator left the screen lit and disabled the alarm, electing to track the performance of the heating unit. Over the next four hours there were six more alarms in other systems, which resulted in two more screens remaining lit and their alarms disabled.

When the ninth alarm sounded and manual control was called for again, the operator and his companion chose to change the entire operating mode. By displaying essential systems on all the screens, the system could be run in a very different way. These experienced operators were able to tell the state of health of the complete refinery using pattern recognition applied to all fourteen screens. This mode was preferred by most of the operators and their supervisors, because of the multiplicity of alarms, their similarity, and their concern about control states when the overall system was being operated in two modes simultaneously.

Automation of the controlling processes in the refinery could have relegated control room personnel to the roles of passive watchers, alarm monitors and fault fixers (Example 8). Humans could have been peripheralsed (Chapter 9). However, the role change to system monitor had not significandy distanced operators from sharing the controlling role (7.3.1), even with the alarm systems operating. Their willingness to be flexible and make improvements had not been thwarted, and the move to and from various levels of automation remained under human control (10.1). It is unlikely that the approach to human-machine sharing adopted in this control room had a precise return for the owners in terms of their allocation of resource to personnel and process. Allowing human and machine to be flexibly involved was more likely the outcome of a philosophy² encompassing values about people, machines, and safety for employees and local communities.

2.2 Useful automation and information provision

Work places have a significant, though often unrealised potential, to facilitate the creativity of individuals. Knowledge is a critical factor in creativity, the delivery of appropriate and timely information being vital and very much influenced by machines. The opportunity for people to choose the information that they want rather than have it chosen for them, can produce useful change. The following example from a telecommunications organisation illustrates these points³.

Example 2. Troublesome control boxes

On his way out from the repair depot, John looked at the print out of troublesome telephone control boxes in his area. Control box #41 had had another insulation fault, the second in as many weeks. He presumed that the weather was a factor as this was the time of the year when electrical storms were relatively frequent. He was not sure whether he had repaired control box #41 more or less than last year, but he knew that it, box #38 and box #44 were regular sources of trouble. In the last four years, the fault identification capability of the network had been extensively automated, fault site and type being identified to repair teams like his by the start of each working day. Despite this efficiency, he was disgruntled by having to return to the same control boxes.

That evening in the pub, John muttered to his two team members how hacked off he was at repeating work. One of them reminded him that he could now do something about it. A recent company directive had outlined yet another programmatic change, this one shifting the authority for decision making to those in the field.

Next morning at the meeting of the four local area repair teams, John brought up the topic of recurrent control box visits, the new organisational directive and the use of spare, monthly budgeted hours. He suggested that they should put the hours into preventive maintenance. The area leader pointed out that there were sixty control boxes in their coastal area and their thirty spare hours would not even scratch the surface of the maintenance problem, even if they knew which faults were best tackled with a preventative approach.

John brooded over this all day. In the pub that evening, he was just about to get the third round of drinks when he realised that he knew a way to obtain value from the thirty spare hours. Next morning while out in his truck, he contacted a friend in information services and, as a favour, asked for a record of all the faults in boxes in his area for as long back as the system had been running. When he arrived back at the depot that evening, there was a cardboard box half full with a computer readout which contained the faults for the last twelve months. A note explained that records where not kept longer.

He took the readout to the pub and the three of them logged the control box number, the fault, and the date for the preceding 365 days. Box #38 appeared to be the major culprit peaking at 45 faults per month, mostly being input lead problems, followed by Box #41 (41 faults) and then Box #44 (35 faults), both with insulation problems. All agreed that in the previous year, the pattern had been similar, but not identical. The three of them discussed what they would do to a control box to prevent insulation breakdown. They agreed that input lead problems required a very much larger investment in time.

At the 7.30 am morning meeting Jo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Examples
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Humans and machines I
• Part A Competitiveness, Innovation and Creativity
• Part B Automation
• Part C Sharing Automation and Innovative Behaviour
• 14 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index