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5Tech Dreams, Tech Nightmares: Couples Counseling for Humans and Technology

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

—Pablo Picasso

If we had to assign a Facebook relationship status to humans and technology at work, it would definitely be “it's complicated.” While technology has unquestionably revolutionized what's possible across roles from front line to C‐suite on a day‐to‐day basis, it also frustrates us and even exhausts us.

While an entire chapter about all the ways that technology drives us crazy at work would be incredibly cathartic to write, and likely pretty amusing for you to read, just kvetching wouldn't actually be helpful. So while we'll start with a quick account of where work technology often does more harm than good, we'll then move on to some of the surprising reasons why our experience of technology at work is so crummy—and then finally we'll explore how to make your organization's experience of and value derived from technology as great as possible. Because the promise of technology at work truly is bright—if we can harness it to a human way of working. Technology itself gets a bad rap; fix using our approach, and the systems we rely on can go from dystopian to utopian in a flash.

Tech at Work: The Problem

Problematic technology at work haunts our collective dreams. Virtually any movie set in the workplace features some moment where technology goes haywire. If you're GenX, like me, Office Space’s repeated error message “PC Load Letter”—provoking ...