We are experiencing a change of epoch, in which crises follow one another abruptly: first the Covid-related health crisis, then war, inflation, and the energy crisis. The concept of "normalcy" to which we are attached seems to be receding, fading, perhaps vanishing. At the same time, a new high-tech scenario opens up, dominated by the call to digital transition. Businesses, companies and individuals: all are involved in this transformation, which impacts work but also personal and relationship life.

We talked about it with Marta Bertolaso, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Human Development at the Campus Bio-Medical University of Rome, to focus on the main tensions underlying the digital shift and how these impact the daily lives of companies.

"Change generates anxiety, and the revision of established or habitual processes forces us to confront something new, something not experienced before. A sudden change of pace came overbearingly with the pandemic. The emergency pushed on the accelerator of change and made it clear that traditional strategies were not sufficient or adequate to deal with the situation."

"The management of smart working has become one of the issues on the tables of boards of directors, CEOs, and HR.

One of the risks, in times of acceleration such as the current one, is to mistake symptoms for causes.

Working on the symptom, in our case asking whether or not to implement smart working, prevents us from devising solutions on the actual cause.

Actually, remote work is not "the problem." The real issue is engagement, that is, that people want to work and work, maintaining productivity regardless of where they work. This is the real issue to be addressed in corporate policies on smart working.

This happens because in corporate realities an organization in which man is to be controlled prevails. Organizational models inspired by Taylorism, live a notion of autonomy based on the implicit assumption of control, with clear directives and precise processes, otherwise it is thought that the worker does not complete his tasks. If we don't shake off these assumptions, we will hardly be able to implement new models."

"Engagement," involvement, is feeling part of the team, having a role in the game, and is an activity closely related to Transformational Leadership: motivating employees and bringing out good practices, but above all focusing on personal identity and connecting it to the collective identity of the organization in which one is embedded.

We need to recover the concept of the "person understood in his or her relational dimension" and put him or her at the center. In pre-industrial times, in fact, the individual was functional to the group. After the industrial revolution, in Western culture, we moved to a more individualistic conception of man (in which the individual was central and important). We need a paradigm shift from one of control to one of care. Set aside the logic of the functional performance of the individual and take up dimensions that we otherwise risk forgetting. Young people for example already have a less individualistic but still autonomous self-perception."

"Distribute responsibilities and decentralize in a "flock" logic, which is not just a metaphor but a specific entity with a precise mathematical pattern. Vertical and pyramidal leadership, with the CEO locked in his office on the 11th floor, no longer works today. A different approach is needed. A radical rethinking of the management model from hierarchical to an entrepreneurial system of relationships, in which employees themselves feel a bit like entrepreneurs. In a flock dynamic, Governance is distributed, there is no fixed point of control, but there are hubs, which can change dynamically over time: they catalyze the process, transmit inputs, keeping peripheral areas compact.

We need to understand how the global and the local come together. The rationale for local solutions is the real engine of innovation, progress, and the reconstruction of a social fabric that is resilient, that holds and becomes generative of new market and business concepts as well."

"It is a time of global challenges. The complexity we face destabilizes all the old logics. We are inside a world that continues to change, there are no longer established boundaries, and rigid structures are ineffective. Today, companies must have the ability to "surf." The surfing strategy is to maintain one's position, one's specific identity on a changing, changing terrain. But the big difficulty in times of crisis and transition, it's not just dealing with organizational complexity, it's for people to follow you, for the ranks to tighten and for there to be awareness and energy around a new direction."

"The process of innovation is necessary. Digital has tremendous power in organizing so much data quickly and giving us access to dimensions of reality that we didn't see before, to penetrate the world and broaden the view, a bit like what happened with the microscope and the telescope. From a business perspective it allows us to see new possibilities for action and new organized principles, to get to do more by doing less. But it is only possible with the human capacity to decide what is relevant and what is not."

"Man is naturally technical; technique is his way of being in the world. He enjoys it, he enjoys using the smartphone or going to the moon. He built machines to automate processes, speed up, access data, solve. But right from the start he sensed the threat. The reason is that humans tend to compare themselves with everyone, including machines, in terms of performance and not identity and relationships. It is man who programs the machine, enters the data to be computed. Algorithms work and return an output within a question that has been formulated. When the scenario changes, the semantic code must be changed, and that is only possible because of the person's experience. The machine perceives only the missing data. But only the person perceives the problem, asks questions, is able to handle the unexpected and change the point of observation."