Sometimes we feel a need to say things we don't really believe. it feels better to imagine a silver lining to a situation that has devastated us, as if there is a lesson in a traumatic experience that isn’t really there.

Surely that’s something many people are facing in the past little while. 

It’s very tempting to “bright side,” and to emphasize positivity, particularly in our work, because that is the comfortable language of commerce. To embrace sentiments that are financially advantageous to us.

As Upton Sinclair once wrote: 

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

We do understand that the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We also understand that our work, namely AI and automation, is going to contribute to those changes. 

Therefore we find that telling you the truth, as we understand it, is the only way we can feel good about what we do.

One of the hardest things in life is to wake up each day and have to decide who we really are. It’s worth remembering that as much as some people enjoy the fruits of dishonestly, they also live with the moral discontinuity of lies.

Talking about who we are

Light, as they say, is the best disinfectant there is. If you talk about your convictions and expose your thinking, you’re likely to find that the work has already largely been done when it comes to moral decision-making.

Something just is, or isn’t, a thing that you would do. But there’s more to it than that. 

This commitment to truthfulness can’t be hidden within a company’s inner-culture, ensconced behind garden walls. That insular kind of truthfulness can lead to disaster. A total disconnect between the values of the people within the company,  its leaders, and the customer.

Often, we find, such situations occur because an organization’s own leaders aren’t fully committed to the company’s mission to begin with. Sometimes it’s because a company’s leadership is motivated by ego or ambition to push it away from its core mission. Sometimes the sin is of omission or cowardice. 

That certainly seems to have been the case at Twitter, for example, where Jack Dorsey expressed regret at allowing the company to grow larger than it should have been. But on his decision to actively campaign for the platform’s destroyer, he remained silent.

How on Earth to avoid such a situation? Most companies would be glad to face such a dilemma, with billions of dollars at stake, but few are prepared for when and if they actually do.

A thing not publicly said can be forgotten, or it can never have been there. So it’s important that we do say who we are. That we do say what we believe in.

What Do We Believe?

A statement, or a “motto,” if you like, is important because it is supposed to guide what we do, as individuals and as a group. It's meant to represent how we think, and what we value most. 

Our core ideals at doFlo have been set out openly from the beginning. To these, we add our simple motto:

“Be More Human.” 

To us, being more human extends from our internal interactions to our behavior as a company, to our dealings with customers, and the hoped-for actions of our customers and users themselves.

On every level, it’s our goal to elevate human beings above the drudgery of the modern work environment. And not to be forgotten is how we will do that by impacting the daily lives of our users… not by getting them to log on every single day, but by allowing them not to.

To do that, one of the things we have to accomplish is, paradoxically, a reduction in the direct dependence upon digital interactions and digital platforms for daily tasks. 

Yes, we as a digital platform and technology company, want to reduce your daily use of digital services like ours.

We promise we’ll make this make sense. 

The Lonely Digital Age

The past 25 years have been a nonstop love-fest for productivity and communication technologies. We now have the ability to create virtually anything, from virtually anywhere, with virtually anyone else, without leaving the house. And that’s great.

Or at least, it should be great.

It would be great… if we weren’t all miserable because we feel so lonely.

But the transformation wrought by digitalization has sparked an epidemic of loneliness. As we become more connected, we lose the human interactions that make us feel alive. And this is not just because people are working at home. Return-to-office mandates in the US and Europe are not cutting into the loneliness problem. In some cases, the return to offices is just making things worse.

It makes sense if you think about what modern working conditions are like in this world of endless possibilities. You and everyone else you know now have an endless surfeit of options for how to allocate their limited attention. When you work in an office, it’s like those around you are - just as you are - being served an endless stream of distractions, some needing their attention, others only wanting it.

You may have gone back to an office, but the office culture has been erased. The water cooler is now just a place to check your Instagram, not to talk with other people about your life, or what you saw on tv last night – impossible now anyway because every single person also has an infinite choice of what to watch.

If you work with customers, they too have a shorter attention span and are likely to have even less in common with you than at any time in the past. In the US particularly, this disconnect is feeding the rise of so-called "Silent Services:" literally services that you can now receive without having to talk to another human being.

And we get that. It's not even the consumers' fault. Headlines across America state that the country is living in two distinct realities where none of the facts are the same. That may be an oversimplification, but it's a description that many feel to be accurate. More and more, people can absolutely choose what factual universe to reside in, and they can do quite a lot to shut out any other version of reality that intrudes.

Digitalization has helped this process grow and become mainstream. And that's a harsh reality we have to face.

Our infinite digital abundance has stranded each of us in a world empty of human beings. 

 The Great Distraction 

While those tools and platforms and even entertainments remain critical as services, what they have become over the past decade is a great noisy gabble, screaming out for your attention, every hour of every day. 

Digital transformation has made libraries available to us at the click of a link. It has made it possible to do things no one thought possible even 20 years ago. Yet it has also exposed us to an endless stream of alerts, emails, and a sea of subscription services with notifications and administrative fluff that wants our attention and demands our engagement.

Not only are there more such products and services every day, but they are all actively finding ways to distract you and gain your attention, whether it’s truly necessary or not. 

Each digital product is designed in such a way, that your active attention is deemed an absolute good, and a measure of the product’s success. Though such metrics may seem obvious for companies like Twitter or Facebook, or Netflix, they are an industry-wide staple of analytics data. Every company is concerned with how much time you spend on their websites. How often and for how long you look at their emails or open their apps. 

And of course, that stream of stimulus is shaped by how we respond to it. We can turn off alerts we don't want to see. Web apps and social media learn to show us things we will react to. Advertisers can pay specifically to reach those who will respond.

And that desire for you to always interact more, give more attention, and spend more time with our products, makes us product developers do things we just shouldn’t do. It makes us gamify our products, and play tricks to engage you and addict you in an endless cycle of distraction after distraction.

It temps us to trick people into parting with more and more of their money, knowing that they will rarely if ever get the full value of what they’re paying because there are so many other products out there ready to distract them in turn. 

Planning For Change

The truth is many digital platform companies count on their customers buying things we know they don’t need, and our models of success assume that you are likely to forget that you’ve paid for something you won’t end up using.

At best, then, we become just another little distraction to choose from. Just one more service taking one more little sliver of the pie.

It should be clear that we think it’s high time for a change, and we want to be a part of it. That’s what “Be More Human,” is all about. 

Our idea is that people who use DoFlo should spend as little time as possible with the product itself. It should be easy, it should be powerful, and it should be dependable enough to continue doing critical tasks long after you’ve forgotten it’s even there.

That means looking carefully and critically at how we define success and thinking in terms broader than time spent on platform, or tasks automated, or the number of users, or how much they spend. 

Instead, our objective as an automation company is to battle distractions, and to silence the bells and whistles of the internet, at least a little bit, so that you can peacefully spend your time doing your work, and even more importantly, living your life. A life that should be filled with human contact. Real people and real life. 

We will admit that this is probably always a failing cause, to some extent. But we have to try. To ere is human, after all.

On Being More Human

To be more human, to us, means many things:

As Individuals

On an individual level, it means to focus on the human beings that make up our core team and to make our interpersonal relationships as meaningful and as fair as we can possibly make them. It means to treat each other as unique and special individuals and to celebrate that uniqueness in everything we do. This is in the belief that this uniqueness and human quality are the most valuable things we have.

It also means to avoid the temptation to treat people as data points, or to look at their work as defined by statistics on probability or time in the office. It helps here that we don't have any offices, but even if we did, we would want to make a conscious effort not to be influenced by how often people talk to each other, go to the bathroom, or fill out the Times crossword during work hours.

After all, everyone works differently. If the productivity experts are right, and the average worker is productive for under three hours a day (and we suspect this is right), then what goal is served by pretending that's not true?

We think fear of losing one's job is a poor motivator. And while we want to hire and work with motivated people, our primary motivation should be to help each other. If we are doing that, then the work will happen, because it needs to.

That commitment should not just be a platitude of corporate values. It should extend to how we do our work. For example: every word we write here should be done by a human being, for human beings. Not engineered by ChatGPT, not designed for search engines to find us, and not set up just to trick people into buying things they don’t need.

For Customers

That feeling extends also to our customers: to treat them as individuals who are always worthy of our interest and our respect. If a customer isn’t going to get a good and fair value from our services, we shouldn't try to convince them otherwise. We want to work with people who need what we are offering, and what we're offering should be to increase the human potential of people.

Being more human means trying to place the customer’s actual needs before our own, with the confidence that having found customers who really need our help, we can do a brisk trade in process automation. There is always money to be made by helping people get things done. So that commitment should also be just plain good for business.

It also means to think about how our customers will use our products. We don’t want to design products that are intended to replace people, especially when it comes to activities that demand human interaction. We want to help people spend more time talking to each other, not less. 

As a Company

As an organization too, we strive to be more human. 

That means acknowledging and keeping alive the spirit of a living, breathing organism, that can and must grow and change. A human being learns by making mistakes, and then admitting those mistakes, and making changes. For a human organization, that is one of the things that should never stop. We can always be more human. We can always consider the person more.

Think of how organizations grow and change. They do it, we think, by creating and keeping an active and comprehensive history of their failures and successes. That way one can see how the organization gets from A to Z. What steps it's taken and what changes its made to adapt to a changing world.

That history can take the form of a body of laws, or a constitution, or a blog. It doesn't matter. It's about documenting the process of learning.

Being more human also means continuing to focus on enhancing the lives of others, both inside and outside the company. One of the most important ways we can do that is by creating economic potential for human beings; empowering them to engage in business and interpersonal relationships that value and center them as people. 

This should also govern how we work to implement our technology and sell our solutions; namely to work for an expansion of the role of human beings in the economy -and outside of it- and not a reduction in that role. 

This means not selling ourselves as a replacement for people, but as a way of empowering people to offer even more to others. In short: we should work with human beings, and not on human beings. We should enhance people, and not subtract them. 

We should also be focused on allowing people to get more done at work, but in a shorter time, and with less stress. This should be in service of the idea that people’s lives outside of work matter just as much. Our home lives should be free of worry and distraction. A big part of our work should be to allow that to happen. 

Grounded and connected people are more creative, more generous, more productive, and more free. That is a noble end in itself. 

As a Culture

Another aspect of being more human as an organization is to focus our attention on human rights, on human problems, and on our culture. Not just the culture within our company, but also our broader culture, be it the culture of business, or technology, or civilization itself. 

To be more human means to continually refine our efforts to advance the cause of the human being in what we do as a company.

We want to live in a world where people have steady, engaging employment that helps other people, and doesn’t intrude on our home and social lives, so that we can engage with other people who also have the time and energy to make their families and communities thrive. 

That goal requires that we work against the trends in technology and workplace culture that are impinging on our freedoms and our free thought. The things that are getting in between people, and obscuring the person at every turn, often for the sake of money. Often for the sake of achieving political and social goals that hurt many, for the benefit of a few.

Spam, depersonalization, algorithms that advance agendas, that discriminate, and despoil public debate. Automation that is designed to limit individual initiative and to systematize inequality and prejudice shouldn't be a part of what we do. If we see it happening, we have a duty to stop it.

In this world, we can no longer afford to have the needs of advertisers, big business interests, and the super-wealthy determine what we see, what we say, what we feel, and how we interact with each other.

If we are to achieve real progress, we will need people more than ever, and we will need them to be able to work together to do the things that we all know must be done. To save our planet from climate change. To end our collective loneliness. To, all of us, be more human. 

Thank you, 

Sincerely, 

The doFlo team.