Be Human

The relentless march toward optimisation has created a peculiar paradox. In boardrooms across the globe, humans shuffle through identical presentations filled with bullet points and buzzwords, their voices flattened into corporate speak, their individuality compressed into KPIs and metrics. We’ve become so obsessed with efficiency that we’ve accidentally automated ourselves, turning into pale imitations of the very machines we created. This relentless pursuit of efficiency has not only led to a loss of individuality but also a decline in the value of human qualities in the workplace.

The standard slide deck has become the great equaliser of human expression, a template that strips away personality, passion, and authentic voice in favour of uniform fonts and predetermined layouts. We speak in the sanitised language of “synergies” and “deliverables,” as if genuine human communication were somehow unprofessional. Meeting rooms fill with people who nod, their natural curiosity and creative dissent trained out of them by years of corporate conditioning.

But here’s the profound irony: as artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, as robots handle more of our routine tasks, the very qualities we’ve been systematically suppressing are becoming our most valuable assets. The messy, unpredictable, gloriously inefficient aspects of being human aren’t obstacles to overcome—they’re our competitive advantage.

TBC