Aerial View Of Mother Working In Office At Home With Daughter
The effort to discredit Agile management is becoming steadily more desperate with ever more elaborate critiques. This effort is occurring at a time when Agile principles are seen to underlie the astonishing success of the largest and fastest growing firms on the planet. These firms are currently worth trillions of dollars, while the industrial behemoths of the 20th Century anchored in traditional management practices continue their decline. In 2012, I outlined ten perennial management objections to Agile. Now there is a new set of attacks.
‘Technology Is Unimportant’
At one end of the spectrum of these fresh critiques of Agile, the claim is made that atoms are more authentic than bytes; that computer-driven profits somehow aren’t real; they are the artificial consequence of network effects, hedge fund speculation, or unique business models; that Agile management which came from technology must therefore also be a fad; that we are living in another dot.com bubble which will shortly burst.
It does not seem to occur to such critics that a return to the world of atoms, free of bytes, is equivalent to returning to the era of the horse and buggy. When every person and thing on the planet can connect with every other person and thing, instantly, at or near zero cost, the world of bytes is revolutionizing everything—yes, everything—that humans do. Every firm has to become a tech company. Our lives have already been transformed by firms that have mastered Agile management. And the reinvention has only just begun. Firms that don’t recognize this, and participate in it, are not going to be around for long.
‘Technology Is Destroying Us’
At the other end of the spectrum of the fresh critiques of Agile, we see an alarmed recognition that a revolution is indeed happening: yes, bytes are real and frightening and they are here to stay. They are everywhere and they are not transforming our lives for the better; they are destroying our humanity. We are living, we are told, in a world of “ambient Nihilism” that is leading inexorably to “technological Totalitarianism.”
Our lives, we learn, are no longer real: they have become media-facilitated concoctions. We no longer have real friends or honest conversations. We are forced to make do with media facsimiles. We no longer know who we are. Our very goals and values have been determined for us by hidden algorithms, without our knowledge or consent. The fact that most of us feel that technology has made our lives better merely demonstrates how effective and dangerous is the illusion that technology generates. We are becoming, or have already become, computer-driven zombies that are no longer truly human. We should not therefore pay too much attention to Agile management which is enabling and abetting this social disaster.
Technological Nihilism
Critics of Agile also cite the attack on computer technology in Nolen Gertz’s book, Nihilism and Technology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) to support their concerns about technology. Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. Gertz himself doesn’t mention Agile. As a philosopher, he has probably never heard of Agile. But his critique of technology and Nihilism is used by critics of Agile to discount the possible usefulness of Agile for firms more generally. The reasoning seems to be that since Agile came out of the technology world and has been used most successfully by firms that began in technology, its merits are surely questionable.
Gertz’s book is deeply philosophical. Instead of citing evidence for extraordinary claims that “we” do this or “we” think that, Gertz brings out big philosophical artillery like Heidegger, Ellul, and above all Nietzsche, who is said to have foreshadowed the horrifying rise of a technological mass culture which is now allegedly enslaving us.
For those of us who weren’t paying attention in our college philosophy class, Nihilism is the cheery idea that knowledge and values are baseless and that our lives are inherently meaningless.
Nietzsche thought Nihilism was a really big deal. He focused in particular on morality. His Nihilism came in two flavors. “Passive nihilism” involved people accepting the baseless dictates of morality and founding their lives on them in a non-thinking way so that they never had the “real lives” that they could have had if they had thought things out for themselves.
“Active nihilism” for Nietzsche involved people passionately embracing the baseless nature of morality and becoming warriors in the quest to expose the con to others.
Similarly, Gertz argues that technological Nihilism comes in two forms: passive and active. The passive Nihilists in technology are those who accept the intrusion of technology into their lives without thinking much about it. As a result, these people never have the “real lives” that they could have had with “real experiences” not just computer facsimiles of life. Passive nihilism leads us “to equate human progress with technological progress.”
The active Nihilists in technology are those who understand the dangers of technology. They have become evangelists who refute the dangerous illusion that technology is making our lives better. Gertz applauds a “move toward active nihilism, to motivate a search for new values, new goals, and new views of what ‘progress’ should mean.” On his view, this new improved world will be a world in which technology will play a much smaller role than it does even today, let alone the role that it is likely to play as the digital revolution continues on its inexorable path. For Gertz, anything technological is inherently inauthentic.
Gertz believes that succeeding in this effort will come, not by evading or insulating ourselves from technology, but rather by finding “ways to stop trying to evade ourselves and what it means to be human.”
Gertz accepts the obvious truth that technology saves us time and money. He would seem to accept that technology enables us to instantly find knowledge, get books, buy an infinite array of goods at low prices, watch most of the world’s movies or listen to all of the world’s music on our phones.
But for Gertz, this also means our lives have become unreal. The knowledge we get from Google is not real knowledge because Google has biased both the questions and the answers.
Spending a day going to a physical shop for Gertz is real: ordering the same product cheaper and in a matter of seconds online is an unreal facsimile of actual shopping. In part, that’s because of what “we” do with the time we saved. According to Gertz, “we” spend it on meaningless “orgies of clicking”. How Gertz knows that “we” do this is never made clear. The question of what percentage of the population acts in this way is not even asked, let alone answered. Perhaps philosophers have no need to bother with the mundane matter of statistics.
According to Gertz, technologies provide ‘new ways to indulge our ecstatic urges”, such as when they allow us to “post anonymous comments, form flash mobs, and become cyber-vigilantes.” In this way, “our explosive tendencies can move beyond the self-destruction of guilt to the other-destruction of shame.” The mere stating of the possibility turns it into a pervasive conceptual fact.
The possibility that “we” might actually do something meaningful or useful with the time saved doesn’t present itself in Gertz’s world as a real possibility.
The fact that texting and video conferencing might enable me for instance to have a much richer and emotionally fulfilling relationship with my family which is now scattered around the planet is not a possibility that Gertz wants to contemplate.
The fact that technology enables me to get more done and waste less time on getting from one place to another is not Gertz’s concern.
According to Gertz, “we” can see that using such mundane technologies as Airbnb and Uber has “a dynamic of other-reduction and self-elevation.” The fact that I can’t see this at all is irrelevant.
According to Gertz, “we” use technologies to keep ourselves busy. The fact that neither I nor anyone I know does this doesn’t seem to matter to Gertz: he plunges ahead in painting this phantom world as if it were real. The fact that I deny it probably shows that I am a victim of what he calls “techno-hypnosis.”
The fact that I, like most people, view technology positively in terms of the overall impact on the quality of my life simply shows how deeply I have been corrupted by technology’s illusions.
The fact that I also write about the many flaws of technology companies probably means that I am hypocritically setting up a false front to promote my real pro-technology agenda.
A Balanced Approach To Technology
Beyond Gertz’s feverish fictions, we do need to keep steadily in mind both the benefits and risks of technology in our lives. Where technology companies are committing offenses against the public interest, legislative or executive action needs to be taken. And when some of the actions of these firms annoy us, we should let them know, loudly, and at once.
But we should not allow ourselves to be intellectually bullied into accepting that an obscure philosophy professor in Enschede, the Netherlands, knows more about our lives than we do. If we were to succumb to such views, would we not have become the very zombies that Gertz is warning us about becoming?
The Relevance For Agile Management
In any event, the question of the relative benefits and ills of technology in our lives has little bearing on the merits of Agile management. Agile may have come from the technology world, but its lessons are now being applied in every sector. That’s because it responds to the need for almost firms to cope with a world of rapid change and increasing complexity. That need was felt most acutely first in the technology sector but is now being felt everywhere, most notably during the current coronavirus crisis, which has become a great accelerator of change.
The attack on technology and technology firms is a distraction from the challenge of managing in a world of exasperatingly rapid change. Big tech firms have figured out how to do this. We need to learn from their success while avoiding their flaws.
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