Every five or ten years a new software methodology emerges: a process to help people collaborate on writing big computer programs. Each one promises to fix the problems of the last approach by making software, for example, more cheaply, or with fewer bugs.
A methodology called Scrum was hot in the early 2000s. I worked with Anne and Zach, a couple of managers who really liked it.
When I asked Anne about Scrum, she said something like this:
Scrum is the best management tool we’ve come up with to deliver quality software on time. I use it wherever it makes sense.
Zach said something a little different:
Scrum is life-changing. Its discovery empowered us to build software that always works. I refuse to work on any project that doesn’t adhere to Scrum 100%.
Both Anne and Zach were powerful advocates for Scrum, but their responses reveal a psychological, or maybe even spiritual, difference between them.
Anne saw Scrum as something “we’ve come up with.” To Zach it was something we “discovered,” as if it existed even before we knew about it, like DNA or the neutrino.
Anne saw Scrum as “a management tool,” valuable only to the extent it was useful. To Zach it was “life-changing,” and “empowering” and “always” the right approach.
Anne called it “the best,” but to Zach, Scrum was necessary. No software would work without it, and neither would he.
The difference is this: Anne sees a process or system as being something malleable and potentially useful, but Zach can see it as an ideal, something we can trust in and aspire to. Anne’s view is pragmatic: a process should serve a person. Zach’s is dogmatic: a person should serve a process.
Imagining that this difference carries over into other spheres of life helps me understand the vast difference between educated people’s responses to the covid pandemic.
The Annes of the world see remote-schooling or a personal-threat passport as a possible tool. They try it at a handful of schools or businesses, and they ask again and again: Is the policy saving lives? What problems is it causing? Should we expand it or tweak it or try something altogether different?
The Zachs, on the other hand, maintain an all-or-nothing approach. Their attitude is that if we’re going to mandate facial masks indoors, then we can’t measure results in some limited way. If even one or two people remove their masks, or if even one supermarket doesn’t participate, then the policy wasn’t followed. A policy might fail, but as long as it was followed less than perfectly, the Zachs still believe in it.
When the first covid vaccines appeared, a doctor who thinks like Anne marveled at the audacity of the president’s suggesting we needed to reach 100% vaccination. The known risks attached to the vaccine are low, but they are not zero, he said. The likelihood of unknown side-effects is also non-zero. Why would you want everyone—everyone—to do something that might cause some unknown harm down the road? If that risk comes to fruition, however unlikely, do you really want to have no one in the entire population—no one—left untainted?
But I also recall hearing an epidemiologist who thought like Zach. Her theory was that if any portion of the population remained unvaccinated, that group would serve as a breeding ground for more lethal strains of covid. Now that covid has evolved into something milder, I don’t hear this idea anymore, but at the time it motivated us to vilify unvaccinated people mercilessly.
This is the problem with Zach’s approach. If I insist that a process is valid only if it’s followed universally, I’m inclined to disregard any evidence that contradicts the process, to ignore any unintended side-effects, and to overpower anyone who resists it.
If Anne is wrong, she can find her way back onto the right track. But if Zach is wrong, he’s just going to insist more and more forcefully that we all follow his protocol, always aiming for total compliance, ignoring any collateral effects. The people who still believe we should have enforced a Shanghai-style response to covid are the same ones who ignore the depression, loneliness, subpar education, economic collapse, and social balkanization that are still ravaging us now.
Scrum is no longer the hot new trend in software, but Anne still employs parts of it. Zach eventually gave up on Scrum entirely. Now Zach’s an acolyte of Empathy-Driven Development. “If everybody would just follow EDD, from the very beginning.…”
I hear the truism: Global problems require global solutions. That may be right, although even global problems—climate change or war refugees, for example—can be partially ameliorated by local improvements.
What scares me is how blindly the Zachs of the world nod at that cliché: eagerly, hungrily, even needily. They’re always craving the next universal, infallible system, and they get so lost in admiring and imposing it that they don’t even notice the people it hurts.
If only the World Health Organization could enforce its policies globally…. If only every parent could be made to follow expert guidance…. If only New York and Florida had to implement best practices equally…. If only every phone included contact-tracing…. If only the same vaccine could be administered to everyone, worldwide….
The global solutions they’re craving happen to entail a worldwide, tyrannical police-state that destroys anyone who deviates from its edicts and inflicts universal harm whenever it makes a mistake.
But Zach’s a dogmatist, and totalitarianism is just an unpragmatic side effect. He can’t see it and wouldn’t care if he did.
2 Comments
1 more comment...No posts
Well written.
Most all of us have blind spots. And all of us are right with regard to ourselves as we are self-experts. And occasionally, we are right with regards to others as that gives us the ability to pick a nice Christmas gift or plan an anniversary celebration. But we mostly can't speak for others. The Zach's of the world may be uncomfortable seeing the world from another's eyes as it may reveal that their own world is not as golden and pure as they would like to think.