Individuals over Tools: our dance with technology
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” The Agile Manifesto
In the film the Birds, Alfred Hitchcock speculated what if our aviarian friends who completely outnumber us were to decide to cooperate en masse. Then they most certainly could annihilate us and take over the world.
But nowadays all the birds and the bees pale into insignificance compared to the multitude of our modern technology. If you believe films such as the Terminator then annihilation is precisely what is in store for us at the hands of our machines; or alternatively as the Matrix would have it, duped into providing utility as a biological battery source.
From the dawn of human civilisation, we have stood out in the natural world by our ability to create and exploit technology. But what really is our relationship with our technology; particularly in the context of our work and the process of making; and how has it changed over time?
On reflection it has been rather like an unruly dance, with twists and turns, a few feet trodden on, and not always clear who was leading who.
People led
A good place to start is on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Up until then, technology had mostly represented a simple aid to help in achieving some task.
Human skill and creativity utilising these simple tools could produce wonderfully complex things. For those in the profession of making, what we now call craftsmanship, a lifetime of practice and dedication meant their tools became an extension of them. A lifelong bond was formed.
Female spinners were often buried with their spindle. Spinning was a highly lucrative and skilled occupation. It involved drawing out fibres from a mass of raw material such as cotton or wool, then twisting them together to turn them into stronger thread. The drawing out required a smooth motion to avoid lumpy thread and at the right pace otherwise the thread would end up too thick or thin. The twisting motion also had to be careful and consistent otherwise the thread would either end up too weak or tangled in knots. The spindle was a rod which provided a means to wind the thread and prevent knots. They might also use a spinning wheel which automated the twisting process.
The counterpart to the spinner was the weaver. They would take two sets of perpendicular threads, the warp and the weft, and interlace them into a cloth. Their aid was a loom which would hold the warp in place so that they could thread the weft over and under.
Technology led
The growing demand for cloth would be the catalyst for a chain of technological advances which would revolutionise production.
Firstly the flying shuttle allowed a weaver to propel the shuttle with the weft by themselves, rather than pass it through to another weaver, doubling the output. The increased demand for thread led to the spinning jenny which used a large wheel to turn many spindles at once which vastly increased the amount of thread produced.
The next steps introduced self power with firstly the water frame, then the steam powered mule, and finally in response to these spinning innovations, the steam power loom for weaving.
The pièce de résistance was the Jacquard loom which allowed cheap production of many varieties of cloth by programming the pattern with punch cards.
Breaking it down
Someone who was curious to understand more about this “applying machinery to supersede the skill and power of the human arm” was Charles Babbage.
He was busy designing the first ever computer and in order to build one he needed to understand all the latest methods of manufacturing. He therefore conducted a tour of factories across the UK and Europe.
He noted how division of labour had reduced job roles to simple tasks with a specific tool, leading to an evolution from tools to machines:
“When each process has been reduced to the use of some simple tool, the union of all these tools, actuated by one moving power, constitutes a machine.”
He catalogued a myriad of ways in which technology allowed us to be more efficient. The two primary categories were power and copying.
Power could be harnessed or produced in many ways: magnification through motion with levers, pulleys, and wedges; accumulation through tools such as the fly wheel; harnessing existing natural sources such as wind or water; or exploiting the force of vapour to create motion with steam or gunpowder.
Copying came in many methods such as printing, stamping, punching, casting, moulding, and cutting with a lathe. This involved significant investment to produce a tool that could then be used repeatedly to produce copies. The consistency and regularity was beyond any human capability. As Babbage remarked:
“Nothing is more remarkable, and yet less unexpected, than the perfect identity of things manufactured by the same tool.”
This was the beginning of the machine tool industry which would lead to mass production. Of course copying is also one of the superpowers of software development although we take it for granted – the ability to deploy software millions of times over at negligible cost.
Of the many other methods of technology which he described, many are strangely prescient of software development capabilities today. For example, registering operations with a gas meter or pedometer (counter variables), or alarm clocks (timeouts). His most salient prediction was where technology would go next:
“It is the science of calculation – which becomes continually more necessary at each step of our progress, and which must ultimately govern the whole of the applications of science to the arts of life.”
A merry old dance
Machinery had a profound social impact on the nature of work. It supplanted skills that had passed through generations for thousands of years. People could not compete with the power and speed of work or the unerring consistency. Instead they were relegated to menial support activities to aid the machines.
Some tried to put up a fight, like the Luddites who destroyed machinery. But there was no turning back – businesses viewed the machines with an awe and reverence and they would remain dominant.
Karl Marx summarised the situation:
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.”
It takes two to Tango
This tendency to deskill work through division of labour then eliminate it through mechanisation begged the question would machines ultimately take all the jobs? Not according to Charles Babbage. He believed they actually created a need for more skilled work, albeit after a period of adjustment. As he stated:
“the skill called into action in building the new factories, in constructing the new machinery, in making the steam-engines to drive it, and in devising improvements in the structure of the looms, as well as in regulating the economy of the establishment, is of a much higher order than that which it had assisted in superseding.”
Like his insight of the computer, this observation remained largely untapped for another century.
Over that time, the Industrial Revolution had passed on to mass production and the reliance on machines had grown relentlessly. But in Japan the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works had evolved the Victorian loom so that it stopped automatically when a warp or weft thread broke. By detecting an abnormal situation it could then be deferred to human intelligence to resolve. This was known as Autonomation or automation with a human touch.
Toyoda later started building cars and Autonomation expanded to prevent defects and overproduction. They recognised the powers of machinery but also the need for people to direct and problem solve.
This car division became known as Toyota, birth of the Lean mindset, and embedded in that culture from the very start was a respect for people.
The great achievement of the Industrial Revolution hadn’t been the machines but the innovations that led to them.
Machinery could carry out complex tasks at great speed with consistency and precision. But power and copying is no help to meet the market need for variety or continual change, or the need for improvisation when a problem emerges.
Humans on the other hand can understand the context and greater purpose to which the work is carried out. Then apply creativity and resourcefulness to problem solve and adapt to that environment.
Recognising this helps to maximise the productivity of people and technology working together.
Who wins the dance off?
Nowhere today is technology more ubiquitous in the workplace than in software development.
The limitations of technology are still the same. AI despite all the hype is not really intelligent in the sense we are. At least not yet.
Babbage’s technological benefits still have their limits. With great power comes the risk of doing great damage. Just ask someone who has fallen foul of the Linux command “rm -rf”. Copying is not always good. Think copy and paste.
The perception of technology as a panacea to all our problems remains. Like magpies we are obsessed with the silver bullet of a shiny new tool. This has resulted in many painful lessons. Let’s generate all our code from models. If we use Jira we can be Agile. Static analysis will find all our bugs and rid us of technical debt. Inevitably none of these assumptions are true and it is always brought back to people and culture.
When you recognise the comparative advantage of both parties you get the perfect partnership. Like automated testing where people apply context and ingenuity to create good tests whilst computers apply rapid unerring consistency to run the tests.
Ironically software engineers have turned to the past with the software craftsmanship movement – an analogy with the makers of yesteryear such as the female spinners, where skill and mastery of the technology was key. Recognising our unique ability to be resourceful and creative in our thinking, combined with the human qualities of pride and care.
Summary
So technology is a great partner with amazing strengths. But so are we, and in this coevolutionary dance we need to lead. More than that we should choreograph it; and we should be dancing to the tune of the Agile tenet: individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
References
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures — Charles Babbage
The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History — Kassia St Clair
Iron, Steam & Money: The Making of the Industrial Revolution — Roger Osborne
Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production — Taiichi Ohno
