Agile

Among the greatest social challenges today is how to help marginalized populations productively with minimum unintended consequences.  Especially from a policy perspective, to draft a strategy often comes with assigning attributes to certain groups of people, often with negative statistics such as gun violence, drug abuse, and domestic abuse.  These statistics have an unfortunate tendency to move beyond numbers to being seen as traits, feeding into national tragedies such as ethnic violence and racism.  Equally disastrous, youths brought up in these communities eventually see these traits as part of their identities, placing themselves at the greatest risk to perpetuate the cycle of violence and suffering.

As an example, read this up close and personal view of Black Americans in his essay, Many Thousands Gone, by James Baldwin, “He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slum, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease – cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis – which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.”  Accurately, Baldwin characterized it as the “dehumanization of the Negro” by converting a human being into a set of metrics to be accounted for.

Not only for Black Americans, but similar predicaments can be said for indigenous populations, immigrant communities, and even rural white communities, brought to light through the recent opioid epidemic.  It cannot be stressed enough the urgency of resolving these challenges, for complacency will not only result in social instability, but unravel the democratic political structure that we have so proudly upheld since the founding of our nation.

That’s not to say that it is a simple problem to solve.  Ours is a multicultural, multiethnic society, and addressing any challenge in a complex system is never an easy task.  Among the earliest complex systems recognized was the national economy structure by Adam Smith.  In his book, The Wealth of Nations, he argued for putting the individual’s self interests, and not the state’s, as the driving force for the economy.  “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”  The last century of economic showdown between global powers would prove him right, that a national economic system driven by individuals outlasted one of centralized authorities.

Former president Barack Obama understood well that effectual, influential changes happened at the local level.  In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he recounted the beginning of his political career as a community organizer; the place that symbolized everything he was fighting to change was the Altgeld Gardens public housing project in South Side Chicago.  He saw changes as not coming from the top, but “from getting people to act at a grassroots level inside their own communities.”  At the community level is where neighbors understand their own needs and challenges.  They have grit to fight for that which serves their best interests.  And placing authorities and resources in their hands maximizes their chances of success.

Systems engineering is a discipline set out to manage complex systems, including transportation, healthcare and medicine, and aerospace and defense.  Traditional systems engineering prescribes a top-down procedure called waterfall, which follows a centralized approach for managing requirements and changes to them.  However, as systems have become larger and more complex, the cost to manage requirements have become manifold, not only from technical changes, but also overhead and bureaucracy.  Of late, a management approach called agile has been promoted as an alternative to the waterfall model.

The agile model prescribes a bottom-up procedure where changes to requirements are managed at the local level, promising to provide faster handling of changes, to reduce the need for heavy processes, thus to be more cost effective.  Within the last decade, projects taking advantage of the agile model have produced mixed results.  Among the greatest challenges to its success is having technical and management competency at each local level.  Despite the high overhead cost of the waterfall model, the need for competency largely resides at the top.  As authority and resources are cascaded down, the need for accountability is lessened at the bottom.  Inherently, it is harder to staff talents at every leaf rather than a few at the root.  Here, like most other environments, the Peter principle is in full effect where one is promoted to their level of incompetence, leaving holes to fill at every level beneath them.

A technical project, unlike the economy or a social one, has the luxury of getting shut down should things go awry.  In some cases, they drag on and on; their cost becomes exorbitant.  But they are finished and declared a success nonetheless.  Social progress cannot afford the same kind of incompetency.  If Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for all is to be taken seriously, it would behoove us to place it at utmost priority, to see to it that the needle be moved, no matter how hard.