How the fall of Soviet-Communism affected our technology innovation language
Technologists don’t function in a vacuum. The victors of the 20th century Cold War dictated which philosophical assumptions we subscribe to in our management frameworks when creating tech products.
“The idea of the Product Owner in a Scrum team is that he/she is not a leader, but the ‘first amongst equals’.”, remarks a notable Agile Scrum trainer who’s a veteran product manager speaking to a room full of aspiring technologists who are there to earn their Agile Scrum Master certification, the hottest licensed skill in the world of tech currently.
The central thesis of this piece is simple:
● Our socio-political ideals affect our business and management ideals.
● 20th century saw Soviet Communism replaced by capitalistic free market liberalism as the dominant doctrine.
● This kiboshing of the corresponding competing ideology called Soviet Communism has had profound impacts on the way we craft our socio-economic thinking, including the management theories we subscribe to build our tech products.
As we power in a new decade in the 21st century, the one thing that baffles me most is how quickly we have forgotten how powerful the idea of Soviet Communism was for most of the 20th century and how much the substitution of it with democratic liberalism has affected our society. Soviet Communism and its thesis were the main alternative economic theory that was competing with western libertarian capitalism for global dominance, and hence had a significant impact on the economic thought particularly in the developing world (see heatmap below). With the end of Cold War in the 1990s and the tanking of the Soviet regime, huge philosophical shifts occurred as it put an end to the bi-polarity in the international sphere. This had the most profound impact on the international political economy. There was no longer a conflicting alternative economic system challenging the western capitalist world for global dominance. From political governance structures, social structures, economy, business and (for the purposes of scoping this piece) it even affected the way we do product development in the technology world today.
(Fig: Heat map of Communist-Socialist philosophy at its height)
Agile Methodologies & Scrum:
My thesis here is to elucidate on some notable examples of how the management theory of the technology world uses concepts borrowed from the democratic liberalist philosophy. Agile development methods (compared to its predecessor ‘Waterfall) is quite nimble and allow changes to be made in the product development process to align with the market needs. Agile methodologies are used by 97% of technology teams across the world to build technology products (‘The State of Agile 2019 Report). Different Agile methodologies are used by firms around the world including Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) etc. And of those using Agile methodologies, close to 90% of teams use the Agile Scrum framework specifically (State of Scrum 2017 Report). Henceforth, the focus of this piece is on the Agile Scrum framework and a comparison of its philosophical tenets with political frameworks of the past.
“Had the Soviets won the 1960s space race and established an socio-economic-philosophical order that was dominant, perhaps we would be building technology products in a radically different way today.”
Deconstructing Soviet Communism: What is it exactly?
Defining the Communist ideology is a tough nut to crack even for me, as expert Communist historians like Prof Dr. Archie Brown even argue that there are variations of it (e.g- original Marxist communist writings are different from the Marxist-Leninism practiced by Soviets). So, in brief I’ll attempt to define the communist philosophy as high-level as possible as Dr. Brown does. It’s simply a way of governing people, process, technology with a centralized command, hierarchical structure and dictatorship-esque way of controlling variances in those artifacts that sit beneath it. It’s essentially a top-down way of management with power concentrated at the top and then trickling down. Brown mentions the ‘Ideological Sphere’ of Communism as composed of ‘authorities at the top whose words could not be questioned’. A good example of communist influence in practice is its Marxist-Leninist economic theory which promotes a command economy (vs a market economy) where prices and production quotes are set by the people in command and not by the ‘invisible hand of the market’ that Adam Smith puts it.
Enlightenment & Rise of Democratic Liberalism
With the fall of communist Soviet Russia and Maoist China in the second half of the 20th century, you had the rise of its opposing force: the Liberal Democracies of the western world that have become the dominant philosophy of governance today. Promoted by the 18th century Enlightenment breed of Western European philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau: these are roughly the assumptions we live by in our day to day lives, whether we know how to credit this or not.
Read these excerpts from some of the Enlightenment liberal thinkers to understand their core arguments:
● ‘Since all men in the state of nature are created equal, the first form of government is democracy’ (Thomas Hobbes)
● ‘Human beings are in a state of natural freedom and natural equality’ (Second Treatise of John Locke)
● Wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” (Second Treatise of John Locke)
● Jean-Jacques Rousseau's definition of popular sovereignty, provides that the ‘people are the legitimate sovereign’
● ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Thomas Jefferson in The American Declaration of Independence)
These Enlightenment ideologies were so powerful, that they form the bedrock of western (and now dominant global) socio-political constructs of what’s considered the orthodox world-view globally. And this in turn affected the way management theory was constructed. Eventually one needs to understand that, the technologists working in corporations creating products and the academics in the universities churning out management theories, do not live in abstract vacuums. They bring in their own biases or ‘first principles’ (or first set of assumptions of what is right and wrong) as Aristotle calls it to their everyday decision-making process. This can be elucidated by a simple thought-experiment. Imagine in 2020s, we all wake up in the morning and are told that democracy (in Greek demos=rule, kratus = by the people) is something that’s inherently virtuous. Have you ever thought to yourself who came up with that argument? Or why are democracies the best form of governance when we have well documented critiques of democracy from the works of Plato in The Republic, who lived his life in ancient Greece aka the birthplace of democracy.
Given that the Soviets did fall, and democratic liberalism became the mainstream all-pervasive socio-political theory of our times, we can surely see vestiges of it being present in what constitutes the ‘correct way’ of creating technology products.
Effect of Western Liberalism on Agile Scrum
Now to tackle the question, which technology management theory do I consider is the direct result of this new enlightenment way of thinking? It’s the Agile Scrum. It is quite impossible to envisage the development of Agile Scrum management theory without the platform created by Enlightenment Liberalism and its corresponding economic model. After the end of the Cold War in a raging US economy adhering to the western libertarian model and galvanized by the Dot Com Bubble, the Agile Manifesto put together by a bunch of technologists in 2001 formed the basis of the Agile Scrum. Read some of the excerpts below I’ve gathered on some principles from the Scrum Guide (aka the canon read by thousands of technologists around the world):
● Scrum encourages self-organization, and the presence of authority may impede that. Scrum teams continuously improve without authority figures.
(Observe: The resemblance to democratic liberalism and the opposite of command-control communism)● Ideally teams should choose their own Scrum Master.
(Observe: the reference to a vote-based election found only in democratic ideals.)● Those who DO the work are best suited to know HOW to do the work
(Observe: the sharp contrast to a top-down central command management found in Communism.)● Significant aspects of the process must be visible to those responsible for the outcome.
(Observe: The sharp contrast to communism, the black box way of taking decisions from the top because ‘the masses don’t know any better’)● Servant leadership: instead of the team existing to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the team (enabling vs directing).
(Observe: again contrasts to the totalitarian world view of the communist philosophy)
● Scrum values: openness. The stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work especially the scrum artifacts which should be transparent.
(Observe: The focus on transparency and openness which could never seem to have worked at the beginning of the 20th century)
Whilst societies follow their own pathway, their central philosophies that become dominant eventually have a significant impact on even the most non-obvious aspects of our civilization. Had the Soviets won the 1960s space race and established an socio-economic order that was dominant, we would be building technology products in a radically different way today.
And that is exactly why the entire field of ‘deterministic history’, the fact that you can predict the future based on historical behavior, is so powerful. As human civilization leaps forward at breakneck pace (i.e- the technological S-curves are steeper than it ever was in our history), it is our intellectual responsibility to trace the genealogy of our ideas and pressure test them where relevant so we can become the conscious artificers of our future.