This is not to say that supporting software is inherently threatening. Much depends on the awareness of the group using it. The risks are not trivial. For one thing, the work group may begin to conceive and carry out its tasks mechanically, simply following the prescribed format for its own sake. And yet, the journey was essential to the insight.
Group work does require structure as well as freedom.
But when the structuring tools contain embedded intelligence, one needs to assess carefully just how intrusive and coercive their influence might be. The issues here pierce to the essence of the business undertaking. It is remarkable how easily and subtly the human-centered view slips from our grasp. Indeed, just so far as the corporation is viewed as an enterprise designed to score a profit, rather than to serve worthwhile ends under the discipline of economic controls, to that extent the entire organization has already been cut loose from its human justification and reduced to something like a computational machine. After all, prominent among human needs is the need to work, to create, to cooperate, to solve problems, to struggle against the solid resistance of the world.