I move that the article definitely touches upon a critical topic but fails to nail it due to a too-narrow yet too-peripheral account.

Consider this:

> Over the coming decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something that produces value. We’ll need computer scientists working with cancer scientists, for example, to identify specific genetic markers that could lead to a cure. To do this, we’ll need to learn how to go slower to have a greater impact.

This "working with, across domains" mantra underlies the entire article. It's called transdisciplinarity — if not of individuals, of teams.

Guess what. That's how we've done any sector for the longest of times. You start with self-made specialists, they grow the field, which then touches other fields, and before you know it, a "normal" business has several functions: accounting, sales, legal, marketing, production, etc.

Tech is new, and tech is geeky — the greatest among us estimate that no more than 1~5% of the population has enough interest to enter and remain in the field.

Transdisciplinarity is usually a major key to unlock hard problems, indeed. As more and more engineers enter the tech field coming from previous careers, armed with domain knowledge, the quality and "relevance" of tech features improves, no doubt about it — I think music and the arts in general, observed over the last 50 years or so, is a strong illustration of that.

> These new technologies are far too complex for anyone to develop on their own. That’s why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships in order to solve grand challenges.

This literally confuses goals with methods. Agile never told you what to do or why you do it, it's just a "small method for small teams to work better/faster, to manage complexity". Grand challenges don't get automagically solved because they're big and involve many people from many fields.

The "far too complex for anyone to develop on their own" part is more telling of a philosophical bias: we tend to either see the world as "too complicated to be explained" (as the HR author) or "too simple to be worth wasting time to intellectualize it" (this is the general entrepreunarial mindset, to go at things from action even if it's not entirely clear mentally; the opposite mindset, which is mine, is more of a research ethos, an observer / thinker.)

Transdisciplinarity is also not a new thing. It's just the latest trend to kick in on the road to progress, it's a pendulum from hyper-specialization (high verticals) to holistic solutions (big horizontals).

Consider philosophy, human beings sprouting ideas, software engineering for the mind. An idea appears somewhere, in a group, in some space-time. It starts localized, vertical. The taller is gets (i.e. the highest its worth and the strongest its implementation, its relevant rooting at many levels of the stack), the wider it may eventually resonate, spread, horizontally towards other fields, other domains, other spacetimes and cultures. "Don't kill thy neighbor" is kind of such a piece of software that most of us have installed. But look how philosophy generates ideas: usually not in isolation, rather from looking at the world. The best philosophers, imho, are those who speak from experience (typically not career-philosophers, rather doers, goers, people who act and only then speak).

Case in point: after a few thousand years of thinking and transmission, philosophy is part of everything we do, are.

Technology (in the current modern sense, computing, electronics, etc) is like that, it's a big vertical with tremendous horizontal reach. It will become, like philosophy, like any valuable improvement to human condition, a massively transdisciplinary activity.