Succeeding with Agile

Chapter 12. Leading a Self-Organizing Team

One of the earliest models for organizational change was put forth by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. In Lewin’s model, change is a three-step process: “unfreezing” the current situation so that change may occur, transitioning to a new state, and then “refreezing” the new state so that it persists. Many subsequent organizational change models are similar to Lewin’s in depicting extended periods of relative stability punctuated by brief times of transition.

Although this may have been Lewin’s world in the early 1900s, the world today is much different. Change no longer happens in short spurts that interrupt long periods of relative stability. Instead, rather than moving from one state of equilibrium to another, ...