Succeeding with Agile

Change Is Coming More Quickly Than Ever Before

Back in 1970 Alvin Toffler coined the term future shock, saying that it is the disorientation people feel when confronted with “too much change in too short a period of time” (1970, 4). Human, and therefore organizational, capacity to change is limited—ask people to change too many things at the same time and they shut down; the shattering stress and disorientation of future shock kicks in.

In many organizations, employees have been suffering from future shock for years. Teams are asked to do more with fewer people. Outsourcing and distributed teams have become increasingly common. These adjustments were preceded by the rush to move applications to a client/server model, then onto the web, and then ...