Prepare for change aches and pains

Virginia Satir was a psychologist and therapist who created the Change Process Model that describes how people accept and adapt to change. The following diagram, adapted directly from her model, shows what happens when people are asked to move to Agile ways of working. Over to the left, the existing (or late) status quo is the waterfall way of thinking and doing things. When confronted with the foreign element—or "let's do Scrum!"—people resist and attempt to revert to form, or to what's comfortable. When the pressure remains on to change, chaos and depression can and often follow and performance suffers.

At some point, people will recognize a transforming idea to help them out of the "slough of despond" or "valley of despair". As they integrate the new ideas, they eventually realize a new status quo—in our case, they become Agile. Because a Scrum team focuses on continuous improvement through retrospectives and other means, the team realizes over time that...