Embracing Change

Hello readers! I would like to welcome you all to this blog, and encourage you to follow this regularly in the days to come. With a name like 'Waltzing to change', its only befitting that my first post should be something about 'change'. So here goes...

Change is the only constant in our lives. We have all heard it many times. This change could come in the form of unexpected life events, changes at work, culture changes, changes in the world around us etc. etc. Yet when it happens, we find ourselves struggling to come to terms with it. 

Alvin Toffler talked about responding to change in his first book ‘Future Shock’ (1970). He later wrote two other books –Third Wave and Power Shift. Third Wave suggested that the 21^st century would be the information age and according to my old English professor, belong to the service industry. How true that has turned out to be! When I read this book several years ago, it seemed more of a chore as a reading assignment, but over the years I have often thought back to passages from this book, especially when I adjusted to the whole culture change of living in a new country.

I think that India has been facing a lot of the culture shock mentioned in Future Shock for the last decade, and will continue to do so as we face technological and social change at a staggering rate. There is rapid urbanization and movement from rural areas to big cities. People and families are facing a generation’s worth of growth overnight, and are ill equipped to handle all the sudden prosperity. Isn’t this a kind of change too?

Future Shock was written a long time ago, but it feels like we are actually living through what he predicted over three decades ago. That is an indescribable feeling. The only way to deal with change then, is to expect the unexpected, embrace change and be like the Borg – assimilate everything new you encounter, because as we well know, ‘Resistance is futile’ !! (Sic)

One software methodology that thrives on change is Agile. ‘Inspect and adapt’ is a tenet of this methodology which encourages quick responses to change, and empowers teams to take unexpected events and occurrences in their stride and come out winners.

For those of you who would like to read this revered tome, you can get it here on Amazon. Or maybe find a much thumbed copy in your public library or local thrift store!