We polled the InfoQ Culture & Methods editorial team to get their ideas about what 2017 could have in store for the technology industry, the nature and structure of teams and organizations, leadership and management, and the implications these things could have on the way work happens in the future.
Here are our predictions for 2017:
With luck we will see less emphasis on brands and labels (Scrum vs Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, DAD…), replacing this with a pragmatic meshing of context-dependant good ideas. Mature organizations who have been through one or two rounds of methodology adoption will lead the charge away from “one size fits all” to pragmatism and realism.
Unfortunately this will go hand-in-hand with brand wars and commercialization – there is simply too much money to be made implementing branded, recipe book approaches to organizational “transformation” and the recipe vendors are not interested in meshing their “best practices” with anyone else’s “best practices”.
Certification will continue to be a big selling point, with a wider range of certifications covering more roles and activities falling under the certification banners. Unfortunately most of the certifications will remain simple knowledge-based or attendance based assessments – there will be very few ” skills based and hard to achieve ” certifications but these may grow.
Some leading edge organizations will decide to go for radically changing their structure and the way work is managed. They want to truly increase self-organization and autonomy by adopting for example Holacracy, principles from Sociocracy or Sociocracy 3.0 (S3), self-selection of teams, ideas from anti-fragility, or intent-based leadership. They explore ways to become a teal organization, driven by purpose and results.
