Organizations have always struggled to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change, let alone make effective strategic investments in the future. Even when decisions are made, communicating and aligning them with the rest of the organization is just as difficult.

How do we reasonably keep up with the technology landscape?

How do individuals and teams learn what has been done in other parts of the organization?

What are the unintended consequences and social implications of technology trends?

What has worked well?

What has not worked well?

When there are multiple reasonable choices, how do we focus?

When does it make sense to not adopt something “the whole world is doing”?

When does it make sense to adopt something “nobody else is doing?”

Over the past couple decades, Thoughtworks has had to deal with all of these questions. We’ve created several internal procedures for gathering, scoring, and choosing technologies we want to focus on, and those we do not. We’ve also created external resources such as Thoughtworks Radar and Thoughtworks Looking Glass to share our learnings with the world.

In this talk, Ken will show the frameworks, tools, and processes Thoughtworks has used over the past couple decades to attack this problem.