As we discussed in Chapter 8, Tightening Feedback Loops in the Software Development Life Cycle, the sooner we can get feedback that we're heading in the right direction, the sooner we can build the right thing for our customer. This is how an Agile, adaptive planning approach speeds things up compared to traditional management styles.

There has been a dramatic shift in where the knowledge resides in organizations. Previously, it was held by the ones at the top, whose job was to oversee the hands of the organization perform an almost production-line-like series of repetitive tasks.

However, in a modern organization where the tasks carried out have become much more complex, knowledge is transferred to the specialists who now carry out these tasks. Large amounts of information are consumed by these specialists, in our case, in order to build useful software.

This is how the term knowledge workers was coined; the fact is that we have to become just as good at gathering information as we are at wrangling our newly gained knowledge. We have to collaborate closely in order to extract and manipulate this information in order to turn it into something useful.