Nurturing team's spontaneity and unpredictability : self-organisation.

Nurturing team's spontaneity and unpredictability : self-organisation.

by Dirk Depré - January 8, 2021

Many organisations nowadays believe in high-performing self-organising teams. And for a good reason, because the benefits are huge. But after installing structures in which those teams are going to operate, many organisations somehow believe the team is self-organising as from the day the team got that title. It's just the way we think change happens. I have to tell you a secret: by stating something is 'as from now on', doesn't mean necessarily that the change has happened already. Often, almost always, there is still a long journey to start to get to the point of actual change. And this is very much the truth for teams adopting self-organisation. Achieving self-organisation is not something you should take for granted.

When I was a teenager, and like every kid hitting puberty, I've started to question parental authority . "I'm old enough to make my own decisions", I told myself and obviously my friends know better than anybody how the world works than my parent could ever tell me. I was extremely lucky my older sister already paved somewhat the way for me to break away from my parents and I was also extremely lucky that I have amazing parents. One of the things my parents cared about a lot, was me doing well in school and getting good grades: "You need to get your degree to open doors when you start your professional career.", is what they believed to be true. But at the same time they gave me enough room to find out on my own how I could organise my studying career the best possible way. My dad used to tell: "You want freedom Dirk? We give you freedom, but do not forget that with freedom also comes responsibility!". In retrospect today, he was right all along and I am forever grateful both my parents gave me that freedom and time to explore what responsibility is about in the real world.

Since many organisations struggle to grow high-performing self-organising teams, maybe it's a good time to have a look at what self-organisation is about. It might give ourselves some context to put everything in the right perspective...

DEFINITIONS OF SELF-ORGANISATION

from a scientifically point of view they state in Wikipedia:

• "Self-organization, also called spontaneous order, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. ... The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all components of the system. As such, the organisation is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. .. ".

Then, what are Self-Organising teams?

as stated on Scrum.org:

• "Self-organising teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by other outside the team... Development Teams are structured and empowered by the organisation to organize and manage their own work ... What does it mean to be self-organising? Besides its general concept, in the context of software development it means, among other things, bottom up estimation and planning at least at the sprint/team level, Development Team peer pressure to balance workload, overall proactiveness from the Development Team to go after what needs to be done to achieve the sprint objective instead of waiting for task assignment... "

as stated in the Scrum Guide v2020:

• "Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how."

as stated on Planview Website:

• "At the simplest form, a self-organizing team is one that does not depend on or wait for a manager to assign work. Instead, these teams find their own work and manage the associated responsibilities and timelines. ... Self-organising teams also take on the responsibility of choosing the most effective and efficient way to complete their work and regularly look for way to improve through experimentation. For this structure to work, self-organizing team must have a high sense of ownership and responsibility. Equally as important, they need to communicate often and trust in the capabilities of everyone on the team."

as stated on InfoQ:

• " 'The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising team', the Agile Manifesto announces. ... Self organising teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team "

In general, an organisation functions well when it has direction, does effective decision-making, has a degree of control, embrace effective methods to get stuff done and has motivated professionals to take care of the above.A self-organized team is possible when people carry shared purpose, principles and values. They support and respect each other. And they want to succeed.

But let's also keep this in mind, self-organisation is not about "we can do whatever we want to do". That freedom to self-organise, comes with great responsibility.

Philip Anderson wrote in "The Biology of business" the following about Self-organisation: "Self-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviours that emerge from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what effective behavior is."

The most compelling and best known picture to visualize what we're pursuing with our self-organising teams is probably this one from Henrik Kniberg:

And there are good (psychological) reasons to pursue this:

• more responsible for end results, self-disciplined and self-driven

• avoid dependency on the formal leader qualities

• motivated, initiative and willing to act

• enjoy work more

• better insured against groupthink, conformity and diffusion of responsibility

• not shifting judgment and decisions to others, better in finding alternative and balancing options

• every member is in charge, ready to step in as a leader and have incentive to develop leadership skills

Focus on Teaching / learning teams to become autonomous AND aligned

In a section of his book "Agile Project Management with Scrum", Ken Schwaber summarised how we tend to succumb to expecting others to make decisions that we should be making ourselves:

"Being managed by someone else is totally ingrained in our life and work experience. Parents, teachers, and bosses who teach us to self-manage instead of striving to fulfil their expectations are rare. Why should we expect that when we tell a Team that it is responsible for managing itself, it will know what we are talking about? “Self-management” is just a phrase to them; it isn’t yet something real. A Team requires concrete experience with Scrum before it can truly understand how to manage itself and how to take the responsibility and authority for planning and conducting its own activities. Not only must the Scrum Master help the Team to acquire this experience, but the Scrum Master must also do so while overcoming his or her own tendencies to manage the Team. Both the ScrumMaster and the Team have to learn a new how to approach the issue of management."

The ultimate experience of self-organising teams can often be found in team sports or the army. Seems quite logical, because whenever you need to go to 'war', you need to be able to fall back on your fellow warriors and instinctively adapt to the situation on your own.

However, it takes strong vision and good leadership to become a team capable to climb every mountain. In a previous post, I've talked about Phil Jackson and how he urged the Chicago Bulls team to learn to think for themselves. Another personal hero in that regard is Massimiliano Allegri. In Italian football, he has won 5 straight scudetto's (titles) with Juventus between 2014 and 2019. He was once quoted on a saying on a picture he received from a friend of him: "If they had taught us less, we would have learned more". And so it was also common practice that Allegri didn't called all the shots from the sideline so players could start taking initiatives themselves on the pitch and think about solutions what is best for the team; actually helping each other. "It's all about nurturing the player's spontaneity and unpredictability", Allegri said. At the end of an interview he explained it like this to the interviewer: “The next time when they are in front of a closed exit door, they don't start banging their head against the door, but they find another way out.”

It takes a lot of time to get people in that self-managing mindset and every now and then we need to remind organisations that the so-called self-organising teams inside the organisation might not all be at the level of aligned autonomy yet. Let's help the teams to get there.