Self-Organization – The Role of Managers

Self-organization is and essential part of agile product development and also rooted in the Agile Manifesto itself: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” But where does self-organization start? What is it limited to? What is the role of managers in the context of self-organized teams?

Self-organizing teams don’t arise out of space, they rather emerge or develop under certain environmental conditions. First of all you need people who self-organize. These group of people then needs a common goal or vision that they self-organize around. That’s already a good start but might lead to some shakiness if you just leave it there. Self-organized teams also have constraints, which is a limitation or restriction and need additional boundaries, which are unofficial rules about what should not be done. Here are some examples for constraints:

• time is limited, a day has only 24 hours, a working day even less
• we usually have limited resources budget, product material, computing power, etc
• a company strategy that we need to pay into
• your organization builds cars but doesn’t grow fruits

and a few examples of boundaries:

• we don’t accept shouting at each other, at least in environments that I’m active in
• your body needs a rest after some time
• your brain needs a rest after some time

Coming back to our initial questions:

What is self-organization limited to?

Constraints and boundaries, which vary from country to country and vary from organization to organization.

But where does self-organization start? When do we consider a group of people self-organized?

According to Wikipedia a self-organizing system is “a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system.”. To make it a bit easier to digest, we replace the term “system” with “a group of people” or “team” Now let’s think of a very basic form of order that arises from interactions between the people of that team. Based on this I would call it a simple form of self-organization if a team coordinates task amongst themselves. The team decides who does what, and a more sophisticated team also agrees on when. Remember the team is formed around a common goal or vision, that these task are contributing to.

Looking at the answers to the previous questions puts us in a better spot to answer the remaining open question: What is the role of a manager in self-organization context?

Well, first of all the manager could give the team a goal or a vision. That doesn’t mean the manager needs to come up with that goal alone and present it. The manager could also facilitate crafting a goal or a vision with the team. It is just important that there is one.

As important as a goal or a vision is it, to give the team the frame (constraints & boundaries) within the team can self-organize. If the team is newly composed, the frame should be smaller or stricter. The more mature a team gets the wider the frame can be set and the more decisions the team can take over. Also here the manager doesn’t create all constraints and can’t create boundaries. But the manager must communicate and make the team aware of them.

The above is a minimal set of things that a manager should do to nurture self-organization. The manager can also go further and actually adopt leadership behavior that takes self-organized teams to next levels. These aspect I have covered in a previous post here.

In case you also want to take steps to actually turn a group of managed people into a self-organizing team, you can read how to do that here.

If you still want to diver deeper into the subject, I can also recommend to read “How To Lead Self-Managing Teams?: A business novel on changing leadership from sheepherding to beekeeping” by Rini van Solingen