5 Reasons Your Business May Be Blocking Self-Organization

In my previous article, I described how self-organization is a fundamental property of the Universe and the default behavior of human beings.  Left to their own devices, people will self-organize.  It’s just what people do.

However, when I look around many organizations, the one thing I do NOT see is a lot of self-organization.  Instead, what I see is a lot of highly-paid professionals waiting around to be told what to do.  Of course, people being people they will self-organize in other areas, but not in a meaningful way around the work.  If what I have described sounds familiar to you, then I would propose that something in your business in actively inhibiting self-organization.

What to Look For In Your Teams

1. Constraints: everything which surrounds us is the result of the interactions of a well-known set of physical properties and laws.  These interactions create our environment and all the living creatures which inhabit it.  Constraints are essential for self-organization.  Without constraints, we have entropy (randomness).  With the exception of statutory constraints, very few constraints that are put upon development teams are as rigid as they seem.  In fact, most are some manager’s personal preferences that have been codified.  Fix: make the constraints or boundaries clear to the team.  Identify which constraints are non-negotiable and which constraints reflect a personal preference.
2. Autonomy: most organizations are FULL of constraints and restrictions.  Therefore, teams are not lacking in constraints.  What they lack is the freedom of choice of how to move within the constraints imposed upon them.  Or the constraints put upon the team are so restrictive, there is no freedom of choice.  When there is only one acceptable option to implement, then it’s not a choice.  It’s a rigged system.  By definition, a complex problem always has multiple solutions that could work.  Fix: Give the team permission to test their boundaries.  Encourage lateral thinking to identify alternative solutions.
3. Visibility: imagine two professional basketball teams playing a game in an arena that had no windows or light.  That would be an exercise in frustration and probably involve multiple high-speed collisions.  Now imagine that same experience, but this time we turn on the lights.  When team members lack situational awareness of their surroundings, how their peers are progressing or how their work intersects with their colleagues, they simply cannot play the game they were hired to do.  Fix: Expose all the work the team is actively working on.  Give the team the responsibility to manage the day-to-day execution of their tasks.
4. Metrics: let’s continue with our scenario of two professional basketball teams.  This time we turn on the lights, but withhold access to the score, shot clock or game clock.  That’s not going to work.  Much of what makes basketball interesting to play, and watch, is that the players have the ability to check the score, and how much time is remaining, at any time.  Without these metrics, the players are operating in the dark.  They cannot inspect-and-adapt their strategy and without inspect-and-adapt, they lose.  It’s exactly the same for a team building software products.  When teams do not have access to timely metrics on how much time is remaining and how well they are doing with respect to their goal, they cannot win.  Fix: Work with the team to identify two to three metrics that demonstrate progress towards their goal.  Give the team the responsibility to manage their progress using these metrics.
5. Emergent leadership: before the COVID-19 pandemic, I would facilitate an exercise in my Certified ScrumMaster courses where the participants would self-organize into groups based on simple factors over multiple iterations.  Every time, the groups would fail to achieve the objective in the first iteration.  Once confronted with their lack of progress, the groups would always succeed in the second iteration.  Why?  Because a leader would emerge that would drive the group towards a solution.  I observed this behavior hundreds of times over multiple years, locations and cultures.  What it revealed to me is that self-organization requires leadership.  But the leadership cannot be imposed.  It must be emergent.  Fix: Support emergent leadership within your teams.  Encourage multiple experiments to prove, or disprove, a hypothesis when teams fail to reach consensus on a decision or solution.

The Leader’s Role to Support Self-Organization