Leading a self-organising team

Ziaan Hattingh

Managing Director


Jaco Viljoen

SDLC
Consultant


Agenda
Self-organisation and subtle control
Containers, Differences and
Exchanges
Influencing how the team evolves
Situational agile leadership

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What is a self-organizing team?
1. Self-organizing does not mean
• the team gets to decide what goal they pursue
• or even necessarily who is on the team
(some self-organizing teams are given this responsibility)

2. Self-organizing is about the team determining
how they will respond to their environment
• (and managers/leaders can influence that
environment)

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Complex adaptive systems
A CAS is characterized by:

1. A dynamic network of many agents
• acting in parallel
• acting and reacting to what other agents are doing
2. Control is highly dispersed and decentralized
3. Overall system behavior is the result of a huge number
of decisions made constantly by many agents

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Some examples
• Ant colony or bee hive
• Flock of geese heading south
• Us right now
• A family preparing, eating, and cleaning
up after a meal
• A crowd batched up to get into a concert
or sporting event
• Cars and drivers on the highway
• A software team

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Control is not evil
1. Simple rules or incentives are used to guide or
direct behavior
• “Drive this direction and on this side on the
highway.”
2. For bioteams, these are provided by nature
• “Produce honey”
3. For our teams,
• Rules and incentives can be added by managers or
leaders...or in some cases by team members

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Self-organisation does not mean that workers
instead of managers engineer an organisation
design. It does not mean letting people do whatever
they want to do.

It means that management commits to guiding the
evolution of behaviors that emerge from the
interaction of independent agents instead of
specifying in advance what effective behavior is.

~Philip Anderson, The Biology of Business

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Although project teams are largely on their own,
they are not uncontrolled. Management establishes
enough checkpoints to prevent instability, ambiguity,
and tension from turning into chaos. At the same
time, management avoids the kind of rigid control
that impairs creativity and spontaneity.

~Takeuchi & Nonaka

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To be sure, control is still
exercised; but, it is subtle and
much of it is indirect.

~Peter DeGrace & Leslie Stahl
Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions

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What this is not
1. We’re not talking about
• Being deceptive or sneaky
• Manipulating people
2. Nothing I’m going to advocate needs to
be secret
• But there may be reasons why you
don’t broadcast your reasons

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Container
• A boundary within which Self-organisation occurs
• Company, project, team, city, role, nationality

Significant Differences
• There must be differences among the agents acting in our
system
• Technical knowledge, domain knowledge, education,
experience, power, gender

Transforming Exchanges
• Agents in the system interact and exchange resources
• Information, money, energy (vision)

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Using the CDE model
You can influence how a team self-organizes
by altering the:
Containers
• formal teams, informal teams, clarify (or not)
expectations
Differences
• Dampen or amplify them within or between containers
Exchanges
• Insert new exchanges, new people, new techniques or
tools

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Containers
• Enlarge or shrink teams
• Enlarge or shrink the responsibility
boundary of teams
• Change team membership
• Create new teams or groups

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Differences
1. Don’t require consensus
• Creativity comes from tension
• Quiet disagreement is not as good as
fierce debate that leads to behavior
change
2. Ask hard questions
• Then expect teams to find solutions

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Transforming exchanges
1. Encourage communication between
teams and groups
• Who isn’t talking who should?
2. Add or remove people from exchanges
• Change reporting relationships
• Relocate people
• Compliance with external groups
3. Encourage learning

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You are the ScrumMaster or coach...

• The next slides describes some teams with some trouble
might help them by changing their
spots. Think about how you
Containers, amplifying or dampening Differences, or
changing their Exchanges.
• For each case, identify at least one thing you’d do.
• Note whether you are tweaking their Container,
Differences, or Exchanges. (You might be affecting
more than one.)

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1
The team consists of four developers, two testers, a database
engineer and you. The developers and testers are not
working well together. Developers work in isolation until two
days are left in the iteration. They then throw code “over the
wall” to the testers.

2
The team is failing to deliver potentially shippable software at
the end of each iteration. None of the items they start are
100% finished. They’re close but work is always left to be
done in the next iteration.

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3
The team seems to be consistently undercommitting during
iteration planning. They finish the work they commit but it
doesn’t seem like much. The product owner hasn’t
complained yet but you’re worried she will soon.

4
Your organisation has 20 different agile teams. Each team
has its own testers who are starting to go in different
directions in terms of preferred tools and approaches.

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The self-organising path
1. Self-organisation is not something
that happens one time
• A team is never done doing it
• The team continually re-organizes in a
sense-and-respond manner to its
environment
2. Leaders can influence-but not
control or direct-this path

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Self-organisation proceeds from the premise that effective
organisation is evolved, not designed. It aims to create an
environment in which successful divisions of labor and
routines not only emerge but also self-adjust in response
to environmental changes. This happens because
management sets up an environment and encourages
rapid evolution toward higher fitness, not because
management has mastered the art of planning and
monitoring workflows.

~Philip Anderson

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Variation, selection & retention
1. Evolution is the result of three elements:
• Variation, Selection and Retention
2. Consider a giraffe:
• Variation: A random mutation that leads to a longer neck
• Selection: The long neck helps it reach food others can’t;
so it is more likely to survive and breed
• Retention: The mutation is passed to its descendants

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Influencing team evolution
1.Define performance
2.Manage meaning
3.Evolve vicarious selection systems
4.Add energy
5.Reduce or absorb complexity
6.Create vacuums

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1) Define performance
1. The principle of selection tells us that the traits that
help us survive will be the ones retained
2. Managers and leaders send messages about which
traits should survive
3. What message is your organisation sending about
the relative importance of short vs. long-term
performance?
What messages are sent if the organisation:
1. Provides training

2. Supports working at a sustainable pace

3. Allows employees time to explore wild ideas

4. Doesn’t exchange meeting a deadline for unmaintainable code

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2) Manage meaning
1. Individuals in a CAS respond to the messages they
receive; e.g.,
• bees responding to a “danger” message
• ants responding to a “food found over here” message
2. Leaders can push messages into the system
• e.g., putting the team in touch with customers
3. Or keep messages out
4. Meaning often comes from the stories, myths and
rituals that are repeated
• “We will become profitable this quarter.”
• “Our GM counts the cars in the lot every day at 5 PM”

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Managing meaning
• Think of at least one story that is part of your
corporate folklore

• What meaning does that story have about
company principles, values, attitudes, or
behaviors?

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3) Evolve vicarious selection systems
1. Variation—Selection—Retention
• Selection was determining which variations will be retained
• Can take a long time

2. So we often use vicarious selection systems
• This is an animal that can smell that a food is poisonous, rather
than eating it
3. Using only the marketplace as our selection mechanism
takes too long
4. Organisation also evolve vicarious selection systems
• Retrospectives, Google’s 20% policy, compensation

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4) Add energy
1. Unless energy is pumped into the system, entropy will set in
2. Make sure the group has a “clear, elevating goal”† or an
“igniting purpose”‡
3. Motivation
• Project chartering: Vision box, press release, magazine review,
elevator statement
4. Opportunity
• To learn, a bigger role, to go onto even better projects, and so on
5. Information
• Customer visits, training, conferences, brown-bags

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May 25, 1995
To: All Microsoft Employees
Subject: Internet Tidal Wave

The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the
rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well
as an incredible challenge. I am looking
forward to your input on how we can
improve our strategy to continue our track
record of incredible success.

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5) Reduce or absorb complexity
1. Reduce complexity
• Standardize work through
• routines, standards, policies, and procedures
2. Absorb complexity
• Create relationships among people /
departments to provide better access to
information

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6) Create vacuums
• Point out issues but don’t point out
answers or expected solutions
• Let others step into this leadership
vacuum
• “What keeps me up at night is this, that,
and such-and-such.”

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Team readiness
1. The coach or ScrumMaster is
responsible for knowing the readiness
of the team
2. Think about each team in terms of
• Willingness to change
• Ability
3. Different teams need different styles of
leadership
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Assessing readiness level

Readiness
Ability Willingness
Level

Unable Unwilling or insecure R1

Unable Willing or confident R2

Able Unwilling or insecure R3

Able Willing or confident R4

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Different leadership for different
teams
Team is unable and
R1
Relationship Behavior

Participating Selling unwilling or insecure

(R3) (R2) R2
Team is unable but
willing or confident

Team is able and
R3 unwilling or insecure
Delegating Telling
(R4) (R1) R4
Team is able and
willing or confident
(low) Task Behavior (high)

Readiness level 1 teams
1. Unable & unwilling or insecure
2. Need a telling leadership style
• Focus more on telling them what to do than
on establishing relationships
3. Cannot become immediately agile
• This isn’t command-and-control
4. It’s getting a low morale team ready to
change
5. Team needs to develop confidence

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Building confidence in R1 teams
• This team cannot hit a “home run project”
• Try for small victories first instead
• Provide day-to-day task guidance
• Use short (1–2 week) iterations so they (and
you) can see how they’re doing
• Point out the improvements
• Build up foundational agile skills such as unit
testing
• Get a nightly build running that emails nightly
test results

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1. Unable but willing or confident
2. Need a selling leadership style
• Need to exhibit high task direction and highly
supportive relationship behavior
3. Main goal is increasing team’s skills
4. Can become agile
5. Good coach / ScrumMaster shifts decision-
making style
• Starts to rely on the team to make its own
decisions

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Improving skills of R2 teams
1. Have the team start making more of
their own decisions
• Be a safety net if the decision is critical
• Good time to introduce retrospectives
2. Stress that it’s OK to focus on quality of
code over rapid typing
• Pair programming
• Test-driven development

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1. Able but unwilling or insecure
2. Need a participating leadership style:
• Give less task direction
• Have team make more of their own
decisions
3. Team will make some mistakes:
• So what?
4. Team is probably truly in the agile
space

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Helping the R3 team
1. Team is manically focused on the trees
• So ScrumMaster / coach keeps an eye on the forest
2. Watching the forest
• Look ahead planning
• What will the team need in 2 weeks? A month?
• Make sure sprints continue to build toward the
release plan
• Identify high-value work
• Put a project prioritization process in place

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1. Able and willing and confident
2. Need a delegating leadership style:
• Low amount of task direction
• Low reliance on relationships to manage the
team
3. Team is undoubtedly agile:
• Highly skilled
• Self organizing

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Unleashing the R4 team
1. No longer helping team make decisions
• Now helping them learn how to defer decisions
2. ScrumMaster focuses on maximizing throughput
• Rather than meeting deadlines
• Traditional Project Manager thinks of a project like a 10k
race
• ScrumMaster thinks of it as a 1-hour race
• There’s no finish line; clock runs out and you stop

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Leading a self-organising team

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