Category Archives: Self-organization

The SM and Self-Organization

Let’s deal with a few Questions today. Question 1 Does the ScrumMaster facilitate self-organization? Yes. Question 2 What does that mean? It’s a bit complicated. First, many teams at first do not know how to self-organize.  So, the teaching of certain skills may require “less self-organization” at first. But then, the Team should start to […]

Making Change Happen

Updated: May 30, 2024. How do we make change happen? First, this is an interesting and somewhat difficult question. No one knows the complete answer. Change does happen, and people ascribe causes to why the change happened (or did not happen). The facts are very messy so it is hard to be sure, and hard to […]

Self-organization of the Team

We have this idea in Agile, that the Team should self-organize.  This is an important idea. And, more, an important action of the Team. In Agile, self-organization is contrasted with command-and-control. We think self-organization is an important thing to study, both in general and in your Team. It seems simple, but like almost anything, to […]

Self-organization

Some smart people are discussing self-organization on the Lean Software Development Yahoo group. You might want to listen or talk there. Here is what I said today: __________________________________ First, recognize that self-organization happens willy-nilly all the time. I suppose one can still ask when does it start, and where or why does it stop. (Thanks […]

The importance of teams

As I teach Scrum and Lean-Agile classes, I often meet people who don’t understand teams. Often this is true for some of the smartest and most capable people. Why? I think there are many answers. One is that they have been taught the single-leader team discipline. (This is the phrase that Katzenbach and Smith use […]

Spontaneous Order

I will not remember this well (knowledge decay), but there is a great quote from Fujio Cho (now Chairman of Toyota) at the beginning of Liker’s The Toyota Way. Something like: “There are many things you do not understand, and therefore we ask, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and take action? Try to do […]

Shock Therapy

Back in September, Jeff Sutherland spoke at the Googleplex in NYC. The talk includes a section on shock therapy. The video is called “Self-Organization: The secret sauce for improving your Scrum team.” It’s about 90 minutes long. Recommended. One key point: Shock therapy is a technique for a special and experienced coach to work with […]

Self-Organization in Scrum

On Sept. 4, 2008, Jeff Sutherland gave a talk on self organization in Scrum at Google in NYC. The talk also covered some of the associated contradictions (or perhaps, seeming contradictions). Here are the slides from the talk.  Google video is here.