Self-Organization and Empowerment in Agile

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You can’t self-organize without first having a defined system.

Systems are all around us.

A system, as defined by Google, is a connected things or parts forming a complex whole.

Complex systems are webs of relationships among elements

We encounter systems everywhere we turn in our everyday life: US economy, a forest, a tree, a deer, and a bear, the company we work for, our church, the PTO, and ........

Our teams are complex systems.

And, just like other systems around us, are made up more than just the sum of its parts.

A good way to illustrate this is through..... (next slide)

....Ant colonies.

Complex ant colonies are built by very simple rules and only local interactions between ants, ants build complex structures that far exceed the capability of intelligence of any single ant.

The colonies are built in a decentralized structure via self-organization. The queen ant does not tell the other ants what to do. The individual ants react to scents of the other ants near them, coordinating at the local level.

While it may seem counter-intuitive at first because of our experience in corporations, self-organization is the norm and default behavior of most dynamic systems. Consider atoms, molecules, viruses, species, or businesses. Even when we manage teams, there is always a level of self-organization that naturally occurs (think lunch meetings, how to structure folder systems, birthday parties at work, etc.). Humans have behaved this way for many years.

So if self-organization is so great, and simple creatures like the ant can build complex structures without a boss directing all the work, why don’t we do it in our businesses?

Self-organization in its purest form makes no distinction between good or bad, valuable or harmful. Systems will do whatever they can get away with.

....So humans invented Command and Control to steer systems to produce the results they wanted. And the manager role was born.

Management’s role is to make people capable of joint performance (Drucker) and is the critical determining factor. Leaving this very important function up to just a few people doesn’t work well and here are two reasons why....

First issue self-organization solves are the issues that come with the darkness principle.

When a manager makes all the decisions on the team we run into problems because every team member does not know all the behaviors of the entire system and can only have an incomplete mental model of the whole project.

In this example our manager thinks about this image and is solely focused on the goods the truck is hauling while our teammates are focused on other parts. Together they have a more complete picture.

Because of the darkness principle, it’s important to have the whole team plan and decide together. Since nobody on a team or in a crowd has a complete picture of all that’s happening in the entire group, by letting them solve their problems and make decisions together, you actually increase control over the situation.

The more complex the system and the more complex the project is, the more problems the darkness principle adds.

For those of you that follow Scrum, the darkness principle is one reason why the whole team is present for sprint planning and daily stand ups.

The second issue self-organization solves are the issues that come from centralized control.

Distributed control is much more powerful than centralized control in our teams. A good example of this in nature is our immune system. We get sick when pathogens enter our bodies and multiple. If our immune systems were centrally controlled, it would be too easy for those pathogens to attack the central control and take over.

When we distribute control throughout the system, it makes the system more robust and more resilient. Distributed control is critical for the survival of complex systems.

(Internet example?)

What’s in it for our teammates:

Increased effectiveness: Self-organizing teams are more effective and efficient through improved communication.
More Rewarding: Members of self-organizing teams often feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Promotes self-healing: Most of the time, a self-organizing team can deal with adversity in a way that other types of organizations can’t. The strength of the team comes from within, not from the manager. I have seen self-organizing teams mutate as teammates come and go, experience financial pressures, critical deadlines, and short sighted management (for a while). Being self-organizing, teams often deal with challenges far better because they are striving for a common goal.
Increases engagement: Teammates are more engaged because they are a part of the process. Self-organizing teams figure out how to do the work and who should do it. Being a part of the process naturally brings a feeling of engagement to teammates. We do our best work when we are engaged.

What’s in it for the business

Enhanced organizational performance
Increased productivity
Retention of valued employees
Increases customer satisfaction

And

What’s in it for the business:

Self-organization ultimately makes manageability of the system much easier

The illusion of control continued to exist. If we told people what to do, and they followed our directions, we would be successful. Does that really work? What happens when we try to control our friends, our children, or our co-workers? How about our spouse? What makes us think our teammates are any different?
Some managers are not comfortable with the idea of allowing a team to make decisions together. They feel they lose control over what’s happening when teams make decisions without them.

Lesson:
Command and control is an illusion of control – empowerment is the answer.

Intelligent control: extert influence without appearing to do so
Rulemaking should arise from people’s own interactions, not from the manager’s authority
Problem:

Most managers got to where they are because they were better than those around us. The logic went that the best developers and testers had to be the best development and QA managers. So companies promoted them. Little to no training exists. If you found a mentor, they were often too busy to help.

Just because someone is good in their role does not mean they are great at leading and inspring people

Lesson:

Don't promote people who are only good at their job - it's no indication of their leadership capability
Reward your best specialists with other things outside of a management promotion that’s not a good fit. Compensation, special projects, and oher things are better rewards for those folks.
Leaders aren't born, they are made, therefore, you must invest in them.

Managers must learn that they are in charge but not in control.

So what does that mean?The manager has to change. The manager moves from a dictator (Yes, I have that in my title) to an influencer by mentoring and coaching. That’s uncomfortable for a lot of managers. They may not always know or understand why things are done. They often haven’t been given the opportunity or the time to understand why. Just fix it. That’s what I hear all the time. The challenge is that, as managers, we are always just fixing it.

There are five elements that are required for a self-organizing team to be successful:
Trust – four types of trust that are required
Boundaries – Boundaries (or constraints) need to be defined creating the foundation for a self-organizing team.
Vision – Teams need a goal. Often that goal is the vision of where they want to go. With the goal in mind, everything that the team is doing should be in alignment with the vision.
Safety – A great deal of knowledge over the years has been gained by failure. Think of Edison and the lightbulb. Teams need to have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. To do this, a team has to feel safe enough to admit they learned from their mistakes by constantly learning from them.
Authority – A key constraint of a self-organizing system is authority. To be effective, a self-organizing team has to understand what authorities it has. Without that understanding, a self-organized team can’t make the local decisions it needs to make in a timely fashion to be effective.

Trust

Trust – There are four types of trust that are required:
You must trust your people and communicate that regularly.
You must earn trust from your people.
You must help your people trust each other.
You must trust yourself and stay true to your values.

Boundaries or Constraints
Boundaries (or constraints) need to be defined creating the foundation for a self-organizing team.

Management of team boundaries is an important part of the manager’s responsibilities. Three aspects of boundary management:
The way teams are structured
Self selection of teams is possible in orgs that have a high level of empowerment maturity but is rare.
How individuals relate to teams
Try to keep each person on one team so they don’t have to deal with task-switching and conflict of interests which can lead to problems.
How teams change over time
Time spans of team, it’s best to keep teams together for as long as possible.

Vision

Teams need a goal. Often that goal is the vision of where they want to go. With the goal in mind, everything that the team is doing should be in alignment with the vision.

Safety

A great deal of knowledge over the years has been gained by failure. Think of Edison and the lightbulb.

But we’re afraid of failure because we don’t want to be judged, we might be afraid to get started, or we might be afraid of the unknown.

But we don’t learn anything from just repeating good practices or by repeating the same mistakes.

Teams need to have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. To do this, a team has to feel safe enough to admit they learned from their mistakes by constantly learning from them.

Authority – A key constraint of a self-organizing system is authority. To be effective, a self-organizing team has to understand what authorities it has. Without that understanding, a self-organized team can’t make the local decisions it needs to make in a timely fashion to be effective.

Empowerment is implementing distributed control by delegating authority.

Knowledge workers have the knowledge so they are the ones wielding the real power in their organizations and managers are coaches and facilitators. The real work is done by the star players. As a manager you must learn what it takes to empower your team to make your players score.
Being an empowered employee is a skill, it must be learned and it takes discipline to maintain it.
Like continuous improvement, empowerment is a never-ending process

As with most skills that people learn, it is best to start with the tasks that are easy with little chance of things going wrong. Put all empowerment initiatives in three categories, low, medium and high. Start with the lowest categories and work your way up to the level that makes sense for the organization.
Low: developing internal workshops, establishing coding guidelines, and decorating the company’s Christmas tree
Moderate: interviewing job candidates by team members, self-education of employees, self-organizing project teams, freedom of working hours, and freedom of tool selection
High: determine their salaries together, allowed to work only the projects they want, no distinction of job titles

A manager working with a self-organizing team understands the importance of each element and the potential impact on the team.
Let’s talk about some examples of how a manager can influence each one of the basic elements:

Trust
Rule of two feet
Microstatus versus micromanage
communicating a problem, and then letting the team analyse and implement the solution.
Asking for the team to do a retro(360) on the manager periodically.
When a team gets to be too large, asking the team to determine how best to organize into two teams.
when not agreeing with the team, the manager/leader allowing the team to win and try something new. If the manager's position ends up being the better choice, the manager should not say "I told you so!", but should encourage the team to take more risks.

Boundaries
Duration of iteration
Definition of Done
As a manager, we try to establish the closed system that the team will live in as it self-organizes. We define such things as NFRs and development environments, communicate regulatory constraints, and push decision making to the lowest level that can make the decision. For example, a developer can choose his IDE that he wants to use, as they all pretty much do the same thing.

Vision
Making more services free to our customers (Moving the paywall)
We need automated testing
Always early, in the process, a vision is shared. Rarely is it discussed with the folks doing the work. It never gets discussed again in a lot of organizations. Allowing the team to share in the development and refinement of the vision as it is being built makes it their own.

Safety
Not completing a high priority story in a sprint
Give the team room
Allowing the team to experiment and learn from their success and failures without being punitive.

Authority
Delegation Poker
Got their back
If the team meets the definition of done, a manager should provide the authority for the team to determine when the PSI has met the definition of done.
The authority to make decisions about how it will operate.

A delegation board enables management to clarify delegation and to foster empowerment for both management and workers.

Distributed control in a complex system is achieved when authority is pushed into all corners of the network. However, people prefer not to “lose control”. Therefore, in order to make them feel safe, we must play along with the assumption that they have at least some control over their situation. That’s why a person wanting to delegate can benefit from the use of the seven levels of delegation.

1. Tell: You make a decision for others and you may explain your motivation. A discussion about it is neither desired nor assumed.
2. Sell: You make a decision for others but try to convince them that you made the right choice, and you help them feel involved.
3. Consult: You ask for input first, which you take it into consideration before making a decision that respects people’s opinions.
4. Agree: You enter into a discussion with everyone involved, and as a group you reach consensus about the decision.
5. Advise: You will offer others your opinion and hope they listen to your wise words, but it will be their decision, not yours.
6. Inquire: You first leave it to the others to decide, and afterwards, you ask them to convince you of the wisdom of their decision.
7. Delegate: You leave the decision to them and you don’t even want to know about details that would just clutter your brain.

The seven levels of delegation should not be applied to individual tasks and deliverables. Instead, they should be applied to key decision areas. Defining key decision areas is analogous to erecting a fence around the horse. Increasing and decreasing the delegation level (per key decision area) is similar to tightening or loosening the reins while riding the horse.

The seven levels of delegation can be used to define how decision-making is delegated from a manager to an individual or a team, from a team or individual to a manager, and between individuals or teams in a peer-to-peer manner.

Some examples:
 A CEO has set Mergers & Acquisitions at delegation level 1, and, therefore, she simply tells all employees in an email about the takeover of another company.
 A project manager has set Project Management Method at delegation level 2, and therefore he sells the idea of introducing an agile project management framework in the project team.
 Team members have set Vacation Days at level 3, and, therefore, they consult their fellow team members first whenever one of them wants to go on a vacation.
 The facilitator of a workshop has set Topics and Exercises at level 4, and, therefore, she discusses the available options with her class; together, they agree on the details of the program.

The right level of delegation is a balancing act. It depends on a team’s maturity level and the impact of its decisions. Distributed control in an organization is achieved when delegation of authority is pushed as far as possible into the system. However, circumstances may require that you start by telling or selling, gradually increasing the delegation level of team members and widening their territories.

The Delegation Board There is an easy tool people can use to communicate the type of delegation between a manager and a team, or between any two parties. This tool can also help both parties be open and transparent about what they expect from each other. I call it the delegation board.

It is a physical board (or a spreadsheet, or the window that looks out onto your neighbor’s kitchen) that vertically lists a number of key decision areas that someone delegates to others. In the horizontal dimension, the board shows the seven levels of delegation. For each key decision area, the board has a note in one of the seven columns, clearly communicating to everyone how far authority is delegated in that area. Are people somehow involved in the decision process (level 3: consult)? Is their agreement on certain topics required (level 4: agree)? Are they expected to inform the manager about their decisions (level 6: inquire)? The delegation board can tell everyone.

The delegation board is useful in various ways. It models the creation of boundaries and the balancing act of authorization, both of which are needed to get the best out of self-organization. Second, by visualizing key decision areas and delegation levels, the board can act as an information radiator, influencing and directing anyone who takes a closer look at delegation. Last but not least, a delegation board gives managers something to control. When they feel they are losing control, I prefer to see them pushing around some notes on a board rather than the people in their organization. I have no problems telling mana

How do we play Delegation Poker?
Each team plays this game differently, so you can follow some of the more common rules we’re sharing here or you can make up your own. It’s all about organizing how you and your team look at delegation and self-organization.
Start by making a list of pre-defined cases or situations in which you want to create a delegation policy, establishing who has what influence. This can range from project design and authority to hiring new team members.
Team members should be organized in groups of three to seven people. Each teammate gets a set of cards numbered 1 through 7, signifying the Seven Levels of Delegation (see below.)
Team members will repeat the following steps for each pre-defined case:
One person picks out a situation to read aloud OR he tells a story from personal experience.
Each player chooses one of the seven delegation cards privately, reflecting on how she would delegate the decision in that particular situation.
When all players have decided, they reveal their selected cards.
Everyone earns points according to the value of their selected card, except the players that are the “highest minority” (see below).
Let the people with the highest and the lowest cards explain the reasoning behind their choices.
You can then create a Delegation Board to show the results of your consensus.
The Rule of the Highest Minority speaks to the idea of delegating as far as possible without taking it too far. You may have a player who always chooses 7, if he is alone in his choice, that gets thrown out as an option, as do his points. Now, if three or four people all chose 7, that is the majority, meaning each of them earns seven points.
Some also play that the Lowest Minority gets no points either, like a boss who always wants to maintain control or an indecisive teammate who doesn’t want any authority.
gers that they can “control self-organization” with a delegation board when this gives people clarity of boundaries and an opportunity for expanding their territory.

Delegation poker board

Self-Organization and Empowerment in Agile

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Self-Organization and Empowerment in Agile