In my previous newsletter I talked about the need for intrinsic motivation for today’s creative economy, where thinkers and doers work together as a team.
According to Daniel Pink, the first of the factors underlying intrinsic motivation is autonomy.
I will focus today on autonomy, that is, the ability to choose how to develop one’s activities.
For teams, this means self-organization and cooperation.
Cooperation means working together for a shared purpose by going beyond the good feelings of collaboration.
It is not enough to tell people organize to work as a team and hope that this will automatically lead to results.
The first of the Agile manifesto values “Individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools” can sometimes be misleading.
I still remember discussion of a young person, who had recently joined the company, who had the belief that processes and tools could be completely defined by the team.
Establishing self-organizing teams without formally creating clear agreements on rights and responsibilities creates ambiguous or incompletely structured systems.
This is the perfect cocktail for an unpredictable and therefore unreliable work environment, which we might call the Tyranny of Liberty.
Introducing self-organization requires first:
- review processes
- introduce supporting tools
- Train people in this new way of working
An example of this we encounter every day in traffic.
If you remove a traffic light from an intersection and do not introduce other rules or other tools, such as modifying the road system, traffic will fall into chaos.
In the traffic circles that replaced the traffic lights, the road was modified by adding annular road paths and precise rules of travel and precedence were defined.
The driver takes responsibility for when to enter the traffic circle by following simple rules
Self-organizing teams do not need fewer processes and tools, but different processes and tools.
In my experience with physical product development teams, the following actions are needed:
- Define clear agreements with the team on rights and responsibilities.
- Train people on the team on the practices and tools the company has decided to adopt that ensure the quality of what is produced.
Once these two important steps have been taken, the team can self-organize by defining:
- Which development modes to use among those available.
- Which tools to use among those available.
- Which backlog elements to develop in agreement with the project leader (product owner)
This is not enough because one must then have the open-mindedness and courage to break the rules when the existing ones are no longer enough.
During product development, my teams and I often had to find new ways of working and new tools.
Experience is not what happens to a man, but what a man does using what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley
