Scaling the company with the waggle dance.
Working with one hand in nature within a biodynamic farm and the other in a high tech software factory I am able to notice some characteristics of what self-organisation really means.
In the farm I have 10 bee hives where I collect honey for my family and my colleagues. Bees are social insects and when thinking of a bee you have to think of the entire hive. So the hive is the bee and the bee is the hive.
When some bees find a new place to go or the hive is in good health, some bees start thinking about swarming. They start dancing in a specific order to scout new bees for swarming. When thinking about leaving the hive, they also start feeding the future Queen for the current hive. The oldest one will be the one that will fly away.
They do the waggle dance and while dancing they move and follow the shape of the number 8. This is the direction of the place where they are thinking of leaving for. During the waggle dance, some of them are headbutting the others. This is to understand if it is done seriously or not. Headbutts are required in order to understand who will join the old queen and who stay with the new at the current hive.
This a good analogy of what is happening when someone inside the company finds a good new opportunity. Self-organisation requires that a new team will form and the old team’s recognized team leader must leave for the new opportunity.
The waggle dance inside the company is the agreement of what will be good for the next team. Team players start feeding the new queen and when the person is ready the new team is ready to take off. The old queen continues the process of education, staffing the team and enabling cross fertilization of the team.
This includes the new hired team members, they will work on the same technology of the old queen and when ready to swarm they will fly out to the new opportunity. This is how we scale up our teams in a self organised way.
We gently introduce this to customers as a normal job rotation practice, but at the end the whole company (the hive) is driving to a swarm. We swarm every 2 months, when we deliver a fresh new team.
