Self Organized Teams, What you Need and What it Means to Me
We are now reading everywhere about design and systems thinking, agile principles and human center approach, they all have something in common as first priority: the end-user or customer.
The Agile manifesto says: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
By definition, Self-organization is the ability of a system to structure itself, create new structures, learn, or diversify.
To be a self-organized team like the ants from the picture you need to have an environment set up for free experimentation so your team has room to share and collaborate. What that really means is that the team needs to have a space to share their work done. A recent design thinking article from HBR talks about how prototypes can be delivered to users to explore the initial thoughts about a problem or idea.
Have you heard about demo meetings or sessions? These can be used to experiment or show early-stage prototypes done by anyone in the team, to get feedback, understand how to improve, or even what can be done differently to make products even more attractive to users. The Demo, or how it is called in SCRUM, the Sprint Review meeting, is the place to keep inspecting and adapting.
“A design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time.” — HBR. Design Thinking Comes of Age
If it does not work the first time as you thought it would, keep looking for feedback, keep working on it and by the next sprint the original idea will have evolved into something entirely different.
I was working on improving a process because I believed I knew it inside out, so I worked on this solution and during the demo to the end-user, my surprise was that they were already using a similar tool I did not know , but what happened during that demo? I collected more user requirements, I received feedback about my script that helped me to significantly improve it.
“The most marvelous characteristic of some complex systems is their ability to learn, diversify, complexify, evolve.” — Donella Meadows
Demos are vital for self-organization, sharing your work with others is what will add complexity to your ideas, and will take you to the next level.
A self-organized team is where your teammates are not afraid of picking up something from the backlog that they have not tried before, and would not be scared of the feedback when showing the work done in the demo session. This is a way to grow and evolve as an individual and as a team.
Please share your feedback in the comments section below, let’s start a conversation, and if you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my other post about: What makes you a good Product Owner?
References:
Meadows, D. 2008, Thinking in Systems: A Primer.
https://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-Systems-Primer-Donella-Meadows/dp/1603580557/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1NNGBW9HXK41I&dchild=1&keywords=thinking+systems&qid=1600130160&sprefix=thinkin+sys%2Caps%2C635&sr=8-1
Sutherland, J. 2014, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.
https://www.amazon.ca/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Jeff+Sutherland&qid=1600130542&sr=8-1
Kolko, J. 2015. Design Thinking Comes of Age.
https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age#:~:text=Tolerate%20failure.,things%20right%20the%20first%20time.&text=The%20company%20leverages%20failure%20as,of%20the%20cost%20of%20innovation.
