Nick E — Practical Self Management Intensive Week 1

Assessment:

Reflections:

I suppose I’ll start by reflecting on the things that have led to my love of self-management. These ways of working make natural sense to me based upon the way that I view the world, informed by my intuition, experience, education, and philosophical idealism.

I have always held a deep skepticism of any political structure that is defined by ‘power-over’ relationships. I am free-thinking and believe that every person has an inate capacity for individual genius as well as cooperative and communal purpose and duty. I believe that the systems that we have in place in the world are largely negative towards this idea, and are defined instead by inequality justified by social Darwinism. Even in our liberal democracies, it is clear that the emphasis is not on human wellbeing and freedom, but a neoliberal obsession with the ‘free market’ as the primary mechanism for human relations to be played out. As someone with a post-grad in Sociology, I’m trained to critique these tropes and find this explanation of the world deeply unsatisfying. To me it is clear that the human experience of the world is not a summary of the callous transations we make in the ‘free market’, but rather that we are here to create social togetherness, appreciate the awesome beauty of the natural world, and contemplate our purpose and role in it all. If I had to guess at what the highest purpose of the human project would be, I’d say we exist to make art; tell stories.

So, this being my worldview in brief, I’m often left disillusioned and disappointed at how limited our agency tends to be. This is particularly true in the case of work, the activity we spend most of our lives doing. Recently I tried to identify the type of governance or political structure that most organisations follow. Though we live in a democracy — our interpretation and practise of which I find deeply undemocratic — somehow we have allowed our organisations to be something else. I would generally consider organisations to be oligarchies, specifically either plutocracies at worst and kraterocracies at best. These structures rely on wealth and might, respectively, as the defining characteristics of how decisions are made.

When I first started practising agile around 2011, I found a system of work that spoke to my type of mindset and beliefs. The most effective work happens when it is purposeful and executed with intensity and commitment. Self-organising teams make — in my experience- better and faster decisions than a manager with an autocratic tendency. We get more work done and are more satisfied where we can directly collaborate with the people we need access to, rather than going through a maze of siloes and hierarchy. Complex problems like I deal with in product management are rarely solved where we use the linear thinking of Industrial Age management and apply a militaristic chain of command. Complexity requires fluid and transparent communication in order to understand the dysfunctions and anti-patterns preventing us from improving.

So over the years I’ve worked with many teams, and gradually found myself researching the work of Aaron Dignan, Doug Kirkpatrick, Dana Meadows, Margaret Wheatley, John Buck (Sociocracy), Frederic Laloux (Teal, Integral), Ralph Stacey, Daniel Mezick, Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology). Working with many of these methods corresponded directly with the tools I learned in Sociology. Once you’ve studied social research, social policy, cultural and critical theory, demographics, etc. it’s very difficult to be persuaded by the narratives of neoliberalism and the kind of corporate culture that has become popular over the past 40 years or so.

So in summary, these are the perspectives I approach my work with, and it seemed fitting to provide that background.

5 Crucial Tools for New Self-Managing Teams

When I start working with teams who have never been exposed to self-managing ways of working and organising, I tend to rely on a few tools. I am approaching this largely from digital product development where I’ve spent most of my career.

In no particular order, they are:

Problem Statements and User Goals

User Research must be central to understanding who your customer is. Various tools like Impact Mapping, User Personas, Journey Mapping et al. demonstrate that the end user or customer has been central to formulating the problem space of an initiative. We use them to frame potential solutions (ideas) for those problems and as the basis for ongoing customer collaboration. Doing this shows that the customer’s needs have been heard and understood, and that different approaches to solving the problem have been considered.

Team Agreements or Social Contracts

In order for groups of people to cooperate and thrive together, they need to have an explicit understanding about who they want to be and what behaviours they can exhibit. In the absence of a Manager to escalate problems to, self-managing teams need to be able to sort through their organising — including roles and responsibilities, values and principles, rules, etc. — as mature adults. In ‘traditional’ workplaces, the mindset is implicitly towards a belief that managers are the adults, and team members are the children or students. This comes from some sort of paternalism and chauvanism which usually relies upon position or title as a source of formal authority. Where teams are fortunate enough to avoid this, the nevertheless need to explicitly outline who does what, and acceptable ranges of tolerance.

Workflow Transparency

Agile, Lean and Kanban have made value stream maps and visual control boards a feature of many 21st Century workplaces. Transparency is a critical requirement in complex environments where knowledge is often implied rather than explicit. Only through having a warts-and-all picture of your workflow can you identify issues, bottlenecks and opportunities, and make optimisations to improve them. And without transparent workflow you will struggle to build trust and focus in your teams, as everyone is free to invent a picture of how they think reality is, rather than simply depicting it.

Product or Service Vision

What are we building? Who is it for? Why are we doing it? What needs are we addressing? All these questions are answered using a strategic product or service vision. There are many great tools for mapping out a product strategy but a crucial component of this work is outlining the goals and objectives that a self-managing team has. Complex systems have murky goals, but you can make your team’s goals crystal clear, which is a crucial step towards successful implementation.

Release Plans

What’s in your next release? When is it likely to be shipped? What are the proposed goals and outcomes from the release? Who will be using it and where are they? How will it be deployed? Who is responsible for supporting it over its life cycle? Release Plans provide specific data and a playbook to guide a team in operationalising their product or service. Without one, you’re unlikely to get everyone on the same page and collaborating optimally towards a shared objective. These documents cut through noise and generate momentum in a team.