How to create a Chapter in an Agile Organisation

How to get Chapters going by making them for the people and by the people.

I was at a meetup recently that focused on how to set up an Agile Chapter. The meetup started with a “show and tell” from the participating organisations. One by one, using flashy presentations, graphs and even movies, they showed us how they had designed their Agile Chapters. Each group painted a picture of neat functional groupings, metrics and clear responsibilities. Like all good command-and-control scenarios, each Chapter had a Chapter Lead. The Chapters also enjoyed HR powers to manage “resource” deployment and performance.

source. The idea for Agile Chapters is often attributed to Spotify. Note that “Chapters” and “Guilds” are often used interchangeably, with “Chapter” being the more popular term.

I was so shocked that I left before it was my turn to present our approach. Usually, I have no trouble presenting a different perspective, but this time I felt such agreement in the audience about the structured approaches being presented that I just felt too alien — too weird.

Later, trying to understand my misgivings, I put together the following analysis.

Top-down

Why would you tell people to set up an Agile Chapter? Have we learnt nothing about autonomy and motivation? The whole idea of Scrum is based on self-managing teams, experts in determining what needs to be done to achieve a goal. You would…