Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: self-organization

  • Agile Self-Organization: Band-Aid for a Broken Leg

    One of the concepts that has been widely popularized by Agile movement is self-organization of teams. It lands very nicely in any Agile context, no matter the discussed method or even a general approach one might have to Agile implementations.

    It is, after all, an idea that appeals to line employees and managers alike. Let’s give atomic teams power to decide how they would work within safe constraints. Safe here means safe for managers, of course. In one swift move we address, at least to some point, two issues. One, we increase empowerment across team members as they get more say over how they work. Two, we remove managerial burden of work organization at a the most detailed level, at which managers’ competence can frequently be challenged.

    All but the most micromanagerial types should be satisfied.

    Since how the work gets done is decided closer to where it actually gets done, we increase odds of good processes and policies. At the same time, through more autonomy we improve motivation and engagement.

    It’s not without a reason that self-organization at a team level got its way into common practice.

    History of Agile (Oversimplified)

    The starting point for self-organization as a technique or a practice is not unlike other agile practices. Early Agile methods were focused on a team. The perspective might have differed, but the atomic entity in consideration was always a team. Be it Scrum, XP, Kanban or anything else, in their early forms there was little mention on interoperability across teams either horizontally or vertically.

    Obviously, once Agile got traction there was a need for scaling the approach up. Initially, some makeshift approaches were being made to do that (anyone remembers Scrum of Scrums?). Eventually, whole methods were built to enable large scale Agile implementations—SAFes and LeSSes of this world.

    These approaches were built around a core method, typically Scrum, and took good parts of other methods whenever authors saw fit. Fundamentally, the value added of these methods was in a description how to roll everything out in a big organization. The desired outcome would be to see the core method implemented in multiple teams while ensuring some level of alignment across an organization.

    It was about scaling up the method and not scaling up the principles behind. It was about getting more Scrum / Kanban / whatever teams in an organization and not figuring out how the basic values and principles would have to work if they were applied on different levels of an organization.

    That’s exactly when we petrified self-organization as a technique relevant to a team and a team only.

    The Broken Leg

    Let’s look at the problem we are solving with self-organization. We give people autonomy and they organize work better as they are most knowledgeable how the work can be done optimally. At the same time, since we distribute autonomy, we increase motivation and engagement.

    So far, so good. I can’t help but ask: are these problems exclusive to the lowest levels of organizations, i.e. atomic teams, or are they more endemic?

    There’s no reason to think that the disease isn’t wide-spread. After all, for a century we are perpetuating Taylor’s and Ford’s ideas of separating the workforce from workflow design. It doesn’t happen on the factory floor only but throughout the whole hierarchy. A higher rank designs how lower rank works and what is expected of them. It is, in fact, the hierarchy itself that discourages us to distribute autonomy more than absolutely necessary.

    What we are looking at is not just a marginal problem of line employees going shallow into the higher ranks. The injury is not a scratch but a broken leg.

    The Band-Aid

    Despite how widespread the disease is the solution we have is far from enough: self-organization… but just at a team level. It is exactly the proverbial band-aid for a broken leg. It does the work, i.e. stop the bleeding, but only as long as the injury is skin-deep.

    We know it’s not the case.

    And yet we keep curing our broken organizational leg with just more band-aids of atomic teams embracing more autonomy. At the same time, we don’t address the structural problem of lack of autonomy throughout the hierarchy.

    There lies the root cause of the problem. Working only on the lowest possible level, i.e. teams, we already have hard constraints of how far we can go with autonomy (and it’s not far really). Unless we start working on self-organization systematically, we won’t get much long-term effect in an organization. It would be just one more band-aid.

    The Cure

    We got principles missing when we were figuring out how to scale Agile up. Interestingly enough, it had long been figured out in the military. Even more curious, the problem had been solved with tangible practices and not with some vague aspirations. The difference is that the military practices were designed as scalable from the very beginning.

    Take briefing and debriefing as an example. It is a pair of activities of sharing the goals and the context (the orders) by an officer to a unit and having the unit brief back to the officer what they understood. The goal of briefing and debriefing is for any rank to make sure that: a) a lower rank unit understands the goal (the purpose) of a higher rank officer and one rank above, and b) a lower rank unit understood correctly what was briefed.

    Such a practice is rank-agnostic. It can be applied at any level of a hierarchy without any specific adjustments. It is entirely not so with Agile self-organization practices that were immersed in 7 plus or minus 2 people as a definition of a team.

    If we aspire to see organizational transformations that would be an equivalent of turnaround of some of our teams, we need to reinvent self-organization. Autonomy distribution must become either a rank-agnostic practice or it has to have dedicated solutions for each organizational level.

    The former, while much harder to design and implement, is potentially much more applicable. It is the domain where tools such as decision making process, open salaries, or inclusive hiring process reside. The meta pattern here is that by default any decision is made after collective advisory process and at a lower level that it would have been made otherwise.

    I acknowledge that these examples may sound radical. They are, indeed. And yet adjusting them to a softer form is straightforward. It doesn’t have to be that anyone can decide about anyone else’s salary. It can be that anyone can decide about anyone else’s salary within their team and in accordance with budget constraints. What matters is that the decision is made at a lower level (a team mate and not a manager) and the whole team is invited to take part in the process.

    Such a change won’t happen overnight. Even in a small organization it likely requires years and not months to implement. However, unless there is a motion toward that direction, we are just paying lip service to self-organization and apply more band aid to broken legs.

  • Lack of Autonomy: The Plague of the Modern Workplace

    Radical Self-Organization is a way I tend to label organizational design that we adopted at Lunar Logic. It’s been dubbed The Lunar Way too on occasions. Anyway, it draws from different approaches to design organizational structure in a very flat, non-hierarchical way. Describing what we do is probably worth a separate post on its own, yet this time I want to focus on one underlying principle: autonomy.

    Our evolution toward Radical Self-Organization was experimental and emergent. Initially we didn’t set a goal of distributing authority, autonomy, and all the decision-making power across the whole organization. It emerged as a sensible and possible outcome of further evolution on the path we set ourselves onto. This means we were figuring out things on our way and quite often explored dead-ends.

    The good part of such approach is that, we wanted it or not, we needed to understand underlying principles and values and couldn’t just apply a specific approach and count on being lucky with the adoption. No wonder that on our way we had quite a bunch of realizations what was necessary to make our effort successful.

    One of the biggest of such realizations up to date for me was the one about autonomy.

    A traditional, hierarchical organizational structure that distributes power in a top-down manner is ultimately a mechanism depriving people of autonomy.

    Let me explain. Top-down hierarchy addresses challenges of indecisiveness and accountability. We ideally always know who should make which decision and thus who should be held accountable for making it (or not making it for that matter). So far so good.

    The problem is, that the same mechanism discourages managers throughout a hierarchy to distribute the decision-making power to lower levels of organization. After all, if I am held accountable for a decision, I prefer to make the final call myself. Even if I end up being wrong it’s my own fault and I don’t suffer for mistakes of others, i.e. my team.

    In short, as a manger in a traditional structure I’m incentivized to double-guess and change the decisions proposed by my team even if I go as far as consulting my calls with the team. In other words, I am discouraged to distribute autonomy.

    This has fundamental consequences. Autonomy is a key prerequisite of being motivated at work. Lack of motivation and disengagement is a plague at modern workplace. In 2013 Gallup reported that worldwide only 13% of employees were engaged. We can’t expect our team to be creative, highly productive and responsive to ever-changing business environment when they simply don’t give a damn.

    And it’s not teams’ fault. We create systems where autonomy, and as a result engagement, simply is not designed in.

    It’s not managers’ fault either. We set them up in a structure where they are punished for distributing autonomy.

    The biggest problem is that hierarchical structure is a prevailing management paradigm, which we are taught from the earliest contact with the education system. The very paradigm is the plague of the modern workplace.

    There is one important side note to mention here. Autonomy doesn’t equal authority. The two works well as a pair but neither is a prerequisite to have the other.

    I can give people authority to make project related decisions, e.g. that we terminate collaboration with a client. They can formally do it. However, if I instill enough fear of making such a tough call so that everyone is too afraid to do so people won’t have autonomy to make such a decision.

    On the other end, we may not distribute authority formally, but we may live up to the standards of “what’s not forbidden is allowed” and may believe that “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”. In such an environment people will be making autonomous calls even if they don’t always have authority over the matter.

    Coming back to the argument about disengagement, it’s about lack of autonomy, not lack of authority. In other words, simply giving people power to make some decisions won’t solve the issue. It’s about real autonomy, which unfortunately is so much harder to achieve.

    If we agree that lack of autonomy is the problem we have quite an issue here. Since the root cause of the problem goes as deep as to the way we design organizations. Changing how we think about the domain is a huge challenge.

    The other day I was reading an article that mention a guy who opened a branch office in another city and let it run as a Teal organization with no managers and huge autonomy. His summary of his own story was something along the lines: there are 30 people with no management and they are doing great, but I think by the moment there are 50 of them we’ll hire a director.

    This shows how strongly we are programmed to think according to old paradigm. It’s like saying “it’s going great, let’s kill it because, um, my imagination doesn’t go as far to imagine the same thing in a slightly bigger scale.”

    It also shows how big of a challenge we are about to face. Simply changing how the power is distributed in an organization won’t do the trick. Unless such a change is followed with the actual change in power dynamics, enabling autonomy in lower levels of an organization it would simply mean paying a lip service. The most difficult change that needs to happen to allow for such a transformation is the one happening in the mindset of those in power, i.e. managers.

    That’s bad news. If we consider power as privilege, and I do perceive it so, it means that many managers would be oblivious to the notion that they are somehow privileged over others. It means that we first need to work on understanding of domain. Once there, there’s another challenge to face: giving up the privilege. It can’t just be done by setting up different roles. That would be simply distributing authority and that is not enough.

    The real game changer is distributing autonomy: the courage to make decisions even when—especially when—a decision would go against manager’s judgement. After all, the plague of the modern workplace is not lack of authority, but lack of autonomy. Without addressing it we should neither expect high motivation levels nor high engagement.

  • Teal is the New Black

    On many occasions, I’ve shared how we operate at Lunar Logic. We exploit radical transparency—every single bit of information is available to everyone at the company. We exercise radical autonomy—everyone can make any decision on the company account. We entertain radical self-organization—there’s no enforced structure or hierarchy, there are no managers, and the CEO role is purely titular. While it sounds extreme when you hear about it, it feels even more so when you live it.

    Given that we went through a transformation from a rather typical organizational structure, we very well understand how many mistakes one can make when introducing such an organizational model. After all, we made great deal of them ourselves.

    We didn’t use any of the labeled models when approaching our evolution. We are, however, very frequently dubbed as a Teal organization, as described by Frederick Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations. I don’t necessary fancy the label as I’m not overly fond of the model proposed by Laloux. Nonetheless, the label is somewhat useful to communicate how we are organized at Lunar.

    The interesting thing is how people react to Lunar Logic story. Over time I get more and more reactions like “oh, we’re working exactly the same way” or “yeah, we are Teal too”. This often triggers some questions on my end. Do you have transparent salaries? How do you set salaries? Do people know the contract details? How much company money can people spend without getting a permission? Can people leave the project they’re on when they want to? How is the strategy decided? Which decisions can be made by high-ranks only?

    Inevitably, most of the answers are as expected. “We can’t let people decide to spend company money at their whim, let alone set their own salaries. That would ruin the company! We can’t even let people know what everyone else earns as it would trigger huge frustration. And obviously strategy, and many other important decisions, are prerogative of senior managers.”

    Other than that, you are perfectly Teal, aren’t you?

    Progressive Organization is an umbrella term I use to describe different modern approaches to redefine how organizations are designed. Declaring that a company is one of flavors of Progressive Organization became a fashionable thing. People aspire to have flat-structure organizations, and to empower people (which is a completely flawed goal by the way). When it comes to labels, Teal organizations are getting most of the buzz these days. It’s a trendy thing to say that an organization is Teal or at least aspires to be so.

    Teal is the new black.

    The problem is that little comes afterwards. Transforming an organization from a traditional, hierarchy-based model toward radical self-organization and radical autonomy (both being crucial parts of becoming a Teal organization) requires lots of changes.

    I don’t necessarily say that fully transparent salaries, salaries set by employees themselves, freedom over choosing what people work on, no permission expected to spend significant amount of company money, or all the authority distributed to everyone at the company are all required to dub a company a Progressive Organization. I do say that, in one way or another, the way all these decisions are made need to be reinvented to be more inclusive for everyone at the company.

    In most cases the disputed companies have no will whatsoever to challenge the old operating system where managers make vast majority of the important decisions. I even heard people explicitly stating that they were “somewhat Teal” and had “no will to become more so”. Why would they even refer to the label then?

    Because Teal is the new black.

    If I counted companies whose representatives declared that they work in a similar way to Lunar or that they are Teal I should be over the top. After all, I’m somewhat pessimistic about the pace at which the organizations would evolve away from the old, entrenched, century-old, hierarchy-based management paradigm. The reports I keep hearing should be a proof that the situation is far better than I thought.

    I stay skeptic, though. The reason is that most of the reports are about Progressive Organizations in the name only. Hearing the stories, I’m not comfortable with as little as saying that it’s their genuine aspiration to evolve into a new organizational design. I would rather describe it as a pretense, and the one introduced on the weak grounds of fashion.

    The outcome will be two-fold. On one hand we already see inflation of the commonly used terms, like Teal. When someone says “Teal” it means less and less over time as it’s used to describe lots of different things. It wasn’t a precise term to start with and the more popular it is the faster the watering down process is. It is the fate that awaits any niche concept that hits the mainstream. The term Agile is a canonical example. These days it is used to label pretty much anything.

    Personally, I don’t care overly much about this effect, though. After all, I don’t have any stakes in promoting Teal.

    I do care about the other effect and I believe it will be positive in the long run. Given increasing popularity of the idea, even without implementing it the proper way, we can expect that more and more people would become aware of alternative organizational models. While in the short run I still see little action to truly transform companies, awareness is something that will provide leaders and managers with options in the long run.

    At the beginning of our way at Lunar we were inventing lots of things ourselves. There was limited literature about alternative models and none of us was into what was available. There were few stories of progressive companies, even though they exist at least since fifties. We didn’t know much where we were headed or what the desired endgame looked like.

    Awareness of what is possible, makes it easier to plan the change. With increasing number of available stories of different Progressive Organizations, there is plenty of inspiration to design own model and run own experiments. In the long run this fashion will, I believe, have a lasting effect on how humane our organizations are. In the even longer run it will hopefully affect whole industries.

    That’s why on one hand I treat Teal as a label that often bears little value but I’m happy that it makes its way to common awareness. In a way I’m happy that Teal is the new black.