Succeeding with Agile

Influencing Self-Organization

Self-organization is a fundamental concept in agile software development. The Agile Manifesto includes the principle, “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” (Beck et al. 2001). Yet a common misconception is that because of this reliance on self-organizing teams, there is little or no role for leaders of agile teams. Nothing could be further from the truth. In The Biology of Business, Philip Anderson refutes this mistaken assumption.

Self-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviors that emerge ...