No More Self-Organizing Teams

by Jim Highsmith

I've been thinking recently that the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred? Because there is a contingent within the agile community that is fundamentally anarchist at heart and it has latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. However, putting a duck suit on a chicken doesn't make a chicken a duck. As larger and larger organizations are implementing agile methods and practices, the core of what it means to be agile -- an empowering organizational culture -- will be lost because large organizations will reject the cultural piece of agile because they know a chicken when they see one.

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No More Self-Organizing TeamsThu Sep 13 08:12:42 CDT 2007