January 15, 2024

Agile Teams Are Self-organizing NOT Self-directed - Mike Cohn

8 minutes

Happy 2024! I’m back to work after a long end-of-year company shutdown. I hope your 2024 has been wonderful so far.
Late last year, I recorded an Agile Mentors podcast episode about agile leadership with my colleague, Brian Milner. I started sharing some of the tips from that episode with you last month. Agile leadership is such a critical topic that I want to share a few more tips with you this month.
Let’s begin with what it means for a team to self-organize to meet the challenges set by leadership.
Self-Organizing, Not Self-Directed
At its core, self-organization is a response to a challenge. Challenges for self-organizing teams are defined by leaders.
Leadership says Accomplish this goal. And the team figures out how best to do it.
Suppose the goal is “Make a banking app that will speed up loan applications.”
Leadership issues that goal as a challenge to an agile team. The team doesn’t get to self-direct. They are not empowered to say, “Nah, we’d like to make a video game instead.” Their mission is to reach the goal that was set for them.
Self-organization is how teams respond to the challenge they’re given.
In the example I gave, that challenge could be expanded to “Make this banking application and do it with these seven people.” Both of those constraints are a legitimate part of leadership’s role in defining the challenge.
What’s not part of leadership’s role is to overconstrain how the team accomplishes the goal. To continue the example, agile leaders do not say, “Do it with these seven people, use my brother’s API into loan systems, on this hardware, and so on.”
Too many constraints makes it difficult for a team to discover the best solution.
A leader’s job is to challenge their teams with inspiring goals. An agile leader knows when to step out of the way and let teams determine the best way to meet their challenge. That’s self-organization. And that’s one way you’ll succeed with agile.