In my ongoing quest to identify the origins of the idea of self-organizing teams, and even a concrete definition of the term, I turn to a chain of blog posts leading back to prior work applying the concepts of complex adaptive systems to business management. A 2018 blog post by Leading Agile’s Dave Nicolette Limits of a Self-Organizing Team seeks to define self-organizing by defining boundaries for self-organizing teams (what they are not). One of the boundaries he defines via a quote from a 2010 blog post by Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance co-founder Mike Cohn The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team saying:
Self-organizing teams are not free from management control. Management chooses for them what product to build or often chooses who will work on their project, but they are nonetheless self-organizing. Neither are they free from influence.
Cohn builds his definition quoting from the book chapter Seven Levers for Guiding the Evolving Enterprise by Philip Anderson in John Clippinger’s book The Biology of Business:
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 from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what effective behavior is.
At which point we reach a breaking point in the chain of reasoning. A key point about Clippinger’s book is that it describes the behavior of enterprise and multi-corporation joint-venture scale organizations. It makes no assertions about small teams within those organizations nor small teams in other organizations. Further, the book makes some assertions that would contradict the idea of intentional formation of Agile teams at all:
Since outcomes of knowledge creation are nonlinear, predicting success is difficult. Similarly creating aggregations of specific people to generate new knowledge offers no guarantee of innovations. (p. 103)
A further break in the chain is an assumption throughout Clippinger’s book that the science of complex adaptive systems (CAS) has clearly defined the necessary conditions for and behavior of CAS. For example, it says:
One of the pioneers in the study of self-organizing systems and adaptive behaviors has been John Henry Holland. In Hidden Order (1995), Holland describes what he considers the seven basic elements of self-organizing behavior. … The properties identify the key formative characteristics of any self-organizing system. (p. 10)
Contrast that with Holland’s view that there are “seven characteristics that cross-disciplinary comparisons suggest are central to a broad understanding of complex adaptive systems…” [emphasis added] and that his purpose in writing Hidden Order is to “…weave these characteristics into the elements of a theory.”
Throughout the Agile literature, there are similar references to Holland’s book including seminal works like Highsmith’s Adaptive Software Development (2000) and Schwaber & Beedle’s Agile Development with Scrum (2002). These Agile authors miss a key point in Holland’s theory, that “Complex adaptive systems are, without exception, made up of large numbers of active elements” (p. 6). That could hardly be said of typical Agile teams or the generally accepted guidance for formation of Agile software development teams (think 7 +/- 2 people). So, while Clippinger may have mischaracterized the state of CAS knowledge and built his theory of managing large organizations on an incomplete foundation, at least he understood the scale of organizations involved.
