Coaching Self-Organising Teams

Abstract

Self-organization of human beings is a tricky thing. Agile coaches, especially ScrumMasters, are constantly challenged with how to motivate/persuade/trick their teams into self-organizing and doing things, without telling them what to do, but there is very little information or training on this topic. Allowing a team to self-organize along the lines of ?oh well, they?re all adults, they?ll figure it out? is just as irresponsible as reverting to the command-and control school of management. So, how should one go about it? This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics to change the dynamics of a team with the aim of optimizing their work together.

TOPICS:

An introduction to socially complex systems and self-organization

   * Social complexity and team dynamics
   * Rank and Power issues
   * Influence and Persuasion

Sense-making models and techniques

   * The Stacey model
   * The Cynefin butterfly model

Understanding cognitive bias

Intervention models and techniques

   * The Heat model
   * The ABIDE model
   * The Flow model

Relevance and applicability of patterns

Social network analysis and stimulation

Dialogue mapping

Case studies and real-world applications

Changing when you can?t tell people what to do ? the value of transparency

Process/Mechanics

This tutorial will be held as a talk interspersed with exercises and discussion, allowing us to address real needs of attendees.

Co-presenter: Steve Freeman

Steve, winner of the Agile Alliance Gordon Pask award, was a pioneer of Agile software development in the UK, he has built applications for banks, ISPs, financial data providers, and specialist software companies. He has given training courses in Europe, America, and Asia.
Previously, he worked in research labs, software houses, earned a PhD, and wrote shrink-wrap software for IBM. Steve also taught in the Computer Science department at University College London. He is a presenter and organizer at international industry conferences, including the first XP conference, and was conference chair for the first London XpDay.

Co-presenter: Joseph Pelrine

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is one of Europe's leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europe's first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work focus is on field of organizational complexity and its application to Agile processes.

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