Check out Don Highsmith’s Cutter article on self-organizing, suggesting that the term has lost its value to the agile community, and Tobias Mayer’s response. I lean towards believing the phrase still carries useful meaning which is significantly different from ‘anarchy’. So what if some people do co-opt the self-organizing label as a cover for their anarchic non-agile approach? That ought not to invalidate the term. If we allow it to, then wow, that’s giving a handful of anarchists a lot of power over what the rest of us call things, isn’t it? Let’s just call them to account for not really being agile, and keep working to publicize how real agile teams do their work.
While words do matter, I have yet to personally see resistance to change towards agility attributed to dislike of the phrase ‘self-organizing’ 🙂 In my experience, it’s the adjustments to the actual shifts in roles and ‘power’ perceptions that present adoption obstacles. The self-organizing/self-managing teams I have coached, agile or TSP, definitely have appreciated the value of true leadership, of the ‘light touch’ type Don describes.
This topic reminds me of a paper Jan and I had worked on with Laurie Williams a few years ago, on using the values, principles, and practices of a methodology (not buzzword usage!) to assess whether/how well a team was *actually *following it; and it reminds me that I should check with her and Bill Krebs on whether the XP-EF (eXtreme Programming Evaluation Framework) is still evolving.