All posts tagged: Self-Organization

People over Processes

Published by Marcus Raitner

Making decisions is often considered an essential element of leadership. An elite circle of executives makes decisions; at least the big and strategic ones and sometimes, depending on the level of trust in the organization, also decisions on details, leading to the plague of micromanagement. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is leading differently. He prides himself on making as few decisions as possible. And his success shows that he is right, as 20 years after its foundation Netflix is now the tenth largest Internet company in the world (Wikipedia).

The Dead End of the Agile Transformation

Published by Marcus Raitner

Copying Spotify or simply implementing any other blueprint of an agile organization is a fundamental mistake. Not because the models themselves were poor, but because implementing a model of an agile organization that has been chosen or developed by a few managers, experts or consultants from top to bottom contradicts the essential principle of self-organization. Agile organizations are always emergent in the sense that they result from the cooperation of self-organizing teams towards a common vision and are constantly evolving. Therefore, it is crucial for a sustainable agile transformation to withstand the pressure to deliver short-term successes and to empathetically and confidently give people the space and time to learn and grow together. As tempting as blueprints and their large-scale implementation may look, it is precisely this that leads the agile transformation into a dead end.