Organizing Principles

I spoke at this month’s Agile Denver meeting about using Holacracy in an Agile Team to power-up the Team’s self-organization. I also explained how Holacracy can be used to remove the communication gap between Agile Teams and their surrounding tradition organizations.

As is often the case with an introductory Holacracy talk, there were a lot of scrunched up faces and questioning looks at the beginning – until we got to Integrative Decision Making. Then it really clicked and the lights came on. We did a half-hour Q&A right there on the spot!

Here are the slides from the talk.

Here’s the synopsis from the talk:

Self-organizing teams are one of the core principles of Agile software
development. However, when it comes to exactly how to self-organize,
Agile is uncomfortably silent.

Scrum states that team must hold a Sprint Retrospective but give little
concrete advice about what a good retrospective looks like and what its
outputs should be. As a result, many teams let retrospectives fall by
the way side, failing to capitalize on opportunities for learning and
optimization.

Holacracy, an agile-like practice for the whole organization, provides
clear instructions for self-organization. Holacratic practices like
Integrative Decision-Making, Named Roles and Accountabilities,
Governance Meetings and Double Linking complement existing Agile
practices. They also have the potential to extend the Agile mindset out
from Engineering Teams to the core of an organization.