Self Organising Teams
By: Douglas Ross
Tags: Chaos Magic, Self Organising Team, Agile, Leadership

Are you a strong enough manager to succumb to a natural order of things, and see if the people and the teams you manage, can self organise. Some would call this Chaos, it is actually the best way to run your business, and mother nature agrees with me.

Allowing Chaos to thrive in a team is possibly the most natural and healthy thing you can do to make your team(s) and people successful. We have over-organised our working environment to such and extent, that the natural instincts, intelligence, natural evolution and self organisation of our teams tends to literally ‘wither at the vine’.

Does Chaos mean unstructured — absolutely not — in fact some of the most structured things in nature are Chaotic — think of the snow flake.

Unfortunately, the business world in which we all tend to work, is still focused on ‘the process’, we are all process driven. It is always better to ‘follow the process’, rather than ‘swim against the tide’. ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’, ‘don’t rock the boat’…. one could go on seemingly forever.

We are all guilty of complain about ‘the process’ to our families and friends, and if you are really silly, your work colleagues. Things like,

‘I can’t believe that I need to fill out this form for something so simple’ ,

‘when did we get all this red tape’,

‘you won’t believe the ordeal I had to go through to make this happen’, or my favourite,

‘Johnny in accounts made me jump through all these hoops just to do… he is such an a-hole’. (As a side note, if you are silly enough to talk about your colleagues in a derogatory fashion, that you should have left that job and found another one already).

The best part is, that the higher up the management chain you go, the more people are not following the process, and the more the organisation tends to reward employees that ‘ask forgiveness, rather than permission’, ‘get around the bureaucracy’, ‘find a way’,… ‘boy isn’t she a real go-getter, we should promote her’

So if you are starting to feel like the rules of the game are set up for you to fail … well, yes, in a lot of cases, unfortunately this is the truth. Organisations have over-organised, and traits like innovation, new ideas, and out of process thinking is difficult to grow in the people in the organisation. When you hear people talk about the need to entrench a ‘small business mentality’, they generally mean they want to get employees to love their work like it was their own, be more nimble, come up with new ideas, try out new things that will make the company more competitive in the marketplace.

The thing that management teams don’t understand is that small companies, have very few processes, they make mistakes, learn quickly, try again, and again, and again, work long hours and all the time loving what they do; if there is something that needs to get done, then someone does it, you don’t even need to ask.

Small business employees are engaged because they get to use their natural instincts, their intelligence, and self confidence to ‘have a go’ and if they get it wrong, fix it and try another way. It is Chaos — and exactly the way nature intended it.

The science world has long since understood, that the world in which we live is Chaotically structured. The so called ‘ Butterfly Effect’ study and presentation by Lorenz was probably the tipping point for science regarding Chaos. The business world for the most part of struggling with the idea, although there are many companies giving employees the freedom to self organise within the organisation, with some great results.

Newtonian Physics tried its best to describe the natural world in a number of mathematical equations. Science has since realised that the world in which we live is not as structured as that, and instead it ‘makes mistakes’ and evolves and self organises again into the most evolved solution before starting again, and the circumstances around it change. There is no fixed process, not should their want or need to be.

There are absolutely rules though, or constraints to the way nature can act, otherwise the fantastic patterns that exist in nature would never occur.

So nature found a balance between rules and chaos, so that innovation and adaptation, and evolution can occur, without breaking the order of things.

In the business world there are many examples of injecting chaos into the business in order to generate innovation. Apparently Atlassian (an Australian software company) has a day a year whereby the employees can work on anything, however they have to present to the company at a party 24 hours later what they did. This is the only rule, the rest is up to the imagination of the employee. This is pretty close to chaos from my perspective. Apparently they gain fantastic innovations out of this one day a year.

At Google there is the much spoken about 20% time. Once again the rule is that 20% of your time can be used on whatever you want to develop that could be good for Google. This does not mean that it is Friday, and it does not mean that you stop doing anything else. It is more a concept, that enables chaos and innovation to thrive. This is where the standard work day process is thrown out the window, where the natural human motivations regarding autonomy start to thrive. Competition also thrives in this situation, because when the rules are relaxed people that do not normally compete due to the business process, can start to either work together or compete against each other.

I like to call this self organising teams. Where the rules are relaxed to the bare minimum so that you will maximise creativity.