One of the challenges of agile development is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self-organizing teams. Many would-be ScrumMasters and agile coaches go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of their prior command-and-control management styles and fail to unleash the creativity and productivity of a self-organizing team. Leading a self-organizing team can be a fine line. In this session you will learn the proper ways to influence the path taken by a team to solving the problems given to it. You will learn how to become comfortable in this role. You’ll understand why influencing a self-organizing team is neither sneaky nor inappropriate but is necessary. Drawing on analogies from fields such as evolutionary biology and the study of complex adaptive systems, the instructor will describe three factors necessary for self-organization to occur and then provide seven tools for guiding the direction taken by the team as they self-organize.
