Archive for November, 2009
About the Munich Scrum Gathering - pt. 2
Monday morning continued in the best way possible with a great Talk, “Coaching Self-Organizing Teams”, from Joseph Pelrine.
Joseph Pelrine is a Social Complexity Scientist, and a Certified Scrum Trainer as well.
This great presentation didn’t need support of slides/keynote; it was a pity that it lasted only 90 minutes, I could have listened to mr. Perline the whole afternoon.
To try to summarize this presentation is an exercise in futility. I will try to do it anyway, but it will not make any justice on how it was. You just had to be there.
Let’s start by defining what is Self-Organization.
A lot of times we confuse the concept Self-Organization with Self-Assembly. Quoting Wikipedia,
The way that people organize - or, more precisely - assemble themselves within a crowded elevator is a very mundane example of self-assembly.
When we have people assembled this way we have a Group, but not necessarly a Team. If a Team is not acting like a team anymore (or never did, in the first place), what we have there is a Group, which is self-assembling. People don’t change their behaviour unless they have to.
Enter the Scrum Master’s role: when energy is applied to this System (and here System=Team+Tools+History of the SW previously developed), the System will move into several states of Self-Organization.
Take into consideration that: a) Self-Organization is a disruptive state (in the sense that it disrupts Self-Assembly, i.e. the pre-determined behaviour, before any energy was applied) and b) it’s a non-equilibrium state that will decay back to Self-Assembly.
And this is exactly why the Scrum Master’s job of keeping a Team on a high productity state is a work that’s never done. If you remove the energy, the Team will decay into Self-Assembly, into the “old ways” and will become a Group.
And exactly how much energy shall be then applied? Joseph Pelrine explains it in a very clear way on his blog: part 1 here and part 2 here.
(to be continued)
