How to Create Self-Organizing Teams

Teams can add or remove members with their consent, and members can join or leave teams by providing reasonable notice.

Members can also take on multiple roles based on their capacity. It’s not a formal process but rather about finding mutual suitability. Some people may wonder about their position within the team or what’s left for them if they share power. However, the turning point comes when they realize they can trade control for participation. In this way, reputation replaces positional power, and people rediscover their joy by getting involved in the work. It’s crucial to acknowledge that people can self-organize under the right conditions.

Create simple rules or agreements about how teams form and change, and let people go where their skills and energy take them.

Adaptability is key so teams can reorganize as needed rather than significant upheavals every few years. Ensure that the periphery guides your structure — the teams interacting with the market — rather than the teams at the core. These guiding principles help focus on projects and allocate resources, which can uncover areas where organizational debt may hinder progress. Empower teams to take ownership of their local operations to harness their full potential.

Ask questions like:

What is our current strategy? What informs it? What factors determine success or failure? What trade-offs are we willing to make? How do we develop, refine, and communicate our strategy? How does it guide day-to-day decisions? How does it influence our planning process?

A complicated system is causal and subject to cause and effect.

Problems with complicated systems have solutions.

Organizational culture is not a problem to solve but an emergent phenomenon to nurture. Legacy leaders often view everything through a factory lens, believing that hard work alone can fix any problem. But bureaucracies cannot handle our daily surprises, and they’ll never surprise us with an unexpected breakthrough. This brings us to one of the most important things leaders and teams need to internalize: our way of working is made up. We should appreciate what still serves us and change the rest.

Every organization has a purpose, but only some ensure its purpose is fractal — showing up at every level.

The team’s purpose serves the same function as the organizational one. Legacy Organizations are often obsessed with measurement, using it as a form of control to find and punish weak performance. However, you need to make decisions and take action based on your metrics to do it right. Ask every team in your organization to articulate their essential intent. Clarify your purpose so you can see it three decades later. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year.

Purpose enables freedom and autonomy by ensuring coherent action.

[¹]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?