Project Team Self-organization: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

For years the presenter was telling you how awesome self-organization and autonomy are in the context of organizational design and software development project management. Well, he lied.

Paweł Brodziński shares a story about a company that has been a poster child of self-organization and autonomy, bringing them to the extreme and building its organizational culture around them. Everything was as rosy as you might have expected if you’d read books about progressive organizations. That is until it wasn’t. The engagement fell flat on its face. The atmosphere took a nosedive. Attrition crept in. Self-organization, vast autonomy, and radically decentralized control for teams became as much a solution to address the old problems, addressing vastly outdated management principles, as a source of a ton of new friction. This presentation looks at what went wrong and why. You will learn that making our organizations “fit for the future,” as some management thought-leaders propose, is much harder than it looks on paper.

Video producer: http://aceconf.com/