An investigation into Self Organisation

We ran a meetup session with the local Scrum User Group discussing Holocracy, a model for self-organizing teams. After the discussion about Holocracy led by Julian Waters-Lynch, we then ran an activity exploring our own appetite for self-organisation.

I’ll share what came out of the discussion in two future posts;

• How self-organised do we think we are, and what’s holding us back
• How self-organised do we want to be, and what will signal success.

I asked the room to take two different coloured index cards (green and yellow if you must know) and the gave people two jobs.

On the yellow cards I asked people to rate their current organisation's level of self organisation from 1 (low) to 10 (high.) I then asked them to write down some points on what holds them back.

Then, on the green cards, I asked people to rate their aspiration for self organisation (same scale) and to write down what they would see as signals of success.

I have plotted the scores in the chart below.

This is from a group of people who are curious and motivated enough to come out to a work themed event at 6pm on a weeknight, so they are at least somewhat engaged at work.

I personally can't read much from the chart alone except that there is a wide spread of answers to the question and that most people's aspirations live around the 7-8 out of 10 mark. Perhaps this is a natural conservatism, or simply a focus on next stages of growth.

So in the next few days I will post more, showing what comments people said in the context of what scores they were giving.