Bloggtoons

I often hear “All our teams are autonomous.” but what does that mean? The word autonomy means “able to do things and make decisions without help from anyone else” or “freedom from external control or influence.”, in other words autonomous teams have the power to form their own path without control from external influence to the team. But that is utopian in the sense of most company cultures. Why?

Because most of us do not believe it is possible, “at least not here…” and because of that we unwillingly and unknowingly put obstacles in the way. These obstacles originate from all sources all the way from cultural rules, via leadership in an organization all the way to the individuals within the team.

 

 

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It is easy to say the word “autonomous teams” or “empowered teams” and then give the team some power on how to implement some code. That is as much autonomy as giving pocket money for bus trip home to your 12 year old kid. As a parent that might be scary enough both for the kid and the parent. But for a team with a good knowledge set of grown up people, can’t we can’t trust them with more than pocket money have really made the effort to create the best conditions for the team to thrive?

Right now when writing this text my kids wants to get my attention, “what is the color of the Pokemon Feraligatr, dad?”, “can I see again please?”, “What are you doing, dad?”, “I want to print another color paper” of course I want to help them, they are the most important part of my life. But somewhere from whithin my brain I hear “I have a tried to get this cartoon ready since February 2019, get it done god damn it!” And then it struck me, this cartoon is about me, but I suspect Im not alone on this? At work Im also always eager to get involved, interested in most things and always trying to help when I can and I love it, but it has a cost. Too little time for self reflection or actually having time to finish things. It is a fine balance between multitasking and multifailing. So now I have decided, this week I will work from home one day to make sure that I have time to think or at least give myself time to finish a couple of things.

We often hear that you should be a learning organization but where does this learning take place? Learning is when you do things that you don’t fully master. It is here, on the boarder of your knowledge, right outside your safety zone, where you make mistakes. If you at that time acknowledge and reflect on your mistake it will turn into learning and you can start to form a new understanding. At the same time your safety zone will grow. If you on the other had shy away from the mistake no progress will be made. In an organization that helps each others to learn from the mistakes that is made the whole organization will benefit, this is a learning organization.

In any type of development, or any form of complex systems, you will always have dependencies to others. Dependencies will be in the whole range, from the obvious to those that you only know when they hit you in the face. This is also the case for others that might have dependencies to you, so be humble and helpful when a dependency has been identified and try your best to help.