Agile Management – Self-Organization

Agile management is an adaptation of complex adaptive systems (CAS) to management. CAS lacks a central control, and one of its main characteristics is self-organization. Any consistent behavior arises from competition, cooperation, or self-organization amongst each part within the system.

“Planning” or “managing” does not exist. Instead, the system continually adapts to find the best fit with the environment. For example, think about food supply to a city. Adding up all the food in a town’s shops and dividing it by the number of people living in the city will provide a few weeks of future supply to all citizens. The city has not implemented a formal control process or plan to ensure a few weeks’ supply of food. A continually self-organizing system exists merely through the process of emergence and feedback.

Self-management applies to organizations and teams within organizations. Groups should be self-organized. Core members of a team should be selected based on their knowledge and experience, and they should self-organize themselves by naturally finding their order. Based on the order they formed, they can add a new member to react to external conditions, which will enforce another wave of self-organization.

“planning” should be governed by the same principle, let planning to be self-organized in each group eventually this will emerge to one plan, we will discuss this principle and others (that are putting “planning” in a different light) in details during several of my next posts.