Self-organization

There is one more important thing about Lean and Agile: the view on decision-making. Many organizations are based on the assumption that employees should be divided into thinkers (managers) and doers (workers). This comes from Frederick Winslow Taylor who was one of the first management consultants. We think Taylor was right when he divided people between thinkers and doers just because at the time, around 1900, when he was active, there was a huge difference in education between managers and workers. His idea was that the educated should tell the uneducated what kind of products they should build and how to build them. This was a great way to get uneducated people productive in advanced industries. Today we usually don't have this difference in education. Instead, we have a lot of well-educated people in our organizations. In today's world, Taylor's ideas are wrong. To not use all the intelligence of our employees is waste.

We need all the intelligence at our disposal to collect and analyze the feedback we get by quickly getting to market and to find out how we can best improve the product. Unfortunately, a lot of managers are trained in the Taylor way of thinking. They serve the developers their working tasks in a requirement document and a design document and then they just want them to deliver the required things according to a plan. That way of working is likely to foster developers to value compliance over engagement and innovation.

If you tell people exactly what to do and how to do it, you don't give them much room to think themselves. If you instead give them goals and ask them to find the way and solve their problems themselves, you will see more energy and get far more engagement from them.

This following diagram is about fast feedback and reacting to it:

Agile and Lean is about getting fast feedback, being able to react to known knowledge and to wake up the employee's engagement.

To cultivate a culture of self-organization, managers need to build an environment where people:

• Are very aware of goals.

• Are exposed to well-visualized information of how well they are doing.

• Know they are allowed to experiment with their process. They own the process within some well-defined limits.