Self-organization – John Yorke

One of the challenges of an Agile Coach, or anyone in a management or leadership role is establishing what I have seen referred to as the “zone of acceptance” for individual team members.

The Zone of Acceptance is a term for the tasks an individual sees as something they are prepared to do as part of their job. This can relate to tasks, overtime, meeting attendance and more.

In a traditional model where work is explicitly assigned, this took the form of a team member saying “that’s not my job” when asked to do something on the periphery of their role. E.g. being asked to write documentation or attend a meeting outside core hours. This is a direct confrontation that can be handled directly, the team member can be coached to broaden the scope of their ‘zone of acceptance’ and have it explained that sometimes responsibilities extend beyond core hours and core responsibilities.

However, when you move to agile it becomes much harder to deal with. We introduce the concept of self-management and self-organization, there is no longer an external person pushing you to extend your boundaries.

What is my Zone of Acceptance?

In my house I will sometimes come home to find the kitchen bin full or overflowing, if I ask why it has been left like that my wife will in a ‘matter of fact’ tone reply – “That’s your job!” I don’t doubt that it is, at some point we agreed a division of responsibilities – , the responsibility is clear.

But conversely my behavior in a different situation is far harder to manage. My wife may ask me to change our child’s nappy (or diaper as my wife calls it), I will generally willingly comply, but I rarely volunteer. I would never say it is not my job, but by subtly avoiding doing it I am implicitly saying that. She can ask on a regular basis but that in itself undermines the equality and self-organizing nature of marriage, she shouldn’t need to ask. We have an understanding that generally works and in this case the reality is that she is not asking me to take the responsibility, nor is she demanding assistance, but my help is certainly appreciated. What I need is to broaden my ‘zone of acceptance’ and to be more proactive in my support. We are a team.

That is not my job

The same becomes true in an Agile team, if I were to hear someone say ‘that’s not my job’ or “I’ll hand that over the wall to a tester” or similar comments, they can be directly challenged, and the coach or the other team members can act accordingly. But far more common is seeing the team members forming natural silos for work, an often agreed line in the sand where work is divided and not challenged. They will avoid tasks they are not interested in or don’t see as their role, find excuses for working on tasks they see as theirs and in some extreme cases work on something outside the board to avoid picking up a card that doesn’t fall into their zone of acceptance. This behavior may not even be visible, a team can actually become very productive in the short-term by forming mini-silos, but that doesn’t make it right or healthy in the long run.

I see the role of a Coach (or any Agile minded team member) to challenge these silos, to encourage team members to broaden their zone of acceptance, and to get the team to inwardly think that it is their responsibility to get involved in Story writing, and coding and testing and to be active in all meetings, to volunteer to write documentation and present the Demo, and to challenge those that don’t become active members of the team.

“But I’m a tester I don’t know how to code” – is a common argument. My response – “So what!” a lot of coders I know would benefit very much from having a tester on their shoulder asking if they had considered this case or that case, challenging the use of TDD and actively engaging in what and why things are being coded even if they don’t understand the code syntax itself. And perhaps more controversially the opposite is true, having a developer sit on the shoulder of a tester and see what and how and why certain tests are performed can help improve the way a developer writes code. I think we can make passable testers of most developers and vice versa, teams should want to challenge boundaries. In the long term I’d suggest those roles should become indistinguishable from each other and in an ideal world they would be one and the same – a team member who would do what they could and what was needed.

Jack of all trades

By this I am by no means suggesting that we create a team of jack of all trades – I am actually very much against that, expertise should be encouraged and my view is that testing; coding and design etc. are very different skills and expertise in each should be valued. But my view is that the comparison of skills needed to get a user story to ‘done’ will often form a huge amount of overlap and likely a combined involvement.

If each user story represents a piece in a puzzle, chances are that there are a few parts that will require a specialist in ‘Blue’ or expertise in ‘Red’ skills, but the majority of the work is shades of ‘purple’ something that does not require particular expertise and could be achieved by anyone on the team or through a mix of people. We often use edge cases as examples so we can dodge the normal cases, when we see that we should call it out.

How do we expand the Zone of Acceptance?

But now what? We understand the problem, we know it is hard to spot and hard to challenge, so how on earth do we expand the zone of acceptance?

The first step is nearly always acknowledging there is a problem. Discuss it with the team – maybe as part of a retrospective and see if they recognize it as a problem too.
Let the team find ways to solve the problem. Once they see themselves as a team it becomes easier as they will be seeking ways to help each other rather than looking for the easy way out for themselves.

One team I work with identified this problem for themselves and their solution was to put a sign on their task board that said: “Have I done this before?” And another sign that said “Is this on the critical path?”

The idea was that when selecting a story the team member would stop and think:

First whether they were taking a task that someone else could take and learn – or maybe they could pair and teach someone else to share their knowledge;
Secondly “Is this the next highest priority or am I taking an easy option? Some team members will cherry pick from the backlog rather than taking the highest priority item.

By having a written reminder it can become a challenge at stand up. The team members can call out each other if they see either of these behaviors.

Great Team Players

This barely touches the surface of this particular problem, but there should be a desire by the individuals on a team to (sensibly) broaden their zone of acceptance, for the focus to shift from what is the next best(or easiest) task for me to what is the next best task for the team – and even better what is most valuable for the customer. And more significantly for this to be supported and encouraged by the team and the organization as a whole. Too often the organization rewards ‘star developers‘ rather than great team players, that message reinforces bad behavior and can be extremely corrosive to the organization over time.

Bike-shedding, Bystanders and Boredom:

I have a theory that in the context of self-organizing teams in a business environment, there are zones of diminishing responsibility and thus the effectiveness of self organization as the tasks get further from the perceived core purpose of the team or individual.

That is to say that a self-organizing software development team may have little difficulty organizing how to create a feature in their product, but may struggle to water the plants or empty the bins in their Team area.

Background

We as an organization have embraced Spontaneous Order (self-organizing teams) and have adopted a variety of Holocracy, the result is a pretty large organization (Approximately 400+ people) with almost no management outside of the core leadership team of four. The results are fascinating to observe, in some cases wildly successful and in other cases not so much.

Teams are created for a defined purpose, most often this is a defined project from a client, the composition of the team is decided by one of the leadership team based on personal knowledge of the skills of the prospective team members. This is obviously a limitation of scale and requires an exceptional level of knowledge of the available people. Clearly it is not self-organization in the context of team creation but this is the extent of outside influence for most teams (unless they have problems). The teams are expected to self-organize to deliver on their defined purpose.

Defined Purpose

For the most part they do very well and are able to deliver high quality software, interact effectively with clients and have a reputation for being the best in the custom App development business. Although there are a few internal difficulties, such as a tendency for excessive bike-shedding* early in projects, and for a few individuals, especially the stronger personalities to shape the teams to enable them to do the work they like relying on the others to do the rest.

Similarly strong personalities can limit a notion of continual improvement, that is to say that strong personalities can instill pressure to stick with what worked previously rather than being open to improvement.

Those are problems that could be explored further but for today my interest is in observing how wider organizational responsibilities or team responsibilities that are perceived as distant from the defined purpose get lost, ignored or simply take far longer than they should to get done.

*Bike-shedding (or Parkinson’s law of triviality)

Way back in 1957 Parkinson observed that members of an organization give excess weight to trivial issues, spending a disproportionate amount of time discussing issues that everyone has an opinion on (in his example it was the the building of a bike shed), this discussion was at the expense of more important issues that were outside the domain of expertise of the entire group. In other words people contribute because they ‘can’ not because they ‘should’.

In my observations this is a MAJOR problem for self-organizing teams, the choice of electronic Kanban board is my favourite pet hate on this, the amount of time spent deciding on which tool to use or which columns to include, or future discussions about whether to add or remove a column is astonishing, these same teams will spend hours on these topics but will then declare a story writing activity unproductive if the quantity of stories written in an hour is below an arbitrary number, regardless of whether the discussion was effective in identifying details valuable to getting a feature right. Please note I am not suggesting that the decisions about tools or workflow are not important, just that it should be proportionate.

To remedy this self-organization may need a helping hand, a facilitator to keep the group focused, or to redirect in the face of bike-shedding.

Structure vs Empowerment

I often hear people talk about not wanting a framework imposed on them (e.g. Scrum) or “wanting to find their own way”. But in my observations many do find themselves with a workflow that would be described as Scrum to an outside observer. The concern I have with this is balancing the freedom to find your own path – allowing teams choose their path, balanced with the waste involved in teams repeatedly churning for weeks on end or longer until they find the path which is ultimately very similar to what would have been prescribed in the first place. Is it wrong to build on past experience by suggesting a proposed framework structure? Is it empowering to allow teams to repeatedly re-invent the wheel? I am oft told that it is empowering for them, but I wonder if they would feel the same way if they were paying the bills?

This applies to other parts of the organization too, it is all very well when entering a restaurant to be offered no menu and told to order anything you want. But when faced with that how many would feel imprisoned by too many unclear options, how many would rather have a menu and feel empowered to stretch it a little asking for tweaks or combinations, in other words having boundaries that can be pushed.

Observations of children playing show that if a play area has a fence they utilize the whole area, but when the play area has no fence the children cluster close to the center with each other. In our subconscious we are more daunted by the lack of boundaries, but when we have them and feel safe and empowered we will push at them.

In retail, studies show that customers faced with 6 choices are 15 times more likely to make a purchase than those with 24 choices, too many choices confuse and frustrate us and so we regress to safety which is to NOT make a decision. The same is true in our business life, we become overwhelmed with choice, constraining options is empowering not limiting.

The three layers of self-organization responsibilities

The teams will generally have activities and responsibilities fall into three camps, either trivial issues get blown up in to long and largely pointless debates that drag on, more complex issues get glossed over leading to problems later and finally there are certain responsibilities that get overlooked or dismissed as unimportant or out of scope of the team.

Primary Tasks

These are tasks that are clearly and directly related to your role on a team and directly related to achieving your team’s goals and objectives. In the case of a developer this may be writing code for specific user stories. Please bear in mind that a named role such as Developer or Quality Advocate or even Product Owner may imply certain responsibilities are theirs rather than the team as a whole (I am observing this not endorsing this)

Secondary Tasks

These are the tasks that the team are responsible for but may not be perceived as core for the individual, again in the developer’s case this could include organising meetings, testing or writing stories or deploying or… well you get the idea.

Tertiary Tasks

These are tasks that need doing and are essential to the function of an organisation but are outside the explicit responsibility of the team such as: emptying bins, washing dishes, watering plants. Or less trivially ordering stationery, updating company web pages, ordering IT equipment and so on.

Exceptions: There seem to be two exceptions to these layers, the first is if a task in any of the layers is perceived by the individual as interesting or rewarding in some way, in which case the layers can be overcome, the other is when someone of authority (including peer pressure) explicitly assigns responsibility to an individual or small group which elevates the task to a Primary task.

Bystander Syndrome

Bystander syndrome is a phenomenon of anthropology where the more people are responsible for something the less responsible the individual feels. Sadly this syndrome is the reason that self-organization so often fails. Why in small teams or small companies things work well but as they grow this attitude slowly creeps in until one day there is a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, un-emptied bins, and someone has stolen my chair because their’s is broken and it was quicker to take mine than order a new one*. (*imaginary scenario – honest)

These minor annoyances are the start of the breakdown in your corporate society and the warning signs that self-organization has reached it’s limit. To keep things running new roles will need to be created to make people explicitly responsible for these Tertiary tasks. In short you will no longer be self-organizing someone will need to lend a discrete hand, to enable self-organization to continue where it really matters.

Summary

Essentially these are growing pains, the result is what can be best described as a failing of human nature. The tasks that get the most effort and attention are those that fall in the sweet spot of being close to the core purpose of the team, are trivial so that everyone has an opinion, and are interesting or appealing or have clear ownership. The tasks that get ignored and overlooked are those that whilst important or necessary in the grand scheme do not map directly to the core purpose of the individual, are uninteresting, or have no clear owner. For these self-organization wont save you, a helping hand (or a gentle prod) is needed.

Providing self-organizing teams and people with boundaries and structure and for our leadership to have an understanding and acceptance that we thrive best when we know our boundaries makes for a safe environment to grow. We will push at those boundaries mercilessly if we feel safe. But don’t be surprised if the plants don’t get watered unless you assign the job explicitly!

Tag: Self-organization

The Zone of Acceptance