How To Get Your Team Started With Self Organization

Designing a roadmap to increase autonomy and to distribute authority in your organization.

Designing a roadmap to increase autonomy and to distribute authority in your organization.

Image by Hurca! — Licensed via AdobeStock subscription

People don’t need to be empowered, as I explained in a previous article. They are already powerful. What people need is the autonomy and authority to make decisions.

Our brains are wired to self-direct. We don’t want to be told what to do because we want to be in control.

That’s why autonomy and distributed authority are crucial to building self-organized teams. Making smarter and faster decisions requires enabling those who are closer to the information, not to the source of power. But getting there is not easy.

Replacing a command-and-control model by a self-managed one requires intentionality, clarity, and practice.

Alice: Which way should I go?
 Cat: That depends on where you are going.
 Alice: I don’t know.
 Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Self-organization means becoming accountable to the purpos…