In LO8106, Rol said:
>I question self-organizing teams on a number of counts. Nature is full of
>examples of self-organizing organisms, almost all of them extinct.
Restricting my comments to self-organising teams, I don't see extinction
as necessarily a sign of failure. It may be that the team has succeeded.
"Official" organised teams are have no way of remaking themselves. The
meme of such a team can only be satisfied by keeping the team together
after its original purpose is satisfied. Management may even encourage
such action - "We have an organisation that works. Can we use it for
anything else?"
But the will of a team to self-preservation is only the will of the
individuals to stay in the team. Almost by definition, self-organising
teams are easy to form. The organisational meme of each individual (if
that isn't a contradiction) can be satisfied after the break-up of a team
by the knowledge that another can be set up when wanted. Self-organising
teams are, in general, self-disbanding teams.
In LO8139, If states:
>This does not IMO deny the reality of self-organisation, merely the
>challenge to harness it, or at least influence it a little bit. As Mike
>McMaster put it how to we introduce the attractors which we wish to
>succeed?
A self-organising team should appear to solve a particular problem, and
should be seen by those involved as necessary to solving the problem. The
attractor and the problem are the same thing. If I am right, then If's /
Mike McMaster's challenge can be restated as:
How do we make sure the people in our organisation look at
relevant problems?
which is getting a fair way from self-organising teams, and gets to the
fundamentals of management.
IMO once the decision is taken to push learning and decision making down
the organisation, self-organising teams are going to happen inevitably.
Self-organising teams are a way for individuals to try to solve a problem.
They will have all the advantages that come from trying to tackle a
problem at a low-ish level within the company, and all the disadvantages
as well.
Philip Brice
Home: 100607.3436@compuserve.com
--"Brice,Philip,PD" <BRICEPD2@uklon.xtp.xuk.bp.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>