Abstract: Many agile teams suffer from the mismatch of agile and the organizational hierarchy. Based on self-organization and iterative processes the teams run into trouble with the top-down steering of their environment. Consequently, very often agile proponents believe that a supportive agile organization should be structured without hierarchies. But lack of hierarchy, in the sense of an order of decision making levels, leads especially in larger and more complex organizations to a lack of alignment and lack of speed. To achieve both self-organization and alignment, organizations need an order of decision making levels which integrates both top-down and bottom-up decision making at every level.
In this session we are suggesting to use sociocracy as a solution. You will learn how especially the principles of shared decision making and double-linking enable self-organizational hierarchies. It will empower both agile teams as well as managers.
It will also help improve retrospectives and other agile meetings. It will as well enable teams to take full advantage of the evaluations by developing shared decisions that lead to better alignment. And finally, it will improve the cooperation between agile teams by creating alignment between the teams.
Learning Outcomes:
- How to create agile hierarchies
- How to align hierarchies with agile teams
- How to get alignment within agile teams and amongst them
- How to make retrospectives more effective, leading to better alignment through joint decision making
