Resources on Self-Organizing Teams for Agility

In the past several blog-entries I've been focusing on the agile principle of self-organization, what it means, and what it implies for teams. So far, I've written about Agile Self-Organization versus Lean Leadership, Self-Organization and Complexity, and Agile Self-Organizing Teams.

For some online resources (articles and presentations) on self-organization and self-organizing teams, I recommend the following:

• InfoQ.Com articles: High-Performance Teams – Avoiding Teamicide, Coaching Self Organizing Teams, and Ensuring Success for Self Organizing Teams
• Leading a Self-Organizing Team, PDF presentation by Mike Cohn given at the Jan 2009 Dallas Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN)
• Flock-theory applied, by James Brett -- a look at Flock Theory by D.Rosen for answers to creating highly optimized, self-organised Scrum teams
• Exploring Self-Organizing Software Development Teams, by Diana Larsen
• Agile Processes and Self-organization, by Ken Schwaber
• Understanding Self-organizing Teams in Agile Software Development, from 2008 Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC2008)
• The Manager's role in Agile, and 7 Agile Coach Failure Modes, by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd
• Scum vs Scrum: Emergent behavior in slime molds and software development teams, by Matt Truxaw
• Agile Software Development and Complex Adaptive Systems, a 4 part series of articles by Michael Dubakov:
  • part1: Introduction to Agile Software Development and CAS
  • part2: Software Development is a Complex Adaptive System - No Doubt
  • part3: The Edge of Chaos and Hyper-Productive Software Development Teams
  • part4: Simple Rules, Complex Systems and Software Development
    
• Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise
• Steering from the Edges, by Sanjiv Augustine et.al.
• Roots of Scrum: Takeuchi and Self-Organizing Teams, by Jeff Sutherland
• Learning is the Bottleneck, by Amr Elssamadisy & Deborah Hartmann
• Leadership is not obsolete in Self-Organizing Teams, by Mary Poppendieck
• More InfoQ.com articles on Self-Organizing Teams
• Polyanna Pixton's papers/presentations on Agile leadership & collaboration
• When to stand back, when to step-in (Managing self-organizing teams), by Esther Derby
  
• What is the best leadership style for a software team? by Andriy Solovey (also see Evolutionary Software Architecture and Self-Organizing Teams: The Army versus Jim Highsmith
• Self Organization in Scrum and Self-Organization & Shock Therapy, presentations by Jeff Sutherland (also see the corresponding video Self-Organization - The Secret Sauce for Improving Your Scrum Team)
• Of ants and men: self-organized teams in human and insect organizations
• The Meaning of Self-Organization in Computing and The Science of Self-Organization and Adaptivity, by Francis Heylighen
• Mishkin Berteig on Team Self-Organization
• Swarming: The Birds, Bees and Agile, by Tom Perry and Dhaval Panchal
• Limits of Self-Organizing Teams, by Alan Kelly
  
• Bureaucracy & Organizational Politics: Emergent Characteristics of Structure, an essay from systems-thinking.org
• Jurgen Appelo on Self-Organizing Teams
• Systemic Analysis of A Team’s Self- Organizing processes: some insights into the knowledge management
• Be Empowered (That’s an Order !) “Experience the Dynamics and the Paradoxes of Self-Organizing Teams”, by Laurent Bossavit and Emannuel Gaillot
  
• Conditions for Self-Organizing in Human Systems by Glenda Holladay Eoyang (Ph.D. Thesis)
• Series of articles on Group Coherence for Agile/Project Teams:
• Group Coherence for Project Teams - A Search for Hyper-Productivity
• Group Coherence for Project Teams - Common Purpose
• Group Coherence for Project Teams - Collaborative Interaction
• Group Coherence for Project Teams – Group Creativity
• Group Coherence Practice in the Agile Community
• Group Coherence for Project Teams - Practice for Continuous Improvement
• Team Effectiveness in Complex Organizations
• Ensuring Success: A Model for Self-Managed Teams, by Lori Silverman & Annabeth Propst
• Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, and Leadership of Self-Organized Networks: Lessons from the War on Terror, by Margaret Wheatley et.al.
  
• Complexity, Organizations and Change, by Elizabeth McMillan
• Managing the Unknowable: Strategic Boundaries Between Order and Chaos in Organizations
• The Universal principles of Self-organization and the Unity of Nature and Knowledge, by Alexei Kurakin
• Classification of Emergence and its Relation to Self-Organization (also see related papers on emergence by Fabio Boschetti)
  
• Wikipedia entries on Self-Organization and Emergence (also Wapedia entries on Self-Organization and Emergence)
  
• Self-Organizing Systems FAQ
• 10 Questions about Emergence
• Self-Organization Dynamics
  
• Patterns in Nature
• Order Out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine
• Using Positioning Theory to Make Change Happen, by Lionel Boxer
  

I'll be taking a break on this topic (Self-Organization) for awhile, and then returning to it again later to talk about Swarm Behavior, Collective Intelligence, Social Creativity, Group Coherence, Group Decision-Making and Holocracy/Sociocracy.