Self-forming teams - “bounded autonomy”

Description

Organisations are more complex than their org chart shows: the official hierarchy is just one of the many parallel social networks active in a company. This is relevant in any company but much more in a modern collaborative work environment. The aim is to empower the collaboration network and reduce hierarchy to speed up decision-making.

Therefore it is vital to create Teams where effective teamwork is possible. As it is impossible for leadership to consider the combined effect of all possible social networks, the best way to create Teams that can work with the least possible social friction is to let the people decide how Teams are composed. To avoid the potential outcome of teams forming with collections of like-minded people, ensure that appropriate boundary constraints are used to guide the forming process to build teams with sufficient creativity and skill diversity.

This can be done in several ways, the most common being the Self-Designing Team Workshop.

References

This article describes the problem.