Starfish are agile!
Agile is not only a good way to develop software but also a great way to build teams that collaborate better and respond more quickly to the changes in business environment.
This talk presents some evolved thinking backed by some research about how successful decentralized/ distributed organizations have followed agile principles to gain significant competitive advantage over traditional centralized/ heirarchical organizations.
Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom in their highly applauded book “The starfish and the spider” have described decentralized teams (called starfish) as contrasted with centralized heirarchical organizations (called spiders).
This talk draws inspiration from the book and goes on to highlight how agile teams are more like starfish. Both stafish and agile teams have mentors and catalysts and not authoritarian leaders driving them to success. These decentralized organizations are characterized by local, self governing teams which are similar to the scrum teams - self sufficient; having their own customer, product owner, delivery and quality control functions. Like the local units of decentralized organizations; scrum teams are also guided by loosely defined tactical goals and their ability to self govern allows them to quickly respond to the changes in these goals.
Thinking about starfish one needs to switch context to a broader meaning of agile- flexible, people centric, more functional, less bureaucratic, embracing and quickly responding to change.
You will leave this session with a bigger vision of how the agile movement (along with open source, distributed teams, outsourcing/ off-shoring and decentralized e-businesses) is one of the convergent trends that will result in shaping the organizations of the future.
The session will kick off with a game between 2 teams -spider vs starfish. The game will demonstrate the power of circular oranization with decentralized decisionmaking over heirarchical one with centralized decisionmaking.
Then I will cover the similarities between agile teams and decentralized teams that Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom call Starfish in their book “The Starfish and the Spider”
( http://www.starfishandspider.com/ )
I will look at some success stories of agile teams who embraced the open source/ free ware movement. Teams that created successes like Eclipse, Skype, Craigslist and Wikipedia would be covered here.
Then I would go on to discuss how traditional corporations (spiders as Ori and Rod would call them) find it tough to beat these agile teams at their game. We will briefly touch upon evolving technologies and internet based productivity tools that would better equip these open, distributed, agile, self governing teams in days to come.
Finally we will have a brainstorming session to define the likely shape of future organizations built by smart tech savvy individuals who are contributing to the open source using distributed/ decentralized agile teams within or without traditional corportions.
The audience will be broken into several groups. Each group will discuss
1) What type of organizations can be / can’t be built using the scrum teams as the primary building blocks?
2) Will the change happen entirely outside the corporate heirarchical organizations or would it happen inside - some kind of metamorphosis?
In the end each group will elect a representative to present their points to the larger audience for about 5 minutes each.