"Please tell me what to do!"
Not all teams are ready for autonomy.
I have often been told when advocating for team autonomy that some teams want to be told what to do. They often feel uncomfortable when making decisions. I'm struck by the contrast between that and what we actually do: programming and product development require creativity and adaptability to succeed. If we only do what we're told to do, we'll probably create something that nobody wants to buy, and we'll do that in ineffective ways. So, what gives?
The first thing that comes to mind is that a culture of fear drives people towards perceived safety. If you're punished for a "failed" experiment, for example, you will avoid experimentation. Innovation requires rewarding chance-taking. It requires psychological safety, too. (If you've ever been silent in a meeting when you had something to say, you're not in a safe environment.)
A lot of this ties into incentive systems as well. If your bonus depends on output, you'll focus on increasing output, even at the expense of basic quality or creating things people want to buy. If your bonus depends on doing what you're told, you won't experiment with new and perhaps better ways of working. If you are rewarded as an individual, you won't work as a team.
Even understanding why this is a problem can be a problem. Consider Upton Sinclair's “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Things will start running smoothly only after a "wrong" decision is made and there are positive consequences, like being praised for the attempt. This requires active management participation.
Of course, fear of autonomy also comes from never having experienced it. A newly autonomous team can feel adrift at sea, wanting to head for the nearest safe shore in the land of What-we-used-to-do. It's, again, the responsibility of management to provide help and support during the transition.
Love this one.
I’ve always been driven towards autonomy, yet I still remember the overwhelm I felt the first time I was invited to guide a big initiative.
Years later, I saw a few patterns in how teams react to a sudden increase in autonomy, and used a similar sailing metaphor: https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm-part-6f0
I think everyone wants autonomy to some degree, but everyone is also comfortable at different levels of granularity: from fine details to big picture. It’s overwhelming when you’re asked to jump multiple gradations of granularity all at once. So I think one secret is to create a shared model of project success that individuals can interact with at their own preferred levels of granularity.
I also heard from a friend who’s been deploying pivot triggers in her teams, suggesting that she would negotiate based on desired autonomy:
“going forward, I will experiment with the team and leaders negotiating what approach to use according to their preferred level of autonomy (so pivot triggers are really seen as a value add for teams who want more autonomy and less micro-management/second-guessing)”
So many thoughts on this, thanks for prompting the thoughts!