Kevin E. Schlabach

Tag: self-organization

  • Remote Teams Still Need Hallways

    Since COVID, remote work spread well beyond the offshore team or the one person who relocated. For most teams now, people are remote at least a few days a week. The physical center of the team just… stretched out.

    This reduced the small, unplanned moments that used to happen around the edges of work. Hallway conversations. Lunch chats. The five minutes after a meeting when someone says something useful because the official agenda is finally over. The tiny human details that remind you the person in the Jira ticket is an actual person, not just a Slack icon with a status dot.

    When there’s a production fire, people need to move quickly. They need to trust each other. They need to disagree without flinching. They need to assume good intent while everything is burning down and someone is asking for an ETA every few minutes.

    That kind of trust comes from shared experience. Standups and sprint cards don’t get you there. So how do you replace the hallway?

    On my last team, we had peers distributed across the eastern US and Brazil. We put an intentional social hour on the calendar each month. Sometimes it was over lunch, sometimes at the end of the day. Sometimes we had a loose activity, other times it was completely free-form. When someone new joined the team, we scheduled one relatively quickly. 

    The rule was simple: no work talk. It was time to hear about pets, kids, hobbies, travel, or whatever weird thing was happening just outside someone’s window. Just show up and be human for a bit. Sometimes that meant laughing about something small. Sometimes it meant hearing about something heavier. Both mattered.

    It gave people a low-pressure way to connect and made future small moments easier. If a meeting ended early, people were more likely to hang around and talk for a few minutes. Someone would ask about a trip, a kid, a dog, or a soccer match.

    You can’t fully recreate the hallway, but you can notice that it’s gone and do something about it.

  • Conformity Constrains

    I’ve seen this pattern a lot.

    An organization has many teams, and leadership wants visibility.

    So they standardize everything.

    • Same exact Scrum process
    • Standardized story point scale (“1 point = 1 dev day”)
    • Standups must be before 10am
    • Exactly 3 sprints of backlog ready at all times
    • All team sprints start and end at the same time

    On paper, it makes sense.

    It’s easier to track.
    Easier to compare.
    Easier for someone outside the team to drop in and “understand”

    But it comes at a cost.

    What happens when:

    • a team is more predictable using their own estimation scale
    • a team’s energy is higher with end of day standups
    • a team could move to Kanban and reduce process overhead
    • retros surface improvements… that don’t fit the rules

    Now the system blocks the team from getting better.

    This is the difference between guardrails and rigid process.

    Guardrails exist for a reason:

    • they create safety
    • they guide behavior
    • they can be adapted through reflection

    Rigid process is different.

    It optimizes for consistency and observability…
    at the expense of team performance.

    Not every team is the same.

    A team doing infrastructure work shouldn’t operate the same way as a team shipping software features.

    And a team that’s matured shouldn’t be held to the same structure as a team that’s just forming.

    Conformity makes things easier to measure.

    But it also keeps teams from evolving.

    And over time, that constraint becomes the bottleneck.

  • Why Self-Organization Is Faster

    Expanding on my last post about how self-organization is often blocked by leadership, not teams…

    A simple way I’ve explained self-organization to teams:

    I’ll grab two people in front of a group and run a quick exercise.

    Person 1 can give directions:

    • “take 3 steps forward”
    • “turn left”
    • “take 2 steps”

    Person 2 can only do exactly what they’re told.

    The goal is simple:
    Get from point A → out the door → to another room → and back.

    We time it.

    It’s slow. A lot of stop/start. Constant direction.

    Then we reset.

    Same goal.

    But this time, Person 2 just… does it.

    No step-by-step instruction. Just the outcome.

    And it’s always faster.

    Not because the person suddenly became more capable.

    But because:

    • they can adjust in real time
    • they don’t have to wait for direction
    • and they can solve small problems without escalation

    It’s a simple exercise, but it makes the point pretty quickly:

    If the goal is clear, most people don’t need to be told how to move every step of the way.

    And when they are, it slows everything down.

    This is what self-organization actually looks like in practice.

    Not chaos.

    Just people who understand the goal and have enough space to move toward it.

  • Self-Organization Is Usually Blocked by Leadership, Not Teams

    Self-organization usually isn’t blocked by the team.

    It’s typically blocked by leadership.

    Most teams, if you let them, will:

    figure out how to divide the work
    help each other out
    and naturally rebalance over time

    That’s where the real speed comes from.

    Where it breaks down is when managers step in and start assigning work to the “best” person.

    Usually driven by urgency.

    “I need this done quickly, give it to X.”

    It works in the moment.

    But over time, it creates a pattern:

    the same people get pulled into everything
    others don’t get stretched
    and the team never actually levels up

    Now you don’t have a self-organizing team.

    You have a few strong individuals carrying the system.

    This is one of my most common go-to observations:

    It’s rarely the team resisting self-organization.

    It’s the surrounding leadership not letting go long enough for it to actually take hold.