1.9: ”The yellow meatball episode”

What is the difference between self-organizing teams and self-managing teams? What did Henrik and William learn about the updated Scrum Guide during a recent ”Scrum beer” with Swedish agile experts? And why on Earth is this episode titled ”The yellow meatball episode”?

”Words, they do matter. That's also why we talk about self-organizing or self-managing, even though I can't tell the difference right now, spontaneously. The concern I have when it comes to autonomy is the extreme form of autonomy, which is basically anarchy. Like, 'as long as we don't have to talk to anyone else we're autonomous, but once we have to ask someone else for advice or guidance or assistance, as soon as we have to communicate we're not autonomous anymore. The bastardization of autonomy. Basically, when I say that I don't really like autonomy in teams, what I'm saying is that I don't like to default into miscommunication or getting rid of communication,” Henrik explains when being under scrutiny from William. 😉

”If you have a company where everyone is keen on working in a very agile way, cell-based architecture could help you define as a PO what we want to do, give you the words that you need. In our organization, there's no end to the amount of people you could talk to. You don't want to waste time not communicating and you don't want to waste time over-communicating with people who doesn't know what you're talking about. Sometimes in the large companies it feels like we're building these cells but we're tying them to people,” William philosophizes in response to a discussion about the possibility of combining cell-based architecture with capability team principles.

And yes – we will definitely make a future episode about cell-based architecture. So stay tuned!

Links:

Scrum guide: https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide