The first discussion of the series is here
This is the second one, recording in 30 degree heat in SaiGon night traffic because... you'll see.
When we don’t prescribe how to do the work, we can allow greater fluidity. Workers flow to the work where they are needed and they can add value. Workers assemble dynamically.It is possible to have long-lived standing teams and still organise fluidly around the work.
One version of this is called “swarming”: getting the right people together dynamically as required to address a need, issue, or risk. An example of this is in support teams, responding to incidents. Conventional response is to have a service desk layer, who pass it to a back-room support layer, who if they can’t resolve it then pass it to experts. This creates a lot of bureaucracy and delay (and buck-passing). Using swarming, the right people come together as quickly as possible to cut through all the process and just fix it.
One aspect of the highest level of Laloux’s culture model, “teal”, is this fluidity. People are self-organising. Under conventional management, self-organisation usually means a team plans and assigns work internally to meet goals given to them, and this feels progressive. But the ultimate teal self-organisation is self-assembly: a team find each other, determine their own makeup, identify the goal and desired outcomes themselves, source their own resources, and then do the internal planning and work distribution.
(From our book)
