Self-organization prior to the advent of “Agile as a mindset”


I start this blogpost with a visual illustration of what I had seen and captured in my "then new" Nikon D750 (Full Frame), as an excellent real-life example of self-organization.

Picture credit: "Lightnlens Fotographie" by Jasdev Singh| Web: www.lightnlens.net
Picture credit: "Lightnlens Fotographie" by Jasdev Singh| Web: www.lightnlens.net

Self-organization, also called spontaneous order (in the social sciences), is a process -  where some form of "overall order" arises from local interactions between parts of an "initially disordered" system.
The process is spontaneous, NOT needing control by any external agent. 

Trigger for self-organization: It's often triggered by random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback.

The resulting organization is wholly decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system. Such an organization is typically robust and is able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. 

 
“Collective animal behavior” is a form of social behavior involving coordinated behavior of large groups of similar animals as well as emergent properties of these groups.

Emergence: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the condition of an entity having properties its parts DO NOT have, due to interactions among the parts.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things. 
              


Emergent properties include:
  • the costs and benefits of group membership
  • the transfer of information across the group
  • the group decision-making process
  • group locomotion and synchronization

PS: Content in this article is not an original piece of research/brainstorming and -
  • It has been put together, after a lot of reading (using content from various Wikipedia pages) with the intent to get a better understanding of the subject of self-organization without any discussion or direct relation with "Agile/Agility" per se.
  • The mention of "collective animal behavior" helps realize that it's not just humans (in an organization) that may exhibit this behavior but animals as well in an ecosystem.
  • Last but not the least, by discussing "emergence", I wish to highlight the emergent properties - those that are an outcome (or benefits) of self-organization.

Hope this article helps corelate and better understand "self-organization" when its discussed "in the context of Agile". Do leave your comments if you find this useful ...

Best,
Jasdev Singh (PMI-ACP®, CSM®, CSP-SM™, ICP-ACC)
https://in.linkedin.com/in/singhjasdev

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When you equate story points with time...

Image
Agile becomes fragile! When you are "doing" agile (most likely because it's in vogue) but have not come out of the "sequential " SDLC execution syndrome or the traditional waterfall way of thinking and executing a project, you are most likely headed for a disaster! Of many things that may or will go wrong, is the estimation of work . The traditional methods of estimation like function-point analysis helped us answer the question - "how long (or duration) will a piece of work take to complete?". On the contrary, Agile keeps it simple and takes a minimalistic approach to estimation. In my opinion, estimation in agile is no rocket science as long as you are clear with the basics and understand "what story points are" and how to use them. Visit my blog post on story points for an understanding. Story Points vs. Time (Person Days) Mike Cohn shares a mantra that makes estimation easy - " Estimate size, measure velocity, derive
Read more

What's the point in a story point?

Image
Part 1: talking of the point Story points are estimates of effort as influenced by the amount of work, complexity, risk and uncertainty ( https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/what-are-story-points ). When we estimate with story points, we assign a point value to each item. The raw values we assign are unimportant. What matters is the  relative values . A story that is assigned a 2 should be twice as much as a story that is assigned a 1. It should also be two-thirds of a story that is estimated as 3 story points. Not delving into the details of how to estimate and what these numbers should be (linear vs. non-linear series or Fibonacci numbers), the focus of this post is to discuss how these points affect the life of a scrum team (development team, scrum master & product owner). A story adds “value” by delivering functionality that the business has asked for, and can/will use depending on whether the story is a part of potentially shi
Read more

In theory, practice is simple. But, is it simple to practice theory?

Theory vs. practicing the theory Part 1: recap of the manifesto This post on my first blog in the "agile space" talks about the theory of agile - the methodologies, frameworks etc. and discusses why it is difficult to practice what is suggested in theory. But first things first, let me tell you why am I obsessed with Agile! I love Agile, primarily because of the fact that it stresses on keeping things simple & focuses primarily on "people" and the "people factors" influencing software development.  If you look closely at the agile manifesto , below are some of the things you'll observe - Two out of four manifesto items are people-related - Individuals and interactions (over processes and tools) Customer collaboration (over contract negotiation) None of the items in the manifesto talk anything about processes to follow or "best practices", so to say! The manifesto doesn't stress on what tools or methodologies to use
Read more