• Management can shape and "nudge" the team and its members, but management doesn't try to dictate the details of "what" the solution is nor the process of how to create it.
• The team is responsible for not only leading and directing itself to achieve its goals, but also to monitor and adapt its behavior to correct/improve its own performance.
• This means the team can change how it leads and organizes itself in order to feedback and constraints from its environment, which also implies that ...
  
• There is no single central "leader" for the team over the lifetime of the team/project - the "leader" is not a static assignment, but rather a dynamic role
• So the person(s) leading any given moment may change, depending on the particular decision, activity, or problem being addressed in any particular context/situation.

• Autonomous: There is no single central decision-making authority. Control is distributed collectively to the team.


• Adaptive: The team dynamically adjusts as needed across roles, functional specialties, and other boundaries, in order to solve their own problems and improve their own performance.


• Accountable: The team collectively shares responsibility for results, and members hold each other accountable for outcomes.

"Human psychology aspect adds that self-organized teams:

• are more responsible for end results, self-disciplined and self-driven
• avoid dependency on the formal leader qualities
• motivated, initiative and willing to act
• enjoy work more
• better insured against groupthink, conformity and diffusion of responsibility
• not shifting judgment and decisions to others, better in finding alternative and balancing options
• every member is in charge, ready to step in as a leader and have incentive to develop leadership skills

A self-organized team is possible when people carry shared purpose, principles and values. They support and respect each other. And they want to succeed. The [Agile] team works together to respond to changes that happen together. They collectively do what needs to be done to build the software."

"Agile processes employ self-organizing teams to handle the complexity inherent in systems development projects. A team of individuals is formed. They organize themselves into a team in response to the pressure of a deadline, reminding me of the saying, "Nothing focuses the mind like a noose!" The pressure cooker of the deadline produces cooperation and creativity that otherwise is rare. This may seem inhumane, but compared with non-agile practices for dealing with complexity, self-organization is a breath of fresh air."

"When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command."

"Complexity science implies that CEOs and managers must give up control -- or rather, the illusion of control -- when they are trying to lead their organization to some goal. But they do need to create the environment in which creativity can emerge. The message of complexity science is not simply to stand back and wait for the right solutions to emerge. Too little control is just as misguided a business strategy as too much. Some structure is necessary. The degree and nature of control that CEOs establish in their companies strongly influences what emerges, in terms of culture, creativity, and adaptability."

"In agile teams, this concept of self-organization is taken quite far. Team members collaborate to get work done. No one orders a team or an individual to do specific work. The team members volunteer for work that they see needs doing, even if it is not something that is in their area of expertise. An agile team is constantly promoting learning in its people. Agile teams are also cross-functional so that the team can get work done without relying on external services. The team therefore represents a complete work unit capable of taking a function valuable to customers from start to finish, from idea to deployment."

An experienced agile software development team is a highly social group that is self-organising around these principles and acts with coordination and collective behaviour. This collective behaviour comprises:

• Collective mind where individual team members develop shared understandings of the team's tasks and of one another, and come to understand how their work contributes to the work of the team thereby facilitating team performance.


• Swarm intelligence which gives a team the ability to adapt to changes, and robustness which enables them to still perform and deliver even when one or more members fail.

To cope with today’s complex, fast-paced, and ever-changing business environment, companies need to shift their overall structure to produce adaptive, highly responsive organizations. The use of teams, particularly self-organized teams with their reactive, emergent properties, may be one way of achieving this goal.

In other words, insect societies often harness the power of self-organization such that with the appropriate set of feedbacks, interindividual interactions, and proximate mechanisms, group-level adaptive behavior simply emerges. No one directs the foragers where to find food, the network of trails and interactions takes care of that; individuals are not allocated to tasks, the reverse is true: the tasks allocate the workers.

McMillan-Parsons (1999) found that the teams fitted Stacey’s (1996) description of self-organizing groups or teams as ones that arise spontaneously around specific issues, communicate and cooperate about these issues, reach a consensus, and make a committed response to these issues. Further, ‘research suggested that self organizing teams have a strong sense of shared purpose, strong personal commitment, display creative and spontaneous behaviors, have high levels of energy and enthusiasm, and that an inherent order emerges from their activities’.

Importantly, in self-organizing teams the members self select and there is no-one checking to see if they have the necessary range of attributes. In her study, McMillan (1999) discovered that members of the self-organizing teams studied learned new skills and developed new attributes to meet the needs of the team.

One characteristic of such organizations is adhocracy. These large, mature yet high-performing companies manage to generate the flexible and adaptive properties of smaller entrepreneurial organizations—in short, to “be big and yet to act small at the same time”. Using teams is one key means of achieving that, for, as Flory (2002, p. 9) remarks, self-managed teams, ‘are fast moving, fast learning groups, flexible, highly autonomous and have a well-developed pro-active attitude and sense of responsibility. These characteristics are the very reason they are brought into life as answers for organizations to respond to a fast moving world.’