One of the challenges of agile development is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self-organizing teams. Many would-be ScrumMasters and agile coaches go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of their prior command-and-control management styles and fail to unleash the creativity and productivity of a self-organizing team. Many want to understand how to walk the fine line of leading a self-organizing team with agile project management.

In these presentations, Certified Scrum Trainer and agile expert Mike Cohn draws on analogies from fields such as evolutionary biology and the study of complex adaptive systems to explain the proper ways to influence a self-organizing team. Learn seven tools for guiding the direction taken by the team as they self-organize and understand why influencing the path a team takes to solve problems is neither sneaky nor inappropriate. Leave with insight into the three factors necessary for self-organization to occur.

To download an audio version of a discussion that took place on January 28, 2009 at APLN Dallas of how leaders and managers are able to lead a self-organizing team click here.

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