Setting the team direction
Alignment & Autonomy
A key factor for successful agile delivery is aligning the delivery team in the right way so that they can be autonomous.
The diagram is taken from Henrik Knibergs' video on Software Engineering culture and it’s a great way to explain one of the fundamental concepts of good agile leadership (you can view the clip at the bottom of this page). In this depiction the leader could be a product owner, a service owner or anyone who is in a position to direct the team.
It describes how applying different levels of alignment and autonomy affects a team and the likely outcomes you can expect.
Henrik maps autonomy along the horizontal axis, and alignment across the vertical axis. He then divides each axis in half to produce a 2 by 2 matrix or 4 quadrants.
If we start in the bottom left quadrant, here we have a team that isn’t being given much (if any) direction. They aren’t aligned with one another. But they're also people with no self-direction because they don’t feel they're empowered – they have no autonomy. This group of people aren’t really going to be functioning as a team, motivation is likely to be low, and there probably is going to be little to no productivity.
Moving up to the top left quadrant, direction is provided but there is no empowerment. The problem is described and the way to solve it is dictated to the team. In this scenario we end up in a situation where the team probably still don’t feel motivated, but they will be productive - they will probably build what they've been told to deliver.
However, they’ve been given no room to innovate as the solution has been dictated to them. The most innovative and best solutions come from those who actually are responsible for building it when they have been given the space to explore the problem and come up with a solution themselves.
So leaders should just explain the problem and then let the team determine the best solution.
By explaining the problem, the team are being aligned with achieving the same objective. By setting them the challenge of solving it, they’re being empowered because they’re being giving permission to be autonomous. Leaders who take this approach find that their teams are motivated, innovative and productive.
We also need to look at the bottom right quadrant. In this quadrant the team are not provided with any direction but have been given permission to be autonomous. This is the worst approach to take as it can have dire and often costly consequences.
In this scenario the individuals within the team will feel motivated because they’ve been given permission to be self-directing, and they’ll be really innovative too, but without any alignment they’ll all go off and do their own thing. While they might individually be productive, they’re probably not being productive as a team and are likely to deliver little of value. Even worse is that there would have been costs associated with whatever has been built and could even result in unwanted products and services being developed to a point where they incur operating and maintenance costs – irrespective of whether they deliver any value or not. This is clearly the worst approach to take.
Reflecting upon the four quadrants, the two at the bottom where little to no direction is provided, where the team is not aligned, these yield the worst results. The team is not a team at all, just a group of people with no common objective, so productivity is low or non-existent.
Here's the clip from the video.
So in summary, great agile teams can be created with the help of leaders who align them by being clear about the problem and empowering the team by setting them the challenge of delivering a solution.