This is the second of two articles that explores a key requirement for Progressive Delivery, autonomy. You can find the first article here.

What is the work, really?

The downside of autonomy is management. It seems like the downside might be chaos, but that is easier to solve than the reality of having to make a choice. There is a lot of cognitive work in deciding what to do, how to do it, and how to tell if you did what you needed to do. Autonomous teams and people spend so much more time communicating than command-and-control structures. Communication takes time and effort, and sometimes it feels like you spend more time negotiating than creating. 

That’s the downside.

But everything we have learned about creative work, which includes software, tells us that the conversations that feel like “wasted time” and “friction” are, in fact, The Work. And if we do them, we end up with better products, faster, and with happier teams. 

Collaboration requires that everyone have some degree of autonomy and some difference of opinion. The process of reconciling all of the differences while you’re working means that you have already solved a bunch of the problems that would appear when you publish your work.

We don’t really have a better name for the work of organizing, taking notes, clarifying group decisions, and making people talk to each other than “management”. You are going to have to do management to get results from autonomy, even if it’s nowhere in your title or official job duties.

Trust, delegation, and abdication

Autonomy requires trust. Trust in the competence and good intent of others, trust in the alignment of the team, and trust in yourself. It is hard to go from taking direction on what to do and how to do it, to feeling confident in your own plan and skills. 

For example, Hello Fresh is a food-delivery service that provides meal plans, ingredients, and instructions for making a weeknight dinner. The food is relatively tasty and healthy, and if there are any techniques a cook doesn’t know, they are clearly laid out, often with videos available. You could eat well indefinitely with their service. But it’s not the same skill as being able to look at what is fresh and seasonal around you and come up with your own ideas of what to make. It’s not the same as being able to execute a dinner party. It’s a subset of autonomous cooking.

Trusting yourself to form a plan and execute it with skills you have or can acquire is hard. Trusting others to do the same thing may be even harder. But that’s what we need to make autonomous teams work — we have to trust other people to create things that will match up with the things we create. The more we try to manage or control about their process, the slower the process is, until it’s so inefficient that you might as well be doing everything yourself.

Trust and delegation are not the same as abdication, though. Delegation implies alignment, either with a larger goal, or with interoperability standards. There are probably several companies making mechanical pencil leads, but if you have a 0.5mm mechanical pencil, it will take any of them. We trust that all sorts of commodities are roughly interoperable, no matter where they come from. Gasoline will make your car go and electricity will charge your phone, if either of them varies wildly, it causes problems.

Abdication is when you don’t set standards for success or failure, and you don’t provide any path to success. “Just fix it” is not helpful direction if the person you’re talking to doesn’t know what “fixed” is.

How do we get to autonomy?

Lack of autonomy not a tooling issue, or not only a tooling issue. It’s a cultural issue. Many organizations are already part of the way to autonomy, because autonomy is the foundational concept of Agile development. Teams may be accustomed to deciding on their tasks for the next work-period, or individuals may be free to implement solutions within the parameters of their requirements. It’s a start.

The next step is making sure that each autonomous unit knows what the overall goal is, what the requirements are, and supporting them in choosing the amount of work that they decide to take on. An experienced leader will respect those estimates, but also encourage teams to remember to account for the inevitable friction of humanity — sick days, train strikes, pandemics, and coffee emergencies. No plan survives first contact with reality, but thoughtful autonomy does allow people to get done what they committed to in almost all circumstances.

Once work is done, or at least stopped, it needs to be managed some more. Does it meet the standards set? Should it be handed off to the next team? Is it fit for purpose? Does it match the current alignment? What is the next step?

Progressive delivery is not just a constant ripple of changes at the consumer side as different teams push their product out into the world. It is also the ripple back that tells teams how they did, what’s next, what should be changed or fixed or altered. It is as much a conversation and management opportunity as anything that happens internally.

Conclusion

Management is an essential part of getting a good result from autonomous people and teams. Management includes:

• providing psychological safety
• defining and maintaining technology guardrails
• delegating the power to make changes
• providing the resources needed for meaningful creation
• helping the team align on goals and definitions of success

You can help a team increase their autonomy by delegating power to them and helping them negotiate how to use it to make meaningful change.