Sociocracy is a way for groups and organizations to self-organize. Based on four principles only (self-organizing teams, shared decision making based on consent, double-linking, and electing people to functions and tasks), sociocracy provides a path for existing organizations toward empowerment and self-responsibility on all levels. It enables managers to become agile leaders. Different to comparable models, sociocracy allows companies to start where they are – with their existing organizational structures and the like. It seems to be a perfect fit for organizations which are in the need to be agile truly (due to market pressure), beyond their IT departments and software teams.

Moreover, on the team level - sociocracy provides a means for the Scrum Master and/or coach to enable self-organization.

How do we engage individual agilists and grow real self-sufficient and self-organising teams with a resonant “we”? How do we empower individuals and teams to keep growing while keeping the focus on the delivery of valuable products for our users? How can we switch to a coaching approach where we help our teams to evolve from the backstage? How do we achieve a smooth beginning-to-end product flow while allowing failure as a way of learning?

This talk presents possible approaches and experiments that can be applied in our teams to evolve them into sustainable environments. We will follow the Integral Agile model defined by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd to review the different interconnected domains that need to be taken into account when coaching teams.

In each of the domains we will be talking about experiments that have worked and some others that haven’t, but that were key for us to learn. We will also explain how some experiments impacted more than one domain and how, depending on the different perspectives in the team, our actions have had different levels of success and failure at the same time.

A good team can do wonders. But those of us who have worked in teams know one thing- working in teams is not easy!  And on top of it, we are expected to be winning teams!

Winning teams hmmm… that makes me think... can we look at sports teams and see what it really means to be a winning team??

While it is true that sports is different from delivering projects, there are similar challenges...targets, super hero attitudes, demotivated team members, performance pressures, uncertainties, .... and looks like, some sports teams handle them better than the others! . So are there things we can learn from them?

In a good sports team, individuals with different skills, background, attitude, emotional quotient, communication skills, body language, come together, complement each other and deliver as a unit. How does this happen? What makes such a unit tick? Is it the team or is it individuals? Is it a great captain or is it a self-organized team? Is it skills or is it attitude? What role does a captain or a coach play? What about preparation? ...

In this session, we are going to explore a few important aspects of a winning team which make them click. And from them, we'll derive, key learning which when applied to scrum teams make them reach the next level!