I am always curious how self organizing teams scale when tackling huge problems that no single person or small team can fit in their head. How do you coordinate your efforts when no one has the whole picture?
This approach doesn't entirely eliminate structure. Often you still have a layer of people dedicated to identifying, prioritizing, and breaking problems down into manageable sizes. They're just not the ones dictating who solves the problems.
I simplify it as "Kanban, but for problems". Instead of a person creating a list of tasks for a team to do, they identify and define problems important to the organization. Teams then self-create around those problems to solve them.
I did self organizing teams at a startup where Engineering grew from 20 to 100. It sounds like the article had the same philosophy, but implemented it differently. We didn't eliminate roles, but the roles became more fluid along with the person that was performing them.
Before, one person would receive and coordinate work among the team - the tech lead. After, we had a rotating roster of people who were interested in solving problems that would act as a tech lead. This was in coordination with our Product org.
You create an open participation group which focuses on these problems. Anyone can contribute to that group and it meets on a regular cadence. I’ve done this many time and it works wonderfully
Through cooperation - it's not like you can't work together in a flat organisational structure, or even elect people to deal with higher order concerns for the duration of a project.
My instinct is that wouldn't scale. Self-organizing gets more complicated, and usually more political, inefficient, and disorganized, the greater the distance self-organization spans.
But I don't know any organizations that actually work that way, so have no data.
