n Agile circles we talk a lot about autonomy, and good teams being autonomous. However, there’s a common misconception. No team is ever fully autonomous. No team lives in a vacuum.

Autonomy needs boundaries to be effective.

Look at a top-flight football team, where high performance is essential. They need to be empowered to self-organise, so they can adapt to what the opposition is doing.

But their autonomy has clear boundaries – how many players you can have on the pitch, the playing area and many other rules. Without them it would be more like the Royal Shrovetide Football game, an early form of football dating back to the 12th century which is basically just a massive fight (the main rule is, somewhat bluntly, no killing).

A team is an example of a complex adaptive system. Every successful complex adaptive system is bound by rules, even in nature. A flock of birds works on 3 simple rules, allowing them to self-organise, avoid crashing into each other and leading to mesmerising patterns like murmurations of starlings.

To enable autonomy, it’s important for teams to have clarity about what they’re responsible for and the boundaries around what they can make decisions on.

Defining boundaries is a delicate act. Overly rigid and you can inadvertently limit the very autonomy you aim to foster. Too much leeway can lead to misalignment and inefficiencies. The goal is to offer enough structure, while preserving the space for creativity.

Like a conductor with an orchestra 🎻: set the tempo 🎵, but let the musicians shine ✨