The science is clear that empowered teams are more innovative and cost less than non-empowered teams when it comes to developing products. So naturally, all product companies want to have empowered teams for their development.

But the vast majority fail. Why?

I claim that this is because empowered teams are completely counterintuitive in a corporate context. To make things even worse, the move to empowered teams typically takes a leap of faith, where you need to decide on a completely new way of working and then just hope that it will work out automatically. See my article on the Circle of Safety for a description of a transitional organisation that makes this leap a lot shorter and less risky.

Background

In working to transition a traditional development organisation ot an empowered one, I have realised that most material widely available describe the end state. They describe, very clearly, what an organisation made up of empowered team looks like and the massive benefits they yield.

Unfortunately, we are all human, and simply describing an end state is very seldom enough for a large group of people to over-night change their way of working.

It is said that “For many reasons, Agile seems to work best when a [line manager] does not assume either the Product Owner or Scrum Master role.” But if so, then who should be that line manager?

The above quote comes from SAFe, and although the latest version of the official Scrum Guide has nothing to say about the topic, it is an often-repeated truth when talking about Scrum. But that obvious follow-up question is not discussed nearly as often.