Joint Deciding Who Decides: 6 Steps

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“We didn’t talk about that at all,” was one customer’s response. I was asked to help with a project that was not getting off the ground. The company worked Agile and had now been given a project that multiple teams had to work on together.

This project had been talked about for months, but nothing concrete had happened yet. No one had started the real work. Of course, there was a lot of talking and discussion. “How should we tackle that problem?”, “How do we deal with that?”, “How do we involve our customers?” Questions that were asked, but on which no one took the lead.

I brought the project team members together and asked them who was actually responsible for the project. It became icy quiet and everyone looked at each other tensely.

“We didn’t talk about that at all!”

An answer that you obviously don’t want to hear, but which was already known when I received this assignment. The prevailing feeling was that everyone was doing a fantastic job with Agile because no one was ‘in charge’. The group wanted to keep the project organization as flat as possible. As a result, no one took responsibility.

Of course, this has nothing to do with being Agile. There is simply no one in the group who dares to take on leadership and responsibility. There is no one who dares to make decisions. On…