The Team is the Boss E-Book

Gabriel Fritsch

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 383

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In this book, I explain the six hurdles that can stand in the way of genuine organic self-organisation. With the help of specially developed models, methods and tools, readers gain a much deeper and more practical understanding of self-organisation than they would from anecdotal examples. So it's not about rolling out a philosophy of participatory collaboration, but about helping your team in a very concrete way to plan and execute their projects in their own interests. This is particularly interesting for start-ups, as they often don't have a real boss. But even in modern agile management, we will inevitably have to take more and more steps towards self-motivated self-organisation. This requires both the appropriate tools and concepts, which I provide as a method developer, and the necessary skills, which the team must develop itself. I show how this can be achieved in an elegant way.

Leseprobe

The Team is the Boss

Success through Self-Organization

dedicated to:

Marshall B. Rosenberg

and his dream, which was social change:

A new life serving togetherness beyond right and wrong.

The Team is the Boss

Success through Self-Organization

Gabriel Fritsch

© 2025 Gabriel Fritsch

Website: https://nvc-plus.net

Publisher label: Care-Verlag

Softcover 978-3-384-72498-4

Hardcover 978-3-384-72499-1

E-Book 978-3-384-72500-4

Printing and distribution on behalf of the author:

tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany

This work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. The author is responsible for the content. Any use without his consent is prohibited. Publication and distribution are carried out on behalf of the author, who can be reached at: Gabriel Fritsch, Seckenheimer Str. 19, 68165 Mannheim, Germany.

Translated from German by Deepl.com

Contact address in accordance with the EU product safety regulation: [email protected]

Table of Contents

Cover

Half Title

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Self-Organization as a Solution

A Team Organizes Itself

The Three Levels of Project Organization

Systems and People in Systems

The 6 Hurdles for the Team as Boss

1. The Team Culture

1.a) The cultural stage model

1.b) The 3 control centers gut - head - heart

1.C) How does cultural change succeed in the team / company?

2. Feelings and Self-Organization

2.a) The difference: Impulsiveness, feelings, intuition

2.b) Lists of feelings and needs

2.c) Classic Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

2.d) The NVC Magic Circle

2.e) Emergency Emo-Step® - dealing with difficult emotions

3. Conflicts in Project Organization

3.a) Lists of feelings and needs

3.b) The NVC Magic Circle

3.c) Forcing a decision

3.d) Request professional help

4. The Appropriate Method

4.a) The checklist

4.b) The four-step circle - the heart of NVC-plus

4.c) Working with utopias and visions

4.d) Objections, annoyances, No-Gos and Must-Haves

5. A Suitable Tool Set

5.a) The NVC-plus Deck of Cards

5.b) The pain points

5.c) Consensing decisions

5.d) The requirements lists

5.e) Tools for utopias and visions

5.f) Download tool depot for free work material

6. Integral Management

6.a) The principles of integral management

6.b) Strategy Maps

6.c) The NVC-plus matrix - the team's control board

6.d) The factual discourse

The Author and Developer

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1: Nvc-Plus Requirements List

Appendix 2: Team Barometer

Appendix 3: Cultural Development in Relation to Having and Being

Appendix 3: From I to You to We in Cultural Development

The Team is the Boss

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Foreword by Wolfram Müller

Acknowledgments

Appendix 3: From I to You to We in Cultural Development

The Team is the Boss

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Foreword by Wolfram Müller

It is a great pleasure for me to write the foreword for "The Team is the Boss!", a book that makes an extraordinary contribution to the world of organizational development. As an avid practitioner of Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in both personal and professional contexts, I have always experienced the transformative power of this methodology. This book represents a groundbreaking integration of NVC into organizational development and shows how it can be used to create modern, vibrant organizations.

As a project manager working in both agile and traditional environments, I find the inclusion of cutting-edge project management approaches, particularly Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), particularly enriching. The integration of self-organization as a central concept is fascinating and far beyond superficial team dynamics. Rather, it is about how self-organization can be used to enable a new form of collaboration at eye level.

The book presents itself as a cornucopia of concepts, ideas and tools that are unique in this form and combination. What is particularly impressive is the way this content is presented in a step-by-step approach based on six key obstacles. Each step is supported by precise instructions that focus on the respective challenges.

Overall, "The Team is the Boss!" is a truly comprehensive work that not only presents a wealth of ideas but also brings them into a coherent overall context. This book is not just a book to read, but a guide for all those who strive for modern forms of organization based on respect, understanding and joint development.

Wolfram Müller, Nov. 2023

Founder of Dolphin-Universe (first community for self-organized changes based on the Theory of Constraints), https://dolphinuniverse.team

Self-organization as a solution

Successful cooperation has always been the foundation of all human civilizations. It leads to the growth of companies, institutions and states. Growth means, that on one hand a system expands within the scope of its possibilities and on the other, that it becomes more and more finely tuned within this expansion. Just think of how computers, smartphones and the internet emerged and then conquered the world in a short space of time, eventually even forming their own virtual cosmos within our world. How much has this in turn changed partnerships, households, schools, companies and politics? How have our habits and expectations changed as a result? Even our perception and understanding of the world has changed. How does what has emerged from our collaboration inevitably transform the way we continue to work together?

People move forward together and as they progress, the nature of their communities inevitably changes. This is happening with increasing speed. Every advance challenges teams and companies to keep up. With the increasing complexity of tasks, structures and rules, we need to constantly organize ourselves better in order to be able to manage our productive interaction. If we succeed in doing this, further growth will follow, which will then make everything even more complex. As soon as we are overwhelmed at some point, a degeneration creeps in that must ultimately lead to collapse. The conclusion is simple: We are in a complexity trap. Progress that we cannot keep up with means the end of our team, our company or even the end of an entire civilization.

We will have to overcome certain hurdles along the way and in any case we will come up against two decisive thresholds. At them, the way we organize ourselves must not only be optimized, but completely transformed. If we don't succeed, we will fail due to the complexity of our systems, projects and tasks, which will inevitably result from progressive growth.

We have already successfully overcome the first of these thresholds in many places by saying goodbye to the dominant leadership of teams and institutions. We recognized that a team does not perform at its best when arbitrariness and oppression prevail. An autocratic boss or a central control point for exercising power is simply detrimental to the intelligent organization of projects, especially if the primary aim is to exercise dominance for its own sake. A dominant team culture has a completely devastating effect, especially in knowledge work and creative challenges. Schools with dominant teaching are often better than no education at all, but they are destructive for mental health and teamwork. With dominance, beings are trained and not educated. They are forcibly assimilated into a collective of subjects and not trained in the finer social skills.

The times when the dominant style was the order of the day are largely over because we as humans have outgrown it. However, it wasn't that long ago and of course there are still some stragglers.

Fig. 1: The two thresholds on the way to more productive cooperation

Today, we are already facing the second threshold and this is yet another challenge. The complexity of many projects overwhelms our pyramid-like decision-making structures. Centralized management thus becomes the bottleneck of the company. If we continue to decentralize project management in response to this, at a certain point we are talking about self-organization: the teams become the boss of the projects. However, a reorganization of collaboration in which the team becomes the boss also requires the team members to be their own boss and not subordinates. Genuine selforganization is based on the networking of independent people. Of course, this requires more than just independence and the will to work together. A clear methodology and good tools are indispensable in practice. This book is intended to help self-confident and self-determined people to overcome this second threshold in a team.

■ It is intended to encourage people to go their own way in teamwork.

■ It is designed to support teams in managing their projects sensibly and implementing them efficiently, even without a superior manager.

■ It is intended to show entrepreneurs how they can view leadership as a shared task and decentralize it on a project-by-project basis.

■ It should give a society confidence in a self-designed future.

Companies and projects do not have to end up in the complexity trap and be slowly crushed by a sprawling and yet increasingly inefficient management, like a giant snake.

How do you overcome this second threshold?

On your way to becoming a team boss, you have to complete the following tasks:

a. You need a sufficient basic understanding of genuine self-organization and should know what this means for you.

b. You need a methodical approach to reliably organize yourselves as a team.

c. You need an idea of how you can integrate this approach as easily and stress-free as possible.

We want to embark on this journey and cover everything from general theory to concrete practice. We want to understand the team and its project as an organic system. To achieve this, I will draw your attention to six hurdles that every team must overcome in order to truly organize itself and I will also provide you with some good tools for this journey.

We start with the theoretical foundations of genuine self-organization, because we need a sufficient understanding of what it is all about. If we understand this, we will also realize that a new way of working together will also give us a different sense of self and self-image. So let's prepare ourselves to break new ground in new ways.

A team organizes itself

„The Team is the Boss“ is intended to achieve four key objectives:

1) Projects and companies should be led out of the complexity trap.

2) Cooperation should be meaningful and beneficial for all those involved.

3) Instead of leading teams, projects should be led within the team and managed between the teams.

4) By networking the individual skills and resources of all team members, an inspiring, proactive and creative field of potential is to be created. The focus is therefore less on the sum of the skills of individual team members and more on the activated team as a whole.

Fig. 2: A separation between decision-making and realization is not always a happy one.

This requires a new approach to management. Traditionally, the boss is usually the primary determinant. The centralized nature of management continues throughout the levels of the company by appointing managers for all areas. They lead according to the instructions they receive from the respective upper levels. The practical implementation of the projects is carried out by the managed teams and employees. Figuratively speaking, this means that the architect does not work on the construction site and the workers who lay brick after brick have no part in planning the architecture. The advantages of this separation are obvious: all those involved can work in precisely defined areas of responsibility according to their training and skills. The boss and the few supervisors quickly reach agreement and can communicate their decisions in clear instructions. This means that responsibilities are also quite clear, which makes it easier to find fault and blame in the event of failures. In this way, a top-down organizational structure with levels and organizational centers is formed. These can be imagined as isolated decision-making silos. The dominance now emanates less from individuals and their arbitrariness than from a functional structure with all its rules and determinations.

People often behave unnaturally and strangely biased in functional systems, which they are far less inclined to do outside these very purpose-oriented structures. The natural flow of communication and interaction gets caught up in the functional web of companies and institutions. Potentially caring people are reduced to nice, low-maintenance and always rule-compliant employees with a false bottom. What kind of person is hidden behind the masking appearance of an employee or boss?

If a society continues down this path, everyone will end up in their own private decision-making silo - alone in their own homes, in their own virtual spaces and in their own dreams of a better life. However, they all disguise this quite well to the outside world. A professional mask becomes a second skin. With the many unhappy individuals, a functional community of fate ends up being its own fate.

Couldn't the responsibilities in a project be organized in a completely different and much more natural way? Couldn't the potential of the employees be distributed and bundled in a self-organized way? Couldn't the whole team be the successful boss?

Hierarchies and decision-making silos have massive disadvantages in more complex projects, in which diverse and timely information, proposed solutions and decisions are required, which are eliminated when we organize projects in a networked manner at eye level. In development teams, start-ups and other creative working environments in particular, where the task at hand requires all-round sensitivity and decision-making competence, rigid rules, long paths, fixed role allocations, status thinking, power imbalances, etc. become sand in the gears. It frustrates everyone involved when ever greater hurdles have to be overcome in order to contribute to success with confidence. Self-determined employees also prefer to work with others rather than among them.

There seems to be a natural evolution of consciousness. We recognize that people today are increasingly reacting with aversion to hierarchical leadership and purely functional involvement. This starts with children, who want to be more involved and make more decisions. A dominant or purely functional school education leads to them withdrawing and switching off. They carry this behavior into their later professional life. Some others aspire to become the head of a hierarchical institution themselves. In doing so, they solve their own problem of lacking independence in line with the system, but at the expense of others and their real dreams.

Fig. 3: Functional structures stimulate the reduction from human to employee. The employee is the formal representation of the person, their avatar so to speak. They may also have a title, number, position, function and the role to be played. What is the price for this and who pays it?

If we gave young people at school the opportunity to become experts in networked design, there would be no need for this book. Every team would already be the boss of its own projects. We are seeing less and less willingness, especially among young people, to subordinate their needs to the requirements of professional matters1 . If we don't simply want to understand this as another generational problem2 and almost capitulate, we are quickly inclined to see this as a deficit of individual young people. We diagnose them with various psychological weaknesses. Common suggestions for solutions are directed towards medication, psychiatrists and psychologists. But with a new type of team and project design, we might not have this problem at all. It could even go so far as to suggest that the unconscious refusal of many people only indicates that it is time for a new way of working together. If it really is not a matter of personal problems, but of systemic deficiencies, the solution would also not have to be sought in the individual, because a problem can only ever be solved where it is and not elsewhere. 3

New times require new perspectives and methods. More complex tasks in an increasingly complex environment require strategies for working together that are capable of complexity and that people are comfortable with. (This reminds me of the question: Why did the ancient Egyptians build pyramids? Answer: Because it was easy for them). In theory, this has long been recognized and there is already so much talk of agility, lean and new work that such terms are already considered buzzwords (overused buzzwords) as soon as they are coined. Hierarchies are being flattened and new leadership methods are emerging, but the central guiding principle of functionality always remains, making it impossible to truly transform teams and companies. So we should ask ourselves: do we want to save the dominant or functional project design into the future, or do we want to fundamentally transform our cooperation and thus also overcome this second threshold that we are facing today?

Fig. 4: The author participated in the German AI Award 2019 with his concept of Natural Networked Intelligence through NVC-plus. AI and NVI are interrelated and mutually dependent.

Admittedly: It is not easy to change the corporate culture as radically as necessary on the one hand and as discreetly as possible on the other. But perhaps it is easier than we thought if we go about it the right way. Transformation is essentially about something completely new that has more to do with visions than with the problems of the present. The butterfly no longer needs to solve the difficulties of the caterpillar.

In this respect, I do not believe that we should seek the next level through improvements at the technical level and better functional interaction between man and machine. Instead, we should be looking for a new form of organization that can integrate collaborative potential. To achieve this, we will have to rely on mindful and creative self-organization, because we will not get anywhere with purely functional process methods, even if we were to support them massively with AI.

However, this approach of genuine self-organization leads to the dissolution of isolated management silos and thus to the dethroning of personal and formal monopolies of power. A cultural change is inevitable. What may sound like an unclear and risky undertaking to some will soon be the necessary prerequisite for successful project design in many areas. Those who are ahead of the game will have the brighter employees, the more interesting projects, the more exciting collaboration and faster results. We can also put a natural networked heart intelligence in front of the functional AI octopus as the boss, which I find increasingly reassuring.

1Quiet quitting: working only the time necessary for your own survival and otherwise making yourself unavailable.

2 Keyword: Generation Z

3 As Paul Watzlawick remarked in a lecture in 1997, the solution would then quickly become the actual problem (ISBN-10:3830291337).

The three levels of project organization

What is „The Team is the Boss“ about? It's about a new level of how people organize themselves for a project.

Figure 5: The three levels of project organization

Three levels can be identified in the organization of projects: At the base is the tactical level. This is where a project with tried and tested concepts is implemented in practice. You can hardly do without this level, because if you abandon concrete implementation, all other efforts make little sense.

The next level is the level at which we plan and organize a project. We call it the strategic level. This is no longer the home of workers, but of technicians, architects and engineers. Artificial intelligence is also increasingly becoming a player here.

Perhaps we don't want to leave the management of our powers of consciousness to a boss, a set of rules, a framework, an app or a computer program. Then it is time to let the forces of consciousness organize themselves. We are opening up a new third level for this, on which employees organize themselves in a meaningful way with regard to the joint project and reposition themselves again and again. This requires sufficient awareness, which includes a good sensitivity for the project, the tasks at hand and the employees. The aim is to network the natural humanity and potential within the team in a project.

An example: in the past, to build a house, you simply carted in bricks, called a few people together and then got started (level 1). Today, plans, determination procedures, permits and suitable management of the construction site (level 2) are required before practical implementation is possible. The world is no longer as simple as it once was and we can't turn back the clocks.

However, this situation has already changed again. In many places, the days when some could set the plan and others simply worked through it are over. The practitioners on the ground are increasingly becoming the sensors and sources of inspiration for the theorists and strategists. Yes, they even have to take on planning and organizational tasks themselves in order to maintain the agility of the processes. All-round attentiveness, commitment, communication and networking are becoming the basis for success.

It has proven successful to differentiate the two lower levels more and more and to take the first step towards self-organization: Employees at the tactical level are given complete freedom to make decisions in their project area and are not involved. Keywords for this would be, for example

■ Control by objectives (targets) instead of control by command (instructions)

■ Avoiding micromanagement (the strategist guides the practitioners on site).

■ the principle of "think globally, act locally" (do not plan too locally and do not act too globally)

The workers at the lower tactical level are usually best able to assess their activities.4 It is also not exactly inspiring to be told by others how to do something. So you leave the decision-making power where the implementation power is.

The employees should simply achieve the strategic goal set for them by the middle level in their own way. An attempt is made to turn the managers implemented in the team into coaches for the teams so that they can work without tension. 5

This is also self-organization, but only on a tactical level. An incomplete leap over the ditch does not lead to success. Half a bridge is not a complete solution. So what would be the next step?

The third level involves the task of managing people in relation to the project. This necessarily happens in a predominantly self-organized way. As social beings, we network our personal strengths, weaknesses, resources, desires, inspirations, skills and strengths so that we can coordinate and align ourselves synergistically and intelligently. Here, the community has the opportunity to align itself not only according to factual necessities, but above all according to shared visions and inspirational goals. This creates joy and cheerfulness. The burden of the many visionless necessities can be lifted from the community.

Intelligent networked awareness is half the battle, at least if the desired project is not trivial. It will still be possible to organize trivial projects very successfully in the old way, even if many activities are likely to be increasingly taken over by machines and AI-supported robotic systems (RAS: robotic and autonomous systems).

With what we call modern leadership, attempts have been made for some time to integrate this third organizational level while still retaining the fundamental decision-making authority of the elite management silos. This is why there is so much talk of the ideal and super authentic leader and hardly any talk of organic leadership as the common task of the team. People are reluctant to sacrifice the old hierarchy and distribution structures. In projects, this prevents profound transformations and the people involved are only happy to a limited extent.

On the other hand, there is also the much-cited normative force of the factual. With „The Team is the Boss“, we do not want to outline a romantically glorified and therefore doomed form of organization that wrongly assumes ideal people but is simply overwhelmed by the actual employees and their weaknesses.

On this third level, a team as boss must therefore help employees to become clearly aware of their actual relevant strengths, weaknesses and inclinations in the project. In practice, this will sometimes work better and sometimes worse and may also require accompanying training at the beginning. We will have to be open about who we can be for the project if we want to network in synergy. We are looking for a common and targeted force for change in the project and do not want to neglect our personal starting points.

The purely functional project organization of the second organizational level has already been optimized quite well over time, because it was not about the people themselves, but only about their functionality within the framework of the projects. The keywords here are quality management, compliance, standardization and automation. With the new achievements of technology and today's communication options, this has all been achieved quite well. Thanks to agile methods and clever value stream management, new impulses for progress are constantly emerging in the area of functional project management. But all of this is mainly happening at the second level of project organization. One question remains unsatisfactorily resolved: What is the optimal way to organize the awareness potential of the people planning and executing at the third level?

At the moment, people are integrated into the processes as human resources, like machines and cogs, by the "better" people, the designated leaders, who in turn are hierarchically integrated into the whole like machines and cogs. And at the very top is the big boss or a few board members, who in turn are all just part of the big socio-economic machine.

It seems that the primacy of capital can hardly be contradicted. Money makes the world go around. Money has mutated from a means to an end and the dominance of this parameter cements the dominant-hierarchical basic structure of every company, which is then more or less favorably overlaid by a functional project organization. People fit into this construct and submit, especially if they are even treated nicely and seemingly "respectfully". Then it doesn't hurt so much. However, this creates contradictions within them that not everyone is able to deal with. And the profit to be made obscures the real motivations, goals and visions of everyone involved. Functionality itself is trapped in a not particularly functional hamster wheel. Our logic only seems logical to a limited extent as soon as we look at the whole thing from a bird's eye or human perspective.

The problem is evident in business, for example, when it comes to ethical values. These are carried into the corporate structure and project design exclusively by the open hearts of those involved. Under no circumstances can they be realized through a purely intellectual concept, appeals, demands or the like. For example, there can be no prescribed solidarity per se - a contradiction that has become apparent in recent years. Nor can values be replaced by the mere proclamation of values or by guidelines, rules and laws. Every ethic needs people involved with their hearts and not just formally acting workers. Living hearts bring into play the many valuable heterogeneous influences that can only be handled well through networking. The uniform, coercive collectives will therefore inevitably give way to self-determined networks.

In our calculating world, people are increasingly miscalculating because life is not constructed and calculated, but lived. If you throw a stone into the air, you can easily predict where it will land according to the formulas of a throwing parabola. If, on the other hand, you throw a bird into the air, you can only do the same if you have taped its wings to its body beforehand.

Have we forgotten how to fly? Do we not want to use the wings of our hearts and minds? The increasing complexity of the world means that our projects increasingly have to be lived and experienced. There is no alternative for people or processes. The team is increasingly serving as the center of the project organization, which contradicts the classic approach and therefore could not be adequately supported with suitable tools.

For those projects in which purely functional organization already brings the desired success, the better networked awareness of employees would not necessarily be needed, but a caring project organization creates new realities in which employees feel much more comfortable.

And what does it look like when we think in longer time frames? More and more people are waiting for a leap into a caring corporate culture. They no longer want to be planned like machines and cogwheels. They long for a life-serving networking of their potential. As a result, projects with more conscious people can often no longer be managed as smoothly and functionally, and this will not get any better in the future.

We therefore need a new level of networked awareness for successful project design and therefore logically make the team the boss. The team organizes the joint processes and should therefore understand something about organic self-organization. In order for this to succeed, I have developed the NVC-plus method6, which is used in practice in „The Team is the Boss“. If we overcome the six hurdles on the way to becoming a team boss, we have made it.

Now that modern companies are already very good at organizing their projects functionally (levels 1 and 2), it is now a matter of being able to network the individual awareness of all those involved into a strong organizational hub (level 3).

We will not be able to cope with functional tricks and detours for much longer. Organizing people is therefore no longer the task of a hierarchical management structure, nor can it be achieved at the strategic 2nd organizational level. In this respect, caring team networking cannot be taken over by artificial intelligence. The well-networked team members are no longer scheduled; they plan, organize and control the work processes themselves. They are not the cogwheels of the big socio-economic machine, but the heart of a social meta-organism.

If we trust the natural networking affinity of human beings as social beings and provide the necessary tools, a new sensitivity to the project environment as well as to the wider environment will emerge. What this means hardly needs to be explained today. Without this sensitivity, the future control of our civilization could only be compensated for by prohibitions, ever tighter social control and brute force regulations, as is being attempted in China, for example. However, this leads to a massive drop in inspiration and motivation among sovereign and freedom-loving people and is therefore not a solution. So we will hardly have any alternative. The nice thing is that we can start organic self-organization on a small scale without much effort.

There are three starting situations that speak in favor of a team as a boss:

a. Your project: The project you are pursuing as a team is complex and requires very consciously coordinated collaboration. You organize and refine your product as you work on it. Creativity, mindfulness and good communication are required. You cannot simply fall back on standardized and automated processes. For success, you need the inspired interaction of everyone involved.

b. Team design: You are a group of people who see themselves as equals and you don't know how to introduce a compatible hierarchy. Or you have a hierarchy and not only want to flatten it, but would prefer to get rid of it altogether without losing seriousness, commitment and leadership. Start-ups, initiatives, collaborations between the self-employed, new work projects and specialist teams call for genuine self-organization.

c. Curiosity and a willingness to experiment: You would simply like to position yourself better as a company and have both the flexibility and the projects with which you want to try organic self-organization. Perhaps the equal interaction of different people fits in perfectly with your corporate philosophy and ideals.

What advantages does the team have as a boss?

So why should a company concern itself with "the team is the boss"?

1. Because each person has a special perspective and a share of knowledge of the whole from their position in the project.

2. Because each person can intervene quickly and directly in their position and with their specialist knowledge to balance the project.

3. Because every person adds meaning, awareness, inspiration, talent and significance to the project.

4. Because individual potential can often only come to the fore and develop in a caring community.

5. Because we need clever networking of our individual potentials both for a good visionary project orientation and for quickly overcoming problems.

6. Because it is a special pleasure and a source of inspiration to be creative together.

7. Because in an increasingly complex world, self-organization is often still the only way to manage complex tasks appropriately and quickly.

8. Because for people who want to enjoy their lives, lively togetherness has a clear advantage over functional togetherness.

9. Because lively and sensitive people don't want to be just a cog in the big socio-economic machine. They refuse both through conscious maneuvers and unconsciously in the form of illness, depression and burnout.

A self-organizing team is unbeatable, unless it beats itself. Logically, a good team would be the better boss in most situations. There are many reasons for this: Many eyes see more than just two and all team members can consult with each other as equals. This enables them to activate, position, network and utilize their knowledge and potential. They are close to the project and often find more possible solutions together. Communication is also like a river that flows poorly upwards, while the water spreads horizontally all by itself. Without a hierarchy, guilt and shame are a toothless wolf, which is only good for the team's critical faculties and error culture.

What is the risk?

Self-organization requires the willingness and skills of individuals. So before you start with the practice, it makes sense to analyze the current team situation. The checklist, chapter 4.a, p.127. Any change can initially lead to destabilization. A team should therefore become aware of its weak points if it wants to engage in organic self-organization. If you can feel the curiosity and anticipation spreading, you can get started. If there is no inspiration after the first few experiments, there may still be one measure missing, or self-organization may not be your thing yet.

Almost every large team has at least one self-convinced or even chronic critic in its ranks. But without new knowledge and experience of how successful self-organization can change the team and the project, any criticism is premature. It is more likely to be understood as prejudice, unwillingness, refusal and pre-emptive resistance. You should not let this irritate and slow you down and postpone the moment of meaningful critical discussion until after the first results have been achieved. Then everyone will understand more and before this time it is simply better to proceed optimistically, because pessimism writes its own script, which has nothing to do with "the team is the boss". Skepticism and bad-temperedness always want to play the boss themselves, in all of us. If you understand that, you don't necessarily have to live it out anymore. Just give yourselves some foolproof experimentation time and then evaluate the results with all due thoroughness7 . In any case, it makes a difference whether the team approaches the matter with an open or a closed mind. So, if possible, find people who are open, optimistic and ready to start.

In general, a certain amount of uncertainty is to be expected at the beginning, which can make us hesitate. It can be helpful to talk to experts who already have more experience in this field from time to time, even if we are all still pioneers in a new type of collaboration. You can find more on this topic on the website of The Team is the Boss (see chapter 5.f, p.228).

What is organic self-organization?

It is said that people primarily strive for three qualities in their lives: Autonomy, competence and good relationships. Behind the need for autonomy is the desire to manage one's own projects. Behind the need for competence is the desire to learn, train and actively develop. Behind good relationships is the need to form great teams and be successful together. All three points can easily be fulfilled with „The Team is the Boss“. However, if we place teams under dominant leadership, understand competence as isolated individual perfection and confuse our functional cooperation with human relationships, then despite our best efforts we have only created the best conditions for comprehensive unhappiness. It doesn't help if this takes place like a silent inflammation for a long time under the radar of perception.

At its best, a functional team works like a machine. You have to feed it energy and control it. An organic team, on the other hand, is driven and directed by inner life forces. Inspiration, understanding, curiosity, drive, the will to create and the joy of working together and sharing success fill the team with life from within. The conscious self of each team member helps to steer the whole team.

What are the most common questions and concerns?

Does this also work with virtual teams? What do you do if something goes wrong? How long does the changeover take? What happens if not everyone likes the team boss? What will be the task of the previous bosses and managers? Can a medium-sized or larger company organize itself organically?

There are many uncertainties and the most important questions and their answers only come with practice. Before that, there is often more doubt than thorough scrutiny, because a not insignificant proportion of employees always have a queasy feeling about changes, especially if they affect their own position. But the reassuring thing about genuine self-organization is that one's own intuition also acts as a compass and thus helps to organize the current situation. Each person contributes to the sensitive project wisdom of the team, from which the project is steered. It is not about perfect teamwork, but only about ensuring that everything works adequately or at least sufficiently. What is already known from other methods also applies: fail quickly, learn quickly and follow the paths that open up. As soon as something slips, realization and correction should happen as spontaneously as possible. "Direct control instead of distanced management" is the motto.

In game mode, most teams will have a desire for continuous improvement, which is an important management principle today. However, as soon as the game mode switches to battle mode or perceived survival mode, this will no longer be an issue. On the other hand, combat and survival are not that uncommon. So if the company first needs some fundamental relaxation, it can try to use approaches such as Theory of Constraint (ToC), Critical Chain Process Management (CCPM) and the like to provide some relaxation in the functional structures before turning to genuine self-organization.

Focus on problem solving or visionary goals?

Classic management has a lot to do with problem solving. Strictly speaking, it is even centrally concerned with solving or circumventing problems on the way to an entrepreneurial goal. And the goal is usually the solution to a problem that can be exploited by the market. In „The Team is the Boss“, however, the team does not organize itself on the basis of problems, but on the basis of five positive driving elements that ensure an inner alignment:

Fig. 6: The energy is built up by the individuals. In the potential field of the community focused on the project, the energies mature into a vision. This is then realized, which is first indicated here with the familiar PDCA cycle. However, we will rather use the four-step circle of NVC-plus (Chapter 4.b, p.130).

Ideals ensure that people have their own inner coordinate system. The other four elements build on each other and condense a creative process. When a person is inspired, various utopias begin to emerge within them. Utopias are hopeful but not necessarily realistic ideas. When inspired people come together with their utopias and individual ideas, a common field of creative potential is formed. In this field, they quickly find a realistic vision.

If the team has a shared vision, then it also has a positive productive direction. The team members want to manufacture, construct and produce something. To this end, they develop a suitable project environment, a suitable strategy and practical concepts for implementation.

Fig. 7: Time planning according to the parameters important and urgent. Tasks in field B are important, those in field A are important and urgent. In field C, unimportant tasks and around field D is what neither important nor urgent.

As soon as it comes to production, difficulties will of course also arise. It's a long way from the prototype to the finished product. New things have to show themselves in old surroundings and obstacles become visible. Now and again, a team loses its positive, vision-based focus and allows itself to be driven forward by the problems. Problems need to be solved in order to be successful. The urgent sometimes disguises itself as the important.

What is the difference between a problem and a vision at the center of our goal alignment? Once the problem is solved, it is gone. If the vision is realized, on the other hand, the undesirable has not disappeared, but the desired result has been achieved, e.g. in the form of an ingenious product.

The problems in a company can be easily assigned to the seven problem areas. If you focus too much on one of these seven areas, you not only lose sight of the positive vision, but also of the other problem areas. If you then take action, this may lead to a change and probably also to a certain improvement, but the focus and sense of the bigger picture will be lost. The team should therefore not place problems and problem solutions at the center of its activities and allow itself to be taken over by them. It would lose its own course.

Incidentally, the seductive 7 problem areas all have something to do with functionality:

1. Finances

2. Data

3. Technology

4. Strategy

5. Training and communication

6. Reorganization

7. Rules, accounts, audits

With the team as the boss, we do not see the solution of problems as a goal, but only as a framework condition and adjust our approach accordingly. However, the actual project is a creative, life-serving and vision-driven process of creation and development. Primarily, we know where we want to go (vision, caring organizational level) and secondarily, we solve all the difficulties that arise along the way (functional organizational level). This gives the team or company a fundamentally positive and common direction that everyone can understand. That is an important point.

Of course, creativity should not lead to processes getting creatively out of hand or problems being given too little attention. For self-organization, it is important that everyone involved is sufficiently aware of both the visionary goal being pursued and the constructive process required to achieve it.