Team as a Complex Adaptive System

Some agile methods (including Scrum and Adaptive Software Development) speak of a healthy development team as a complex adaptive system (CAS). A classic CAS example is a flock of birds. Each bird has relatively local and simple rules of behavior, yet at the macro-scale the flock exhibits order and a collective emergent behavior. It is as though there is an overlaying flock-level plan, but there isn't. This is in contrast to a command-control management system where team and individual activities are decided and directed by higher-level managers.

The agile methods promote the value that, for creative inventive projects, a CAS-inspired culture of self-organizing teams is more valuable than control or planning by managers. This is reflected in Agile Principle 12. For example, Scrum teams are self-organizing (no management assignment of roles or tasks); team-level organization and adaptation is enabled by the daily Scrum meeting with its special questions that provide each member with the information to make collective decisions.

agile principles

Scrum meeting questions