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Brilliant article. As I came from very old pre-agile ages, when the only curse was "waterfall" and tons of semi-blank paper of documentation - I can see some evolution of management processes. Then came agile, which was more democratic in respect of developer needs and technical expertise and free-will. Now we see, that still agile has some drawbacks and it is not fully goodwill-compatible with developer. It still pushes/forces some weird things to developer against his/her will. That's why we have post-agile movement now started. It's correctly noticed that self-organisation is main keyword here. Developers are not stupid, they knows what must be done roughly to the client, so best thing would be to let them all self-organize, because only they knows best team expertise / wishes / likes-dislikes / tendencies / capacities / etc.., etc. Managers pushing they own perception of work process automatically does big hazard to work quality and team efficiency. Everybody knows that best things are done by people who accomplishes something they LIKE and in a GOODWILL and in a dead-lines they themselves see reasonable. We are not robots, so we can't work as a robot. And every (forcible) work process makes workers robots to some degree. If there must be some managers - they must be just as "advisory force" and not like "control force". In the sense that we must stop lying to ourselves that we can "control" something in principle. Actually - we CAN'T. We just can assemble brilliant people in a team, setting transparent goal for them and let the team do the rest in hopes that team will have good self-organization and that it will reach required business goal. Nothing more, nothing less. I would call this post-agile management process as "goodwillchitecture", instead of pointing something related to anarchy. Because in general anarchy is perceived as bad, negative thing with no rules or order at all. But self-organization DOES have rules. The most important one is - goodwill, tendency of team to make a great positive thing towards a common goal. That I would not call anarchy.
Let me introduce you to two semantic digressions:
- Contractualism: as opposed to utilitarianism/contractarianism plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism
"Thus the various moral considerations that guide our substantive moral reflection are unified by a single normative subject matter. In this way, contractualism guides our substantive reflection about wrongness. Wrong is the primary moral predicate; right is defined as “not wrong”. One reason for focusing on wrong is to draw attention to the domain that contractualism is concerned to map, concerning what it is for one person to have been wronged by another."
- Anarchism: as opposed to anarchy plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism
"Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human flourishing, based upon an ideal of non-coercive consensus building. Anarchism has inspired practical efforts at establishing utopian communities, radical and revolutionary political agendas, and various forms of direct action. This entry primarily describes “philosophical anarchism”: it focuses on anarchism as a theoretical idea and not as a form of political activism. "
Risav Karna I'm sorry, but what is the point of your digression?
Trent Haynes To illustrate what I mean by anarchy and that contractualism combined with this meaning of anarchy can be a positive phrase. Further clarifications are in the comments section of the dev.to copy of this article