As Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, blogged back in 2011:
“Scrum without self-organization and empowerment is a death march, just like waterfall, but an iterative, incremental death march without slack”.

So team empowerment – and therefore a modern approach to leadership – is key for a beneficial adoption of the Agile principles and practices.

That’s even more important if we consider that, still today, many organizations moving into Agile — and even some of its practitioners — focus much more on the “Processes and Tools” part of the Agile Manifesto values, rather than on the “Individuals and Interactions” one.

This workshop is intended to bring more balance into the equation and to help people get closer to the Agile values of self-managing, self-organizing and empowerment.

However, self-organization is an elusive concept (how can we organize something that is supposed to organize itself?) which has profound business and organizational implications.

It taps into the collective intelligence of the team, so that people can come up with better solutions in a shorter time; it distributes control, to avoid decisional bottlenecks and let the project move faster; it relies on the socio-relational skills of the team, but it also relies on transparency, clear processes and shared goals to define the boundaries of delegation; and the greater autonomy promotes engagement and team learning.

Agile leaders who really understand these dynamics will provide the necessary support and resources; they will offer guidance and help define a shared goal by talking more about the "why"and the "what", and less about the "what" and "how" of the goal should be achieved; and they will be able to create an ecosystem where the business advantage of effective self-organization can manifest spontaneously.

To reap the full benefits of Agile and Lean you need to understand these subtle dynamics and be able to implement them effectively in your organization.