Self-steering organization: 6 mistakes we made

We are now working in self managing teams for over a year and a half and we learned a lot so far. For instance, one of the main drivers for working in a self steering environment or workplace is to allow for more efficient and effective decision making. You want to avoid endless approval flows and reporting lines, or decisions made by someone who's too far up in the hierarchy to understand the full scale of the decision. And instead you want to empower the teams to make decisions themselves. So we expected that teams were going to take a lot of initiative and some decisions would turn out wrong later on, but that they would learn from it, obviously as part of the overall learning journey. So it was quite surprising to notice that decision making actually got a lot harder initially and it took even more time than it did before. In some cases, it even led to inertia and we were not making decisions at all because we were so focused on trying to reach compromises or consensus. So that was interesting. And that one, amongst other observations, got me thinking. Maybe we should share some of the mistakes that we made early on in moving or adapting to this model so that other companies could learn from it.