DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Chain Of Command & Learning Organizations

Clinton Keith wrote in his blog about how the chain of command affects inside teams causing delays :
http://www.agilegamedevelopment.com/2008/08/agile-values-individuals-and.html

The usual chain of command can also affect to building learning organization if it prevents interaction between people inside the organization. So let’s think about it from communication perspective. The way I often see it working inside organizations :

• Executive
  • Manager
    • Worker

So, worker talks to manager who decides if he wants to talk to the executive or not, and so on.

The idea is to not prevent interactions between people, because if we only have one people to talk to we limit our chance to learn something new, which is the base idea of learning organization. I think many organizations have forgotten the original meaning of chain of command, it simply means who can command who (or do decisions), not who should talk to who.

The scary thing is that after a while people get used it. Scrum helps (teams), as it encourages people to talk to each other to solve problems, to get new point of views… This kind of mental model needs to be applied to whole organization.