It would be coherent that in an agile environment ownership is preferred to roles.
An agile initiative is to be the responsibility of an entire team, including ALL stake holders. Each team member will take ownership within their area of expertise and/or responsibility (pull), the team then self organizes in order to deliver the agreed value. Trust is the fundamental ingredient and commitment to team work is enhanced.
In the case of directed team organization, roles are distributed to those involved in the initiative (push), and team members may not fully own their area of responsibility. Commitment in such case may not be optimal, team work suffers, and trust is compromised.
_______________________________________________
This post is inspired by the thoughts of Mike Burrows from Agendashift
Hi, I’m Mario – retired agility warrior from a major Swiss bank, beyond agile explorer, lean thinker, former rugby player, and wishful golfer.
I’ve been in the agile space since 2008. I began consulting in 2012 with a Scrum adoption in a digital identity unit — and that path eventually led me to design an Agile Operating System at organisational scale.
What pushed me further was frustration: poor adoption, illusionary scaling, and “agile” that looks busy but doesn’t improve business outcomes.
That’s why I developed the Adaptive Fitness System (AFS) — an approach that treats agility as fitness for change: fit for purpose, fit for context, fit for execution, and fit for continuous improvement. Today, I use AFS to help organisations sense what’s real, learn fast, and adapt with intent.
View all posts by Mario Aiello
Adaptive Ways 