Scrum Field
The article by Nonaka and Takeuchi, published in Harvard Business Review in 1986, is the direct precursor of what we now know as Scrum: the framework that Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland would formalize in the following years took its name and several of its principles directly from this work.
The six characteristics of Scrum fields
Nonaka and Takeuchi identified six characteristics common to the new product development environments they described as "Scrum fields":
Built-in instability
The team works in an environment where management defines the strategic goal in general terms, without providing a detailed plan of the final product, while at the same time giving the team a wide margin of freedom. The ingredients that generate creativity and commitment are the "tension" produced by the fuzzy vision together with the challenge it contains, and the margin of autonomy, freedom, and responsibility.
Self-organizing project teams
These are teams without management roles or guidelines for assigning tasks. They are not self-directed teams—management sets the course—but self-organizing in order to achieve it. They start from scratch and must create their own organization and seek out the knowledge they need. They are similar to a "start-up" within the company. To achieve self-organization, the teams share three characteristics:
- Autonomy: they are free to choose the strategy for the solution. Management acts as a venture capitalist.
- Self-transcendence: the team develops solutions that it continuously evaluates, analyzes, and improves.
- Cross-fertilization: the team's multidisciplinary nature fosters mutual enrichment and the contribution of complementary solutions.
Overlapping development phases
The self-organizing team works as a unit with a single rhythm in which the different phases—requirements, analysis, integration, testing—overlap, eliminating the handoffs between phases that can cause bottlenecks or conflicts.
Multilearning
Team members are in direct communication with sources of information related to the project and can respond quickly to changes in the conditions of the customer's environment. As they progress toward the final product, they narrow down the number of alternatives through trial-and-error processes that give them knowledge across multiple disciplines.
This learning occurs along two dimensions: across different levels (individual, group, and corporate) and across different functions. Nonaka and Takeuchi called this characteristic "multilearning":
All the members of the project that developed Epson's first printer were mechanical engineers who knew little about electronics at the start of the project... By the end of the project, all the engineers knew about electronics. (Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986)
Subtle control
The team has autonomy, but management establishes enough checkpoints to prevent the scenario of ambiguity and instability from descending into a loss of control. "Subtle control" refers to creating an ecosystem that fosters self-control among peers, without the rigid control that would stifle creativity and spontaneity.
Some actions to create this ecosystem:
- Selecting the right people for the project.
- Analyzing changes in group dynamics to add or remove members if necessary.
- Creating an open workspace.
- Evaluation and recognition systems based on team throughput.
- Tolerance and foresight regarding mistakes, treating them as a means of learning.
- Involving customers in the project.
Institutionalized knowledge transfer
Knowledge must be transferred at both the project and the organizational level. Teams are multidisciplinary, and all members contribute to and learn from the rest of the team, from the research carried out, and from the development experience. Over time, the people who take part in a project move on to other teams and projects, sharing and communicating knowledge throughout the entire organization.
Current relevance
The six characteristics that Nonaka and Takeuchi described in 1986 remain the conceptual foundation of what we now understand as agile work. Organizations that incorporate generative AI into their teams face the same challenges these authors described—how to manage uncertainty, how to learn quickly, how to transfer knowledge—with a new dimension: part of the "team" may include AI agents or tools that change the nature of multilearning and subtle control.
Common mistake
Confusing "self-organizing" with "directionless." A Scrum field team does not lack direction: management defines the strategic goal. What it does not do is break that goal down into individually assigned tasks. Self-organization operates within a framework of clear purpose; without that purpose, it descends into chaos.
References
- Takeuchi, Hirotaka; Nonaka, Ikujiro. (1986). "The New New Product Development Game". Harvard Business Review, January–February 1986.
See also
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