Have you ever tried to create teams from scratch? Trying to distribute a pool of colleagues into teams that fulfill certain criteria? It surely can keep you up at night. So many constraints to keep in mind!

So why not have people create their own teams? It fits with the agile preference for self-organising and people will be more committed to a team they chose themselves. They are also bound to come up with a better distribution (if all constraints are known to them.)

Maybe you can think of dozens of reasons why this can’t possibly work, but it can work! It has worked for others, namely Sandy Mamoli and David Mole. Here’s their short manual on how to run a team self-selection workshop:

In fact, it has worked so well for Sandy and David that they wrote a book: Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel.

Did you know there are compilations of our 1-pagers? About Agile & Scrum, Facilitation and for Product Owners