---
title: "You're not self organizing if you have a go-to architect"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/youre-not-self-organizing-if-you-have-a-go-to-architect.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/youre-not-self-organizing-if-you-have-a-go-to-architect.html"
published: "2012-05-01T09:22:08+00:00"
updated: "2014-05-22T21:46:00.757000+00:00"
tags: ["Learning Phase", "Self-Leading Phase"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A quick test for self-organization: if a team must ask an outside architect to finish its work, it is not self-organizing, and the architect should teach."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# You're not self organizing if you have a go-to architect

I realized that while I was writing [the previous post](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-architect-as-a-leader-and-other-specialists.html), I came up with another simple way to tell if your team is self organizing or not,

In [my courses](http://osherove.com/leadership-course/), people always ask me, how to tell if I'm in chaos, learning or self organizing. My answers are usually based on reduction. as is this one.

If your team needs to go ask an architect outside the team questions to finish its job, it's not truly self organizing. A self organizing team should know how to solve its own architecture problems. (That's why feature teams can potentially be self organizing, because they don't need to get out of the team to do their job).

If your team consists of an architect, it's a different story. it \*could\* be self organizing, but I would push that architect to use their leadership position in this area so that everyone became the architect (of course, only in learning mode. in chaos you don't have time to do that.)

## Read next

- [The 3 maturity stages of a software team and how scrum fails to identify them](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html): The chaotic, mid-life and mature stages of a software team, the leadership each one needs, from dictator to coach, and why Scrum Masters miss them.
- [The architect as a leader, and other specialists](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-architect-as-a-leader-and-other-specialists.html): Why an architect or any specialist on a team is a bottleneck, and should act as a coaching leader who spreads knowledge until they are no longer needed.
- [Grow your "feature teams" into just "teams"](https://www.5whys.com/articles/grow-your-feature-teams-into-just-teams.html): Why feature teams built from specialists carry a bad bus factor, and why team leaders should grow them into teams where everyone can do each other's work.

## Topic

- [Learning Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/learning-mode)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/