Delegation: the boundaries of self-organisation

We’ve all heard the stories, or even lived them: a company moves towards self-organising team structures, and there you go, the team should self-organise!

What you usually see is that the teams either freeze or go wild, with a sad manager observing the train wreck, complaining they are not allowed to interfere or saying things like: “See! I knew we shouldn’t have given them all of these responsibilities! It’s up to the Manager to keep on taking all decisions!”.