Step 5: Coordinate Logistics

Establishing early where and when your self-selection event will take place can support your communication effort, build trust that it will actually happen, and give confidence to people that everything is planned and under control.

You should define the following details as early as possible. When will your event take place? Where it will take place? Who will be there?

When Will Your Event Take Place?

It’s a good idea to choose a date that’s far enough in the future to give people time to get used to the idea but not so far out that it doesn’t feel real or could be in danger of not happening at all. Consider also having a backup date in case of last-minute problems or illness of key people.

In a sufficiently large company there will always be people who are ill, traveling, on annual leave, or unable to attend for some other reason whichever date you choose. Therefore, we recommend identifying key personnel up front—those people who without them the event would be compromised.

Following our first self-selection event, Sandy remembers:

If you have close to 150 participants, it’s inevitable that some are going to be away. We didn’t look out for our key people being away, and what happened to us was that one of the key influential people was not present on the day. This shouldn’t have been a problem per se, but his peers started second-guessing him and they started acting and thinking, “What do you think Peter would want us to do?” rather than choosing for themselves what they wanted to do. It’s something we actually had to intervene with during the day because people were slipping away from the principles of self-selection.

Where Will Your Event Take Place?

You’ll need a big, open collaborative area with lots of wall space to visualize the status of your squads and the progress of the self-selection process. The event room space we used is shown in the image.

We had lots of room and lots to discuss! Go for the biggest space you can find and, if possible, run the event away from your normal office environment. This will help detach people from their current project and way of working.

Who Will Be Invited? 

It’s important to define up front who should take part in your self-selection event. Is there any particular group who should be included or excluded? It’s likely that most people to invite will be obvious, but others will be borderline between being part of a squad or in the supporting cast. In our case we had to make choices about operations, infrastructure, and data analytics specialists.

We recommend that you allow as many employees to self-select as possible. If in doubt, include everyone who could be included in a squad. This should give the best results for your organization and the most diverse squads. It will send an important signal of trust and transparency to everyone.

We advise against inviting those who aren’t directly involved in squad work or helping as facilitators. People often act differently when observers or their managers are present.