Sketch Comedy, Self-Organizing Teams, and Modern Leadership

About 25 years ago, Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall was planning a reunion tour. Their last venture had flopped, so they tried something new. They spent months just “playing,” working out material new and old, growing to learn and relearn each other’s sensibilities and techniques.

From a traditional business point of view, this was “wasted,” “unproductive” time and labor. From a sketch comedy one, it was essential to the product. It did the trick. The tour was a success that led to follow-up tours in subsequent years, as well as a number of other projects.

This wasn’t just an R&D cycle. It was a process that helped a group of individuals gel as a self-organizing team. That’s exactly the kind of team you need building your software, too.

Perhaps a comedy troupe seems light-years removed from the more sober-minded work groups of the corporate world. Good news: It’s not at all. The concept of a self-organizing team has been written up across business literature, including the Harvard Business Review—not exactly Clown College.

In his book Management 3.0, Jurgen Appelo describes the characteristics of a self-organizing team. Here’s our Sketchy spin on those:

• Autonomy: A self-organizing team makes its own plan and work decisions related to it, with members managing their own activities and taking ownership of how the objectives are met. In the next chapter, we’ll see some variety in sketch comedy leadership styles. In some cases, there are indeed central stars, executive producers, or other “main deciders.” But even so, they defer to the team to do its internal work its own way first.
• Collaboration: Sometimes collaboration is treated as an “optional” activity when something goes awry, or you need to yank something over the finish line. In a self-organizing team, appropriately to our area of interest, collaboration should be a feature, not a bug. Remember the Kids’ approach: “Work[ing] with whoever was available, or you were drawn to.” My co-author Rob had a similar experience writing for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”: Every day’s morning task immediately led to the formation of provisional work groups. In candor, he found collaborating more enjoyable with some than others—but the collaboration was the norm, and everyone snapped to it instinctively.
• Shared Responsibility: In self-organizing teams, every team member should feel comparable responsibility for the overall task. As a corollary, each member ideally takes responsibility for different pieces of the work. This is a powerful two-shot that organically bolsters both teams buy-in and intrinsic motivation.
• Shared Leadership: It goes even deeper: Each member of a self-organizing team should expect to step up and become the leader on a given subtask or objective. This way the team gets the bonus of experiencing each member’s unique skills. More to the point, though, it builds up that elusive fuel called “trust” that we saw with the Kids. That enables both super-bold creative risks and a team that moves as a unit, leaching away minimal energy to interpersonal differences.
• Participatory Decision-Making: Here’s one of the radical breaks with hierarchical workplaces: The team makes decisions, not someone on the outside or above. Or, even if big-picture calls are made from elsewhere, the team has direct involvement in those decisions and how they are implemented. This is how troupes like the Kids leveraged that precious diversity of perspectives that we discussed earlier. More voices equals better choices.
• Adaptability: This is one of the greatest strengths that a company with such teams brings to the marketplace. Business, especially knowledge-based business, is volatile and fast-changing. So are self-organizing teams. When new inputs and challenges arise, the team is not forced to try to chart a painful middle path between the new needs and the old diktats from the Home Office. They collectively team their brains to recharting the course, as often as needed.

Self-organizing teams are also the norm for the gold standard of sketch comedy: “Saturday Night Live.” Each sketch is completely owned by the cast performing it and the crew staging it. Lorne Michaels, longtime producer and one of television’s most successful leaders, doesn’t see himself as the “big boss.”

Instead, he’s described his role like this: “Really all I am is the tiebreaker. I’m just the one to say, ‘okay, it’s gonna be this.’”

So, where does that leave you? After working so hard to become an executive, are you supposed to set aside all of your power and become a tiebreaker?

Not exactly. Despite Lorne’s humility, that’s not quite all he is to SNL. He has a few key strengths that make him a great leader.

For one, Lorne has an excellent eye for talent. It’s been apparent since the very first season of SNL, when he assembled a cast including Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Dan Aykroyd, all of whom went on to achieve stardom. When you’re that good at hiring people, you give them what you need and stay out of their way.

That brings us to servant leadership. We all talk about it, but walking the walk is another thing entirely. Lorne gives his team the resources required to create sketches that keep a show running for half a century. Instead of imposing restrictions, he focuses on removing roadblocks.

Finally, and it might sound strange to say in an article written for high achievers, SNL shows that a good creative leader is one who gives their people the opportunity to not shine. Because those stagger-steps, those error-ridden yet freely experimental forays, are the crucial framework from which improvement arises.

Obviously, no one wants failure at the end stage. But you can’t “move fast and break things” if people are terrified to make mistakes. If you’re going to hide somebody, or something, in the back until perfection is achieved, you’re squandering opportunity. You need a bad dress rehearsal to yield a good show.

Whether you think of it as Scrum, the SNL method, or something else, self-organizing teams are part of product management 101. Hire the right people. Give them what they need to succeed and get out of their way. Establish a feedback loop where they come up for air every couple of weeks, at which point you act as a proxy for the end user. This is the way to accountable autonomy.

Written by John Krewson. (Parts of this piece have been adapted from Pitch, Sketch, Launch: What Sketch Comedy Can Teach Us About Product Development).
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