In this chapter, we looked at how the shift in where knowledge resides in an organization and how the necessary specialist skills to process that information now lie at the team level.

It has meant a shift in our team dynamics due to the complexity of the problems that software teams solve. We can no longer afford to work as the individual cogs in a machine; collaboration and communication are fundamental to a team's high performance.

Much of the work our software teams carry out requires improvisation and the use of judgment in situations that are often ambiguous. The problems we work on are complex, often requiring novel solutions and an empirical (scientific) approach to solving them.

The role of our job as leaders is to be agents of this change and to provide support and a high-enough level of comfort to the team so that they are more able to assimilate all of...