What if you could organize and motivate people to double their highest-expected productivity goals?
The **future of leadership** is emerging to guide 21st-century organizations beyond the small, cross-functional, green-field software development teams of the 1990s. Agile enterprises must **respond to emerging markets**, provide unity of purpose to workers with conflicting motivations, and foster order when change is the only constant. Agile leadership must cope with **distributed teams**, “gig economy,” diverse skill-sets, and the impact to morale of unexpected changes. But the measure of success is still delivery to the market: **volume, quality, reliability.**
Early in 2017, a group of several hundred independent players of the futuristic **massively-multiplayer video game** *Elite:Dangerous* faced all the above organizational challenges yet still managed **unprecedented delivery to their market**. And they did it despite the “me first” culture of online games. We’ll explore the structural, social, and cognitive factors which enabled this large distributed team of casual **volunteers** to deliver twice as much as their nearest competition. And we’ll uncover how to amplify those factors **in your own workplace.**
You’ll learn the powerful effects of making **individual contributions** visible, expanding the scope of your regular **team synchronizations**, having a loose leadership hierarchy, and encouraging **diffusion of innovation**. And you’ll see how community engagement is an essential quality of a **servant leadership** culture. **This is a compelling story about leadership that’s relatable to anyone regardless of their interest in or experience with Agile, online gaming, or space pirates.**
