Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team.

I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against the author's approach.

    Instead, at the next department meeting, I talked about how impressed I was 
    with what those teams had done, and how it was going to be important for us 
    to spread that good practice to other teams. Without explicitly saying so, I 
    let it be known that this was something people could work on.

And what if nobody had stepped up? Would the author have left it at that, undermining their political power by showing that they could be ignored with no ill effects? Or would they have then appointed someone to force continuous integration upon everyone (thus creating resentment due to the false choice presented)?

If you're going to manage, manage. If you're going to be hands-off, be hands-off. But this half-and-half nonsense combines the worst of holocracy and traditional management.

In a world where there is no judging, this could work well, people would do things out of interest and want, but in this world, I feel this is more "gamification". This is because people will take these hints because know they are an explicit vehicle to get noticed and they know that _not_ taking the hint will cost them. It's playing with (psychologically manipulating) people.

That's to say they do it because in this game it's beneficial to their career/image not because they sincerely _want_ to. It's making the brownnosing opportunities explicit, I guess.

It also practically makes people work "on a curve" the baseline is the "best" worker now, the person who has no other responsibilities, the workaholic, neurotic, perfectionist, etc. and now everyone else gets (unfavorably) compared to this one.

It's the difference between going to the toilet and on the other hand, choosing to eat ice cream. One is a must, the other an option which you may or may not act on.

"And what if nobody had stepped up?"

One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge.

Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.

I wouldn't be concerned with work not getting done as long as you're thoughtful in where you leave the vacuums.

The example he uses is a pretty good one. Teams were building software without the aid of CI, some teams had found benefit in it, but not yet all of the teams. You might be right, forcing CI may have created resentment, it might not have been the right thing to do at the time. If no one steps up, that's a signal worth thinking about.

I've worked at too many places where the vacuums are real, not contrived as bounty, and NO ONE WANTS YOU TO FILL THEM. They all really, really just want to spin your wheels, stay on the treadmill, and count paper clips until your dying day. Everyone.

The real-world dynamic, on the other side of the wall, is more like that of some kind of 1950's sitcom depiction of a social circle of married couples, and all the lazy husbands resent the one that buys his wife roses, and makes them all look bad.