How do we get an agile organization to self-manage online in the VUCA world of 2021? Command and control doesn’t work over zoom. Teal models like Spotify and Holacracy don’t either. But Camelot provides an easy solution we can get working in just a couple of hours with an absolute minimum of overhead to empower descaling autonomy-in-alignment across large organizations even when all our staff are trapped in Zoom rooms.

In a way, these are problems real world tribal societies have already solved. Up to a million people collaborated like this over a period of over eight centuries in the North American “Haudenosaunee Confederacy” through its “Great Law of Peace”. Their problems were different to ours, but the disconnects caused by the decentralization of their villages and tribes were much the same as the ones we experience in Zoom. There are important practical lessons we can draw from their experience.

The XSCALE Alliance of agile coaches ran a series of experiments with these ideas around the world over the past five years. The result is a simple but powerful self-management toolkit we call “The Camelot Model”. Why Camelot? Because “it’s only a model”. It’s not a one-size-fits-all framework but a pattern language we can apply in many different configurations to solve the specific organizational problems we’re actually experiencing today.