 to thinking, conversation, questions, things of that sort. So I will not be overly involved in actually giving the presentation. Self-organizing teams are something that are talked about a lot in agile. They are supposed to be one of the agile virtues, the ability of having a self-organizing team. Something magical is supposed to happen about that. The concept is relatively simple. You get a whole bunch of people in the room, you give them some autonomy. They organize themselves, don't require management and close direction and things of this sort. And they just magically somehow or other coalesce into this high-performance, high-functioning organization or entity that is able to produce software. A lot of misconceptions about that whole notion and it's not very well grounded in any kind of understanding, discipline, science, anything of that sort. So we're going to start off today trying to explore and look at those foundations to begin with. So we see things that we call self-organization and which we have used as metaphors for what we want to have happen in our organizations in our software development teams. We can see it in chemistry. We can see that if you add two solutions together, they will spontaneously crystallize into a very defined, very rigorous structure. That's a kind of self-organization of the atoms and the molecules. We see it a lot in biology. And biology is the ultimate source of how we have been thinking about self-organization. The cell, from the basis of a cell up to the basis of an organism, these are all examples of self-organization. We see it in complex adaptive systems, which is another part of what is talked about in Agile, that we can have self-organization because we are a complex adaptive system and we see complex adaptive systems from all the way up to societies and cultures as these kinds of self-organized phenomenon and emergent phenomenon. They aren't something that you can direct, something that you can control. It just magically happens when you put all of the right ingredients together. Same kind of thing. Agent-based systems are really kind of a corollary or a subsidiary of the overall notion of complex adaptive systems. But this would be birds, things of that sort. So the common thread from all of these things is that we say self-organization