Well, if that works for you, then kudos. Personally I am skeptical of self-organizing teams because I have had strictly negative experiences with them as a dev

Well, if that works for you, then kudos. Personally I am skeptical of self-organizing teams because I have had strictly negative experiences with them as a developer. It seems that having a self-organizing team of evenly qualified and experienced professionals is probably almost guaranteed to work, but 'working' does not mean 'optimal'. I am almost certain that when self-organization works, command and control would still work better if you put the right person in charge. Still, I do not think that command and control is the absolute optimal form of organization. It seems to me that true self-organization requires a number of very special ingredients that maybe the humankind is yet to discover. Just simply declaring self-organization will lead to more or less disorganization. A disorganized team will not necessarily fail though. It depends on a number of conditions, such as the complexity of the project, the qualifications of the team, time/budget pressure, etc. If the team's proficiency greatly exceeds the project's complexity, then probably any form of organization will do. A reasonable disorganization is probably what is actually being exploited under the buzzword of so called 'self-organization'.