Flow Engineering

The journey toward organizational excellence demands commitment to value, clarity, and flow. This requires establishing a clear target, aligning stakeholders, and optimizing workflow.

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•And not understanding how work flows—or, more

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Effective action in organizations of any size depends on having coherent goals. But having coherent goals depends on having shared clarity. A lack of shared clarity sabotages improvement efforts. And scale makes achieving and maintaining shared clarity nearly impossible. Even at the scale of a “two-pizza team,” clarity is often sacrificed at the altar of getting things done. And with the demise of clarity, our ability to get things done withers.

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We’ve spoken to organizations that have spent $28 million and twelve months to add a single option to their billing system. We’ve seen organizations invest in automation that won’t improve their time to market by a single percent. We’ve seen organizations with high-performing, multimillion-dollar “innovation centers” but no way to bring their improvements to market.

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We need to be able to chip away at complexity. We need the capability to clearly set a target outcome, assess the current state landscape, and navigate decisions to address constraints and obstacles. We need to dismantle and decouple crippling dependencies and enable effective descaling to improve flow. And because collaboration is critical to this effort, we need effective ways to share perspectives, information, efforts, and ideas to disentangle the complexity.

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Enabling people to work toward a meaningful purpose demands a substantial amount of clarity. Teams need to see not only how their efforts contribute to valuable outcomes but also how the broader organization’s activities are serving legitimate customer needs.

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What orients a group of people into being a team is a sense of purpose that is shared rather than fragmented.

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Org charts are, by nature, inward looking. In fact, the customer is nowhere on the org chart. Customer orientation requires a fundamentally different way of thinking about purpose within the organization. To enable an effective and sustainable flow of work,

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The larger the distance between efforts and outcomes, the harder it is to effectively connect what you’re doing to what matters most. In the absence of a simple purpose oriented around the customer, teams default to acting in incoherent and self-serving ways.

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The power structures embodied in the org chart lead to another significant challenge. Because of organizational power structures and hierarchies, people are often nervous about expressing their real understanding and ideas. Contributors can be unsure about the value of their input and the consequences of sharing it with the group. Under these circumstances, sharing ideas constitutes a risk, especially when those ideas come from…

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If we optimize for only sharing what’s safe, then new and potentially valuable ideas will never have an opportunity to take hold. This is why a culture of psychological safety is necessary for high information flow. Few organizations have created the visibility, psychological safety, and effective feedback loops required to support truly open information…

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Attaining clarity depends on understanding the dynamics of group collaboration. In a team of eight people, you will have eight different sets of priorities, eight unique perspectives, and eight distinct behaviors. Being able to operate as a “team” is not something that’s easy or automatic; it requires enormous trust and…

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The fastest path to clarity is visibility. Thirty percent of the human brain is dedicated exclusively to visual processing.2 Making a group’s most important priorities and understandings visible creates a common shared resource and keeps people’s attention on…

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By contrast, the default in most organizations is meandering conversations and an endless sprawl of digital documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Any one document taken in isolation is easy…

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This fragmentation of information leads to a fragmentation of thinking and action. Gaining shared clarity depends on creating a simple, visible, and shared representation of a team’s purpose and activity. This view must be oriented around bringing benefit to customers, and teams must be able to pool their collective understanding honestly, openly, and without fear. Otherwise, it’s impossible for teams to establish the key element of organizational success: the development of collective intelligence effectively applied to…

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The paradox of modern organizations is that the more specialized workers become, the more they struggle to understand the broader system in which they fit. Even the most capable contributors in these organizations—including coaches, team leads, and technical experts—are constrained by the limits of the system in which they work.

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Silos are a natural consequence of specialization and scale. They exemplify the difficulty of maintaining clarity across large groups. As silos form, individuals and teams alike fall back to local operation and optimization rather than the big picture of sustained customer value delivery.

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To catalyze and foster that performance, you need a system to enable effective action. You need to focus and align your efforts to a valuable target state, develop shared clarity on the current state, and establish a flow of activities toward delivering that outcome.

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Flow Engineering is a series of collaborative mapping exercises designed to connect the dots between an unclear current state and a clear path to a target state. It’s an open, adaptive, and engaging series of practices that can take you from complexity to clarity, from friction to flow. The practical goal of this book is to provide you with scaffolding that allows you to confidently map for greater value, clarity, and flow without worrying about how to start or going off the rails.

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In most cases, these benefits came from just a few hours of mapping. Mapping reveals hidden opportunities that teams can address quickly by eliminating waste, aligning efforts, and adjusting their ways of working. The result is not only improved collective flow but also improved individual flow for everyone involved. (We’ll discuss collective and individual flow in more detail later in the book.)

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•Outcomes vs. Tools: “Roadmap organized around business outcomes? I already have a roadmap based on cool technology.”

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Figure 0.1: Bolt Global Current State Challenge Every organization grapples with how to address current state challenges in the face of increasing

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We can’t understand where we should focus.” •“We need to do more with less.” •“We’re not aligned.” •“We have too many tools, meetings, dependencies, and interruptions.” •“We have too much technical debt and work in progress (WIP).” •“We spend too much time micromanaging or in the weeds.” •“We’re always waiting for something out of our control to happen.” •“We can’t retain/leverage/empower our talent.” •“We’ve always done it this way; that won’t work here.”

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There are three specific human costs brought on by scale: distraction, disorientation, and disengagement. Distraction is a result of the constant interruptions, changing priorities, and demands on our attention. Disorientation occurs from a lack of clarity and alignment toward what matters most. Disengagement occurs when we resign ourselves to treading water without a clear connection to value. (See also

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There’s nothing more fatal to an organization’s ability to get things done than a team that can’t focus on its goal. Scale only exacerbates this problem.

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Judy Katz and Frederick Miller’s book Opening Doors to Teamwork and Collaboration.5

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Misalignment in Teams Perspectives, goals, and scope vary widely across individuals, across groups, and over

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Because of our unique perspectives, we may possess or lack key information. Different people may also have different goals based on what they see to be most important at that time. We can also have different scopes of concern (wider or narrower, sooner or later, micro or macro, strategic or operational)

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Technologists are famous for zooming in on challenging technical details when making a decision. Those who are considering a situation from a greater distance may come to entirely different conclusions. All of these different perceptions can offer complementary points of view, but it takes effort to align.

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Even in simple coordination activities, like playing a game of tug-of-war, individual effort declines as group size grows. This loss of effort is known as the Ringelmann effect: as more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, with each participant tending to feel that their

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The study revealed valuable correlations between scale and performance: “We find that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding (and less productive) sub-tasks; however, we also find that individuals in teams collaborated more with increasing team size.”14 In other words, large teams necessitate increased collaboration, yet the default effect is each contributor doing less.

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As an organization grows larger, it will tend to become more inefficient. Effort is reduced and errors increase with scale unless care is taken to offset these risks. These costs are hidden since economies of scale can bring gains that outpace the waste of poor coordination. Cost and waste not only reduce company margins but also impact customer and employee experience.

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•Brooks’s Law:23 This law posits that adding more people to a late software project only makes it later. It highlights the communication overhead that comes with each new team member, which can slow down a project rather than speed

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•Conway’s Law: Organizations that design systems (including products and services) are constrained to produce designs that are a copy of the communication patterns within the organization. As organizations grow and diversify, maintaining coherent communication becomes a challenge. Incoherent communication patterns can result in incoherent systems that perform outdated functions or are misaligned with current goals. Conway’s

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The common thread here is that as scale increases, complex and consequential effects begin to threaten the performance of the organization. Communication, coordination, and collaboration suffer. This not only degrades operational performance but also begins to degrade the very products and services the organization produces.

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“The Checkbox Project” is a case study published in the Fall 2023 DevOps Enterprise Journal.25 It describes a seemingly simple task of adding a single checkbox to customer billing that would fire an API call to resell a partner service and generate millions in revenue with practically zero operational expenditure. It seemed like a clear home run but turned out to be a painful exercise in the challenges of enterprise scale.

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Ultimately, delivery of the initiative required managed and close collaboration across over sixty teams in multiple organizational hierarchies across multiple channels and segments, including involvement from many coordination roles and shared services. In the end, the project took over twelve months from conception to completion and cost the company over $28 million to implement. Few stakeholders would consider it a success.

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Dominica DeGrandis’s book Making Work Visible helped popularize the challenge facing knowledge work organizations: our work is invisible. But even physical work benefits from making work visible.26

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Collaborative work is more like a construction project. You can operate, even as a team, at peak performance and watch nothing improve. Until you address dependencies—the permitting process, the handoffs between trades, the supply chain for materials, the cost of inventory, the effects

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Knowledge work is like a construction project in which the raw materials, the work being done, and the finished product are mostly invisible. As Frederick Brooks said in The Mythical Man-Month, “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”28

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We can’t address issues we can’t clearly see and understand.

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•Scale increases the distance between cause and effect; people’s perspectives, priorities, and activities; and the ultimate value and purpose of their work.

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•Distanced from the purpose of their work and from a shared view, people become disengaged, disoriented, and distracted. •These human costs limit the ability of teams to effectively and efficiently deliver value.

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The same holds true in business. Copy and paste is not a viable option. Existing solutions fall along a spectrum ranging from prescriptive to generative, as shown in Figure

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By contrast, generative methods take a distributed approach. They seek to bring together stakeholders throughout the organization and facilitate discussions and exercises in hopes of finding emergent solutions.

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The Spectrum of Solution Approaches

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When people are involved in creating a solution themselves, they are more invested in delivering the outcome. This is often called the “IKEA effect”—we value things we build ourselves more than things we receive preassembled.

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The power of a prescriptive or centralized approach is that it provides more clarity and direction. When insights are distributed across the organization, they become invisible to most people. Those in positions of power can make clear statements about goals, structure, and priorities and ensure that those messages are visible and amplified across the organization. The main challenge with prescriptive methods, however, is that they tend to be so heavy and constraining that the overhead of applying them dramatically undermines the benefits. Prescriptive models like PRINCE2 have a considerable learning curve and training cost and require specially trained experts and up-front budget approval. It can seem

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Like the generative methods mentioned, the solution you choose must engage all participants to ensure their perspectives are shared and that they feel committed to the solution. This addresses the risk of disengagement. Like the prescriptive methods, the solution must be simple and aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. This prevents the risk of disorientation. But unlike typical prescriptive approaches, the solution must also be fast and easy to put into practice to quickly realize ROI. This avoids the risk of distraction.

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The common approaches to enabling large-scale collaboration typically suffer from three gaps: an alignment gap, a visibility gap, and an on-ramp gap.

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The Three Gaps to Enabling Large-Scale Collaboration

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The visibility gap refers to the challenges of creating a shared picture of goals and the current state and making that picture accessible to everyone who’s involved and affected. To assemble a complete view of your landscape, you must also include diverse, distributed perspectives. To navigate effectively, you also must be able to see where you’re going. Creating a clear view from current to future state is essential to help everyone move together.

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Any effective remedy to the problems of scale must also be based on scale-free principles—i.e., principles that will hold true at any scale. Cybernetics is one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century and offers just such a scale-free explanation of how to accomplish goals. Cybernetics introduced the idea that any attempt to navigate toward a goal depends on effective control systems. A control system is a system that uses feedback loops to continually adjust direction toward a target state.

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Such a sense of progress, clarity, and focus may feel inaccessible at work. But perhaps that’s because we’ve not yet built the cybernetic control systems needed to understand and act on the challenges at work. Our most important work goal should not be just to survive the next quarter. The most powerful goal is to engineer the experience of flow at work.

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Understanding Work as a Flow

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If we can only improve what we can see and we can only see a subset of the overall flow of work, all our effort could be wasted in comparison to addressing the weakest link in the chain of activities. If our visibility is limited to a subset of the work process, we will direct improvement efforts there. But if we fail to address the real constraint, our targeted improvements won’t matter at best and could make things worse.

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To manage and optimize the flow of work, we must first see the flow of work. To reason about work effectively, we need to create a simple model that represents this flow. In a large-scale working environment, no individual has the full picture.

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Cybernetic Control Systems in Popular Decision Frameworks Framework/ Methodology Target Sense Compare Compute Act Lean Startup Set hypothesis Measure Learn Build Build OKRs Objectives Monitor key results Compare to objectives Compute adjustments Act on adjustments V2MOM Vision Obstacles Values Measures Methods Scrum Sprint goal Standup Retrospective Identified improvements Improvement Balanced Scorecard Strategic objectives Monitor perspectives Compare to objectives Compute strategy Act on strategy DMAIC Define goal Measure Analyze Improve Control Lean Define value Map the value stream Measure the value stream against target outcome Identify constraint & causes Create flow/establish pull/strive

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•Common solutions often suffer from an alignment gap, a visibility gap, and an on-ramp gap. •Value streams provide a model for cross-organizational performance visibility, measurement, and management. •Cybernetics provides a model for effective action to drive performance improvement. •Our best methods for driving effective action leverage the cybernetic

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Clarity describes the ability to accurately understand the key aspects of our situation. To have clarity means that our mental models align correctly with our observations. Because each of our perspectives and mental models is limited, building shared clarity in a group enables a more reliable perception.

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Flow means unobstructed action that emerges from the effective pursuit of value. It refers to smooth, steady, sustainable activity that is both predictable and satisfying.

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Effects of the Three Elements of Action Flow without direction or clarity leads us on a winding path full of waste and confusion. Value and clarity enable you to build high-speed railways for flow.

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Cybernetic Loop with the Elements of Action Value, clarity, and flow summarize the cybernetic loop.

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Effective action depends on value, clarity, and flow. And effective action at scale requires those elements to be shared across individuals and teams.

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The Abilene Paradox1 describes a situation where a group collectively decides on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of most or all of the individuals in the group. It’s based on a story of a family who collectively decides to take a long, uncomfortable trip to Abilene—despite none of them individually wanting to go—because each mistakenly believes the others want to go. The paradox occurs when members incorrectly believe their own preferences are contrary to the group’s and, therefore, do not raise objections. This results in a situation where no one is happy with the outcomes, even though everyone believes it’s what the group wants. In collaborative environments, a lack of clarity and alignment can take you places nobody wants to go.

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But when they jointly build maps, two individuals can construct a mental model that synthesizes both of their views. The map allows them to decode each other’s language, pointing them both toward the same understanding (Figure 4.1). The maps in Flow Engineering aim to address the gaps in understanding that arise from silos of activity, concern, and visibility.

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Maps allow individuals to have higher-quality conversations on specific

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Flow Engineering allows us to identify value by connecting current state context to a clear target outcome. It connects that outcome to specific benefits for customers and stakeholders. It keeps that value present as a north star so that contributors can make the best decisions about what will help boost and uncover value through their efforts.

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Five key Flow Engineering maps enable the three elements of action: Outcome Map: To identify your target outcome. Current State Value Stream Map: To reveal the current state and constraints of your workflow. Dependency Map: To identify dependencies by studying constraints. Future State Value Stream Map: To create a future state definition of flow. Flow Roadmap: To organize insights, actions, and ownership into an improvement roadmap.

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Figure 4.2: Value, Clarity, and Flow Woven through all Flow Engineering Maps Solid lines indicate a direct contribution, dotted lines indicate indirect contribution.

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Five Maps of Flow Engineering

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The important part is to build the maps collaboratively or at least get fast and varied feedback from everyone

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That also means that leadership and those who are able to change the system, workflow, and team must be present and involved. Once you identify your key bottlenecks, you can narrow the involved parties to those who are critical to those areas. In general, it’s good to include as many voices and perspectives as possible, but we find that twelve people is the maximum manageable

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Facilitators talk as little as possible outside of guiding the mechanics of the process; they let the participants own most of the dialogue.

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When you’re just arguing, you’re only as good as your negotiation skills, your role power, your experience, your credibility, your social capital, all these things that have nothing to do with the facts—making it a waste of time, in most instances. However, with Value Stream Mapping, all of a sudden these people who had been complaining about environment updates for years felt vindicated. They felt empowered knowing that now everyone could clearly see what they’d been trying to say for years.

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One stakeholder, a program manager overseeing their transformation efforts, described the value of the exercise with a shocking statement: “I’ve been here for nineteen years, and this is the first time I’ve seen our process from start to finish!” This case illustrates a number of benefits provided by a mapping-first approach to improvement. A fresh, minimal approach to mapping fit the need in terms of not only speed of creation but also simpler understanding and clearer insight.

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Table 4.4: Purposes and Benefits of the Five Flow Engineering Exercises Mapping Exercise Purpose Risk It Averts Outcome Mapping Align all members of a team around the value they need to deliver. Investing in irrelevant improvements. Current

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•Collaborative, visual mapping is a superpower for knowledge work. It’s remote-friendly, persistent, and easily shared. •Flow Engineering is not a one-size-fits-all approach but rather involves designing improved flow within a particular value stream or team for their situation based on their unique target outcome. •Flow Engineering was designed to address alignment, on-ramp, and visibility gaps and to reduce disengagement, disorientation, and distraction. •Flow Engineering is easy to start, justify, and apply, so you can start doing it today.

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When we start any journey, we need to know what our destination is before we can effectively navigate. Similarly, the first challenge to tackle in the process of Flow Engineering is clearly defining our desired outcome.

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2020 research report by Boston Consulting Group highlighted three key questions that companies need to ask when attempting a digital (or any other) transformation:3 Why are we doing this? What should we do? How do we implement the transformation?

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What Is Outcome Mapping? Outcome Mapping is a collaborative workshop to help a group of stakeholders clarify value (i.e., their primary goal and direction). Its goal is to focus the team while surfacing doubts, testing assumptions, and enabling the emergence of new insights. Just like with the other maps in Flow Engineering, Outcome Mapping accelerates change efforts with only a modest investment of time and forethought. Outcome Mapping helps the team start to define a clear roadmap toward the value they seek. It answers the following questions:

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•Does everyone clearly understand our target objective? •If another issue disrupts our focus, is it clear how to prioritize?

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When you make your primary outcome clear, teams understand what’s safe to ignore. This helps teams clarify what’s in or out of scope, how much detail is needed, and, most importantly, how everyone can contribute to making the target outcome a reality.

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Outcome Discovery: What is our target? Defining the Target Outcome: What goal(s) do we want to achieve?

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Defining Benefits: Why does this outcome matter? Defining Obstacles: What could get in the way? Defining Next Steps: How are we going to proceed? Figure 5.2: The Five Stages of Outcome Mapping

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Figure 5.3: A Rapid Outcome Map Est. time: Ten minutes to value, clarity, and what’s next.

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many cases, teams have already been tasked to achieve a particular outcome and simply need to strategize on how to accomplish that goal. If everyone feels clear and aligned, you could skip the discovery stage and move straight to building the Outcome Map as detailed later in this chapter. But if you’re an outside facilitator or if the group is struggling with many competing ideas, this discovery process is essential.

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Defining Benefits Stage three, defining benefits, answers the question, “Why does this outcome matter?” Typically, not all stakeholders fully understand and appreciate the benefits of achieving the desired outcome.

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