Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action

There are two types of challenges: situations where you don’t know what to do and situations where you know what to do but don’t want to do it. Addressing the first challenge requires clarity: careful observation, thought, discussion, and creativity. Addressing the second challenge requires subordinating our innate experience of value—our feelings—

“Control the clock, not obey the clock. Collaborate, not coerce. Commit, not comply. Complete, not continue. Improve, not prove. Connect, not conform.” The mantra from Leadership Is Language

We have deeply ingrained habits of assuming that we should maximize the use of all capacity. But a system is more than the sum of its parts. The root of the challenge lies in how variable the work is. If there is little or no variability in how long a work step takes (as would be the case with purely operational value streams like in manufacturing)

“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. Those who grasp principles can successfully select their own methods.” Harrington Emerson

These approaches emerge from two different ways of seeing an organization: the prescriptive approach is based on the view that an organization can be designed and engineered like a machine, while the generative approach is based on the view that an organization is composed of living workers whose behavior necessarily emerges from their own values a

Visibility enables observability; observability enables clarity. Observability means to infer the internal state of something by measuring its external characteristics. This depends on visibility, as well as contextual information. The ability to infer something’s internal state is the source for generating clarity, an adequate explanatory model. C

For each column, follow these steps: •Step 1: Participants should reflect silently on the column prompt (e.g., benefits, obstacles, or next steps) to generate ideas. For instance, if they are working on the “Benefits” column, participants would start reflecting on what benefits the target outcome will bring to the team and organization. (1 min.) •S

Paula Thrasher laid out a useful framework in her 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit talk “Interactive Virtual Value Stream Mapping - Visualizing Flow in a Virtual World.” She laid out 5 Rs to identify value streams, starting from a delivered feature or change: choose something recent, real, reach, representative, and road tested.5 •Recent: Something in

The most common mental model of work is that it’s like a 100-meter race (not even a 100-meter relay race, just a race)—as if a team is a single runner and can just pick up the pace, improve their conditioning, or improve their technique. Comparing work to a race and your teams to independent athletes obscures the complexity of work and leads to pro