Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action

“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

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

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 Ken Blanchard has said, “No one of us is as smart as all of us.”1

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

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 peop

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—

Many people study and admire high-performing organizations like Toyota and Amazon but struggle to understand how to catalyze performance across their own organizations. 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