Flow

Get Everyone Moving in the Right Direction . . . and Loving It

Ted Kallman, Andrew Kallman

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781634621342
• eBook ISBN: 9781683506461
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Simple is seldom easy to implement.

However, as a recent Flow trainee puts it, "Flow 'plays nice' with everyone! And, it will enable you to successfully customize and implement whatever solution you choose."

Flow is the distillation of over fifty years of successful, hands-on experience that has delivered more than 100 million US dollars in value-add to companies in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Putting Flow into practice, one company increased profit $550,000 in one year on $2.5 million of revenue, and a large Asian telecom turned around a mission critical project from a projected 2-year schedule overrun and 300% budget increase to delivering seven months early and $4 million under the original budget in a 90-day period.

Ted and Andrew Kallman unify Traditional management and Agile methodologies enabling successful results, regardless of the existing leadership framework. Simple and easy to understand, Flow helps individuals, teams, and organizations create and sustain high performance.

SECTION 1:

WHAT IS FLOW?

Chapter 1

Flow Defined

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” ¹²

TESS FLANDERS

Perhaps a mental picture would help frame our book in a more memorable fashion. If you have access to the internet, please take a minute and look at this video of an actor portraying Bruce Lee playing ping pong, with a twist. The actor uses nunchucks (a martial arts weapon that consists of two wooden handles that are connected by a very short chain link in the middle) instead of a paddle. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SncapPrTusA

You may be one of the more than 20 million people have viewed this video on YouTube. If so, you probably had the same response that we did, “Wow! That was an amazing display of talent.” Or maybe, “Man, how did he do that?!” Regardless of your understanding of martial arts and the skill level needed to pull off that demonstration, you walked away impressed by a professional who was “in the zone.” The actor was in a state of individual Flow.

We will touch on aspects of individual, personal Flow in this book and will point you to a number of resources that can assist you in getting to, and staying in, optimal personal performance and it will not be a commercial created to appear like a high-performance professional at the top of his game. By following the principles of Flow, you will actually become a high-performing professional. Smoke and mirrors won’t be necessary.

We will touch on team level flow by highlighting both the benefits realized and challenges faced by teams. Much of this discussion will relate to one of the strongest methodologies we have found for team high-performance, which is Scrum/Agile. By the way, a list of Definitions and acronyms included in this book will help you navigate any Agile-specific or project-management terminology used. You may want to put a sticky note on those pages to quickly reference terms or acronyms with which you may not be familiar.

We will spend the majority of our efforts dealing with optimizing Flow for the whole organization. This, of course, assumes that the underlying teams and individuals are all either in, or growing toward, a state of Flow.

Our beginning Definition of Flow is:

“The state of optimal performance achieved by applying a clear, consistent, persistent and unified Vision at all levels of an organization.”

Here are some descriptions from other authors regarding Flow:

“The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow … in flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged.”¹³

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

“When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.”¹⁴

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Csikszentmihalyi correlates a state of personal flow with the word enjoyable. Daniel Pink utilizes Csikszentmihalyi’s research as the basis of his book “Drive” and he depicts flow this way:

“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.”¹⁵

DANIEL PINK

“There is a way to get a grip on it all, stay relaxed, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, across the whole spectrum of your life and work. You can experience what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’ and top athletes refer to as the ‘zone,’ within the complex world in which you’re engaged. In fact, you have probably already been in this state from time to time.” ¹⁶

DAVID ALLEN

“Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing … trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats, but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival.” ¹⁷

CRAIG LAMBERT

“Technically, Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” ¹⁸

STEVEN KOTLER

Flow is both a state of enjoyment and a state of arrival that results in high performance for individuals, teams and entire organizations. The quotes above are really great and we feel they reflect a deep understanding of some of the key positive elements and blockers for an organization that wants to achieve a high performing state of Flow.

For those that are interested, we will be sharing other books that focus on process optimization or product flow. For example, Don Reinertsen’s book on “Product Development Flow” is a superb resource since it gives the mathematical proofs and engineering viewpoint that analytical individuals love.

We have not included a Definition from Reinertsen’s book “Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development” in the quotes above, because we weren’t really able to find a crisp Definition for “Flow” anywhere in his book. His book is a great tactical and operational resource and we love the math which validates the Unified Vision Framework (UVF). We have utilized his ideas related to proxy variables, queues and small batch size.

Not having a succinct Definition, in our opinion, muddies the Vision for his book. But, we have been able to piece together, from three different pages, some of the descriptions of how he views flow:

“At its heart, this new paradigm emphasizes achieving flow. It bears many similarities to the methods of lean manufacturing and could be labeled lean product development (LPD)—To distinguish this more advanced approach from the ideas of lean manufacturing, we call it Flow-Based Product Development—A flow-based process delivers information on a regular cadence in small batches.” ¹⁹

If you compare the cobbled-together quote above about flow from Reinertsen to the quotes at the beginning of the chapter, it becomes clear that Flow is important for individuals, teams, projects, products, divisions and enterprises to attain high-performance.

Reinertsen’s focus is solely on product.

However, in addition to product development and individual Flow states, there are also group Flow states that apply to teams, projects and enterprises:

“There is also a collective version of a flow state known as ‘group flow.’ That is what happens when a bunch of people enter the zone together.” ²⁰

STEVEN KOTLER

If you are looking for a book or framework that will help you optimize (or sub-optimize as the case may be) individual processes or products, then “Flow” may not necessarily be the book for you since our focus in “Flow” is on the whole picture.

For those of you that may not be familiar with Traditional, Lean or Agile methodologies, Flow fits in the picture as a methodology-agnostic, Executive tool to organize work:

We will share how to achieve a state of high-performing Flow for individuals, teams and organizations; and, how the framework and principles of Flow can be applied to successfully improve any process or product.

We have included dozens of examples in Flow from the past four decades of how we have helped individuals, teams and organizations achieve higher levels of performance using the principles included in Flow.

The following story is a powerful picture demonstrating the impact of Flow.

A Stunning Example of Flow at SingTel

The following project case study is an example that demonstrates the immediate, powerful result of using Vision and the Flow framework at the team level. Take a moment to think about what you would do (using your knowledge, skill set and experience) to rescue the following project that was crashing and burning, and you have been given 90 days to successfully implement the changes and turn the project around. Here are the brutal facts:

This was an infrastructure build-out that included Operational Support Systems and a marketing team that was supporting the targeted national brand launch.

They were two years into a three-year project with a demoralized team of around eight people that were working 60 – 80 hours per week each.

The project team leader from Deloitte had a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and had been on the project from the start. She was also trying to use the PMBOK (The Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge), cover-to-cover, to try to Deliver the project, including:

40 “PMBOK” inspired reports issued weekly, monthly and/or quarterly, including status updates;

And, an MS Project plan with over 2,000 lines of work activities and task level items.

There were 440 Stakeholders and 38 Steering Committee members.

The weekly, four-hour status update meetings, were shouting matches (sometimes in multiple languages) and rife with politics.

The original schedule to complete this project was three years. We arrived two years into the original time frame. The estimate to complete this project, at the point in time that we arrived, had been extended to 5 years, total.

The initial budget estimate had increased by 300% to pay for the additional resources and time needed to complete the project.

EXERCISE:

What would you do? Take five minutes and on a blank piece of paper or blank page at the back of this book, write down what tools, methods and/or frameworks (agile, traditional o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• Shorthand, Abbreviations, Acronyms and Capitalization used in Flow
• Section 1: What is Flow?
• Section 2: Must haves for Creating, Entering and Maintaining Flow
• Section 3: Anti-Flow
• Section 4: Conclusion and Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• Contact the PMO Brothers
• Footnotes and References