Flow
Personal flow, information flow, delivery flow.
Cut work so people can finish it. Route information so it arrives. Place decisions so they do not block delivery.
Inside the letter F
Flow in FLAIMS means three things, and all three belong together. Personal flow: the state in which a person is absorbed in a demanding task and forgets the time. Information flow: how knowledge actually runs through the company, who learns what and when, and where it gets stuck. And delivery flow: how finished work reaches the client. All three come out of the same structure. Whoever cuts the company along product and service lines instead of departments gets clean handovers, less searching, and people who come to work.
The trap
Most companies are optimised for being busy. Everyone is in a meeting, everyone has too much open, and still little reaches the client. Knowledge seeps away into private chats, decisions hang in forums nobody called, and the people who understand the work are worn down by side tasks.
Mechanics
- 01The Flow Steward sets the frame: how value creation is cut, how information flows, which rules apply to focus time and meeting hygiene.
- 02Anchor Core Jobs for market, delivery, organisational design and internal services structure the field. With several service lines, the Conway cut applies: one Core Job per line, with its own Core Jobs below it as the line grows.
- 03Crews are where the work happens: small teams around a client or a product, made up of holders of different Core Jobs, small enough that everyone knows where the others stand.
- 04WIP limits protect the slack. A company running at a hundred per cent utilisation can no longer absorb anything, cannot learn and cannot deliver.
Rooted in research
Each source with a short sentence on what it actually says.
- Csikszentmihalyi (1990), Flow
Describes the state in which skill, challenge and attention come together. People work at their limit and forget the time. Performance and wellbeing rise together.
What this does not settle: describes the experience of the individual; it does not say how a company builds flow at team level.
- Conway (1968), Conway's Law
The systems a company builds mirror its communication structure. Whoever wants clean products needs clean handovers between the teams.
What this does not settle: originally an observation about software; transferring it to whole companies is experience, not proof.
- Dunbar (1992), Dunbar's Number
Human groups tip at around 5, 15, 50 and 150 people: trust and coordination work differently beyond these thresholds. FLAIMS takes the numbers as orientation for the size of crews.
What this does not settle: approximate values, not hard limits.
- Goldratt (1984), The Goal
The throughput of a system is set by its slowest step. Whoever optimises somewhere else is keeping busy.
What this does not settle: written for manufacturing; in knowledge work you first have to find the constraint.
- DeMarco (2001), Slack
Full utilisation kills throughput. A system without slack can neither absorb change nor learn.
- Reinertsen (2009), Product Development Flow
Queues, batch size and WIP limits determine lead time more than the diligence of the individual.
What this does not settle: assumes measurable flow; service organisations need adapted metrics.
- Note: FLAIMS-specific constructs such as Steward, Anchor Core Job, Core Job, Joblet, FlowCoach, Gravity Decision Model and the learning chain are developments of the model out of practice, not cited research.
In practice
Meetings end with a name, a result and a date. Open work is visible. Information has a route, decisions have a place, and the crew stays with the client.