Inside Out: The Power of Clarity

By Steve Pereira & Andrew Davis

About Flow

#10・ Nov 11, 2021

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About Flow

By Steve Pereira & Andrew Davis • Issue #10 • View online

When we think about flow, we divide our focus between two primary levels: Collective and Personal. When we’re thinking about value streams, we see the collective flow either enabling or hindering personal flow.

🔭 Getting clear

Collective Flow

Collective Flow Activities in a Value Stream

When we align teams with value streams, and build systems that facilitate an effective flow of work, we can enable collective flow that maximizes the performance of a group, where each contributor is utilizing their capabilities to the fullest. Like a relay team seamlessly passing a baton in a race, each runner has a key strength placed in the flow to optimize the overall performance of the collective.

In essence, we follow two objectives:

Minimizing delay
Minimizing friction

Personal Flow

The world-famous Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the one who actually coined the term ‘Flow State’ and mentioned it in his book “Flow: The Psychology of Happiness”. He described the mental state of flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Time flies, the ego falls away. Every movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you’re performing your skill to its uttermost”.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, there are 8 key components of the Flow State:

Clear Goals – There is great inner clarity and you know what needs to be done

Strong Concentration and Focused Attention – You are completely involved in what you’re doing.

A loss of the Feeling or Self-Consciousness – A feeling of going beyond your comfort zone.

Distorted sense of Time – You lose track of time and you’re completely focused on the present moment.

Immediate Feedback – You get an immediate result on how well you’re doing.

The balance between skill level and Challenge – You know that the activity is feasible, that you have the needed skills to complete the task successfully.

Personal Control over the Situation – There’s an essential motivation and whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Absorption - You lose your sense of self and all of your worries and concerns drift away.

All of these components are enabled by a well-functioning value stream that marries the challenge of the work being performed with the capabilities of individuals and the team delivering.

Personal flow enables a sense of joy when the challenge you’re tackling and the skill you possess are well matched. Not too easy, not too hard. You feel a steady sense of progress through continuous feedback.

When we aim to improve personal flow, our objectives are:

Maximize engagement
Maximize performance

It’s important to consider and balance both collective and personal flow to maximize outcomes. Too much personal flow, and a team could be derailed by an individual contributor. Too much collective flow, and personal meaning and diversity could be lost in the group.

A well-architected value stream can create a high degree of collective flow that allows individuals to fall into a personal flow state. This can happen many ways; by minimizing interruptions and friction, allowing contributors to utilize their strongest skills, minimizing repetitive, boring tasks, providing feedback on performance, and so-forth. Below are 8 key components of getting into a flow state that can be enabled by a well-architected value stream.

🏅 What we're finding valuable

Is the new Agile going with the Flow?

Very interesting and information-rich article from Christopher Patten. This is his commentary on another rich blog article, “Why You Should Be Talking Less Agile and More Flow” by Haydn Shaughnessy, Fin Goulding and Mik Kersten.

www.linkedin.com • Share

Organizing around the value stream

Finding flow

Flow. That feeling you get when working on something or doing an activity when time seems to fly by, and the work is happening. Everyone wants to achieve it. We achieve productivity not because it’s effortless, but because all our systems are working in concert with one another. But flow is not just for individuals. It’s for teams, and organizations, and is one of the core goals in the first way of DevOps, borrowing the idea from its roots in Lean.

Managing flow

In any system of work, we endeavor to optimize flow. This concept was popularized by many, including Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt in “The Goal” where he describes the Theory of Constraints. According to the theory, in any system, there will be a bottleneck that causes work to stack up before it and starve downstream workstations after it. The outcome of analyzing our workflow is to elevate and alleviate the constraints so that work can flow more quickly through the system. In our businesses we often refer to this flow of work as the value stream.

To read this article in full, please click here

www.cio.com • Share

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness: Organizational Effectiveness

Tim finishes his article by looking at how highly effective organizations design their engineering organization to optimize for effectiveness and feedback loops. He illustrates what this looks like by the example of Etsy, who actively measures their ability to put valuable products into production quickly and safely, adjusting their technical investments to fix any blockers or slowness.

more…

martinfowler.com • Share

🎢 In the flow

Flow Engineering with Steve Pereira | Software Delivery in Small Batches

Adam welcomes Steve “The Value Stream Guy” Pereira to the show. Steve goes deep into flow engineering and the four outcome maps. Part two of three of the conversation.

smallbatches.fm • Share

Thank you for reading!

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Steve Pereira & Andrew Davis

To solve big problems, we need to go back to basics. Our effectiveness depends on gaining clarity, creating value, and finding flow. Society and technology are changing quickly, but at every scale these three considerations are timeless keys to success. We look at maximizing improvement ROI, how the best teams work, and how individuals can find meaning and purpose in their work.

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