Flow is a must-read for leaders and team members who want to embrace agile innovation in the workplace. It is a guide to changing your culture and work practices, embracing new ways to work such as Devops and faster innovation made possible by the Cloud.
For individuals this book provides an opportunity to up-skill, not just as an agile team member but also to create a career in change management. For companies, ti spells out some of the key steps in digital transformation. It will benefit project managers, the PMO office, agile coaches, scrum masters, software engineers and people in the business who want to learn how to collaborate more effectively.
Whether you are in software engineering or in business innovation, you need the techniques outlined in Flow.
The book's lessons are drawn from actual examples and practices of transforming organisations. Its authors are pioneers of Flow practices. In this book they set out lessons learned in a highly illustrated, wonderfully designed book that is easy to read and packed with information on how transformative organisations now work.
You should buy Flow if: You are participating in any transformation activity You work in a fast paced innovative workplace You want to understand advances in agile as a practice You want to enhance your career by learning more about the future of agile in business You want to broaden your skills and become a leader in agile transformation.
It is written for: Project managers Business leaders Scrum masters Software engineers and developers who want to expand their career horizons Business analysts who want to learn more about IT Business analysis's who want to re-engage with customers Producer owners and product managers Digital marketers HR Professionals who want to understand changing roles.
Contents include: A primer on the impact of digital technology on work The benefits of more social interaction for collaboration in the workplace The importance of transparency in leadership and how to achieve it Introducing visible work Modern leadership qualities Flow teams Collaborative work design Just-in-time strategy And the organisation as a learning model.
Flow should be read in conjunction with 12 Steps to Flow, a primer on each of the steps necessary to create a digital and agile culture. It helps large enterprises prepare for this essential change. But uniquely for a business book it does so through highly graphical illustrations that reflect a core message of the book: visualise everything.
It will teach you how to accelerate the pace and scope of innovation by integrating Agile and Lean methodology with new principles of continuous innovation.
Benefit from: Ultra-short cycle times; More value, less waste; Startup-style pivot ability; Process innovation at pace.
Inspiring reading. The book describes FLOW as a number of things. From what I gathered it’s a process, or a set of guidelines for innovation, and workplace and business transformation.
Fin and Haydn didn’t invent FLOW, but they did a good work with the book, which seems to be a collection of steps, advises, and study-cases that they learned from their own experience.
They say that FLOW is a new WoW. I think that very few things are actually new these days, I agree more with Lavoisier -
Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme.
Philosophy set aside, although I didn’t see anything actually new under the sun, it’s inspiring to see how they’ve been transforming, adapting, and adopting to enhance people's capacity to create value for customers, make work better for employees, and more productive for the company.
The heart of FLOW, it seems, is the idea of using walls for all kinds of visualisations, for ex.: a Customer Wall, a Risk and Issues Wall, a Cool Walls, etc)
They discuss culture change, leadership, the need for social gathering and interaction (in front of the walls) in order to bring about collective intelligence, the need for a transformation in traditional HR departments processes/workflows (HR traditional processes can be a barrier for creativity and development) in an era where “the pace of change is reaching light-speed”.
I liked very much the design of the book: it’s colored, good font-size, makes use of elements such as list, tables, images, and so on, to make the reading less boring and more engaging.
This is an era of decentralized information. This is an era of decentralized leadership.
The pace of business requires synchronous response to changes within the business ecosystem. Being responsive and being a conduit both inside and outside the organization are required.
To respond to this level of responsiveness organizations need to build trust and robust feedback loops.
FLOW is an excellent resource to help organizations design for this level of adaptability.
A great deal of design intention went into the architecture of FLOW as the examples are grounded in real situations so you get a sense the authors are walking with you in your own work. Nothing better than having Cyrano de Bergerac in your ear as you navigate change in your teams, with your customers, with the market.
Finally, the book is beautiful. It is so nice when authors model the way and are working examples of what they are teaching.
Business is fluid, Jennifer Sertl @jennifersertl #a3r
PS: To keep pace with #platformeconomy follow Fin Goulding @fgoulding & Haydn Shaughnessy @haydn1701
It is a great book, easy to read, with loads of useful information for every person no matter what level you are in the company. Loads of good and easy ideas to implement!
I really struggled to read and finish that book (6 months for 200 pages!). The topic is appealing, the premises also but the structure of the book is incredibly confusing. Everything seems logic and I agree with the analysis of the current state of the business world, but the authors make it very difficult to really understand what the Flow techniques are. Is it still a work in progress, missing the confrontation with real corporate life?
Interesting read - I like the ‘working out loud’ approach
From an end to end perspective in a companies knowledge discovery process, this book makes some great suggestions on how to visualise the journey and bring co-creation into the thorny process of transformation. I liked it even though in places it was verbose and loaded with opinion
Didn't think that such a solution can exist. Thought that lean is the ultimate value creation process. This book opened my eyes to beyond lean and agile. Definitely worth a try, esp the customer wall and the academy wall. Convincing CEO for executive wall is going to be tough! 😁
Great breakdown of the essentials of communication, creativity, and interaction in innovation - things we shy away from to stay in comfort zones, but MUST embrace for real change and project. This book helps guide through the messiness of it all, providing principles and tools to empower.