Flow is a revaluation of the existing organisation

Hans Mulder and Hans van Bommel together in dialogue in the HIGH PERFORMERS Section #1 2023 Computable.nl

In this column, IT entrepreneur Hans van Bommel and IT mediator Hans Mulder PhD. exchange views on the following questions: Why do some enterprises in this digital era do (much) better than others? What are the unique characteristics of these ‘High Performers’? And what is the role of IT in this? ? ?

Van Bommel – I’ll dive right in. What do you think it is that makes High Performers successful??

Mulder – High Performers distinguish between what is necessary and what should be left alone. They have the courage to look beyond the framework offered by text books at universities and technical colleges. High Performers also understand that for some changes you don’t need a project. Compare it to your satnav: it’s constantly updated with new technology, symbols and functions, without making the whole thing less reliable. We recently did a study with the The Standish Group to find out why innovations fail. Turns out that in companies where innovations were tackled through projects, they failed. But in businesses where they didn’t, it all went well. How is that possible?

Van Bommel – Because adaptations are an ongoing thing there!! And because those companies don’t make big changes by doing projects. Change always happens through evolution. It’s something that nature enforces. People like to talk about ‘disruption’ and ‘revolution’, but that’s more metaphorical language than reality, it’s just words. Change is never anything other than evolution. Never. All you have to do is create the right conditions to get through the next day. We should strive for Flow in any change. Within an organisation this means a team achievement (‘the organisation as a whole as a meta-person’) where the team keeps its focus every day as a collective. They can only do that if they know that anticipated high dependencies will be managed in the near future and it will take them less and less energy to continue delivering the performance they want to deliver. So it’s the experience in which we use our capacities to the full, we are relaxed, and we perform complicated tasks almost without thinking. To be in a state of Flow, movement within organisations must take place holistically.

Mulder – Yes, working entirely without projects is possible. They can all go! And then the next question is: What does it mean if projects are no longer necessary? You have to rely on the existing teams, on the people you have in your organisation. So Flow is a revaluation of the existing organisation. And yet in college we still learn that you must work with projects. And if you don’t do that right, you get an F.

Van Bommel – I learned that too at university. All projects have a beginning and an end. With my background in physics, I never got more than a C because even back then I disagreed. How can there be an end? How do you freeze a project like that? Surely that’s an impossibility?

Mulder – For years we were drilled into thinking that projects are a must. But when we got into IT back in the 1960s, we were really just winging it. The operators, the coders, even the end users - they all came from the same place. We tried to keep things on the rails through projects. The first projects were more like gentlemen’s agreements between governments, banks and insurance companies. Later they became professionalised and people began putting business cases together. Later still it all careened off the rails at full speed, with projects that went on and on forever.

Van Bommel – And organisations still believe in working in projects, although we’ve known for ages that everything changes constantly.

Mulder – The world is changing so fast, we just can’t keep up. We do see that three weeks for a project isn’t fast enough, it’s changing to days. The mindset of a project goes from weeks to one day. But then it’s not really a project anymore! So what is it? I think the Agile way of thinking is already coming up against its limitations. We don’t make things easier with Agile, we make them harder.

Van Bommel – If people can work in Flow and set the organisation in motion, they do it by performing their job based on a shared understanding of the direction in which their organisation moves. Achieving this state of Flow is quite a challenge for any organisation. It demands the commitment of all its workers. Organisations actually consist of one or more value streams that deliver products. These move side by side, through each other and sometimes even against each other. It’s like a river that moves calmly in some places and is wild in others. So these value streams all go their own way, all have their own flow. It can have a chaotic effect mainly because organisations do not have a clear enough picture and understanding of their product portfolio and how it’s supported within the organisation.

Mulder – If you want to bring Flow into the limelight, it’s vital to have solid instructions. Like you say, Flow is not easy to achieve. Creating Flow on an organisational level is also essential if you want to be a high performer. There’s no greenfield, no Big Design Up Front, but there will be daily learning and production from the status of the product portfolio and well-developed knowledge structures.