12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility

The companion book to the best selling Flow: A Handbook for Change-Makers.How do you go about changing the ways you work? The Flow toolset for business agility is an effective way to empower employees, uncover their collective intelligence and re-engage them in better, faster and more creative ways to work.

LEARN HOW TO CREATE A VALUE-SEEKING ENTERPRISE "In the race for agile transformation somebody has to spell out what the enterprise looks like once many more people are empowered. At last, in Flow we have that document and with it the start of a movement for a new way to work. Shaughnessy and Goulding use very practical examples to show us how self-organising, empowered teams can go about co-designing the best way to get work done. Innovation becomes Flow, the enterprise becomes agile." Peter Hinssen, author The Day After Tomorrow

Every business now needs to master business agility if they are to compete in markets that are increasingly influenced by highly scaled platforms like Amazon and Alibaba. However, there are very few guidelines for how to get to this magical agility. Agile frameworks, derived from the IT department, are a potential answer but present risks. They help companies to work faster but not necessarily to work better. You can be agile and produce bad work, quickly.

Flow practitioners work in a highly visual environment, in fact visualising all work processes. And they are encouraged to create, or co-create, the right process to get any job done. They are not forced to follow rules or set processes. But they do have to take a much more serious view of where value lies.

Buy this book now if you want to accelerate your journey into that new way to work, starting with how to set up initial discussion groups on the issue of changing work practices, right through to how to deliver in smaller increments where value is the team's top priority.

Fin and Haydn show practical ways to get whole organizations (not just development) thinking and solving customers problems, then flawlessly flowing that value to those customers." Troy Magennis: Founder/Metrics & Forecasting Consultant, Focused Objective

Flow challenges organisations to relate all product work to customer needs and then to disrupt their normal cadence of delivery to ensure that what gets to customers has the highest change of success. Create a culture where your organisation doesn't just work fast but also works smarter.

Fin Goulding's view of his CIO role is to give people permission to try new ways to work. So often in work we try to set up complex rules and rituals when in reality common sense and good social interaction will solve many problems. At the very least it will let us be creative about how to solve those problems. As long as we take the view that we can pivot quickly then we should always be trying to do things better, safe in the knowledge we can switch out when we need to.

Fin has been  CIO/CTO at Lastminute.com, Paddy PowerBetfair, Visa and Sabre Holdings. He's is a marathon runner and former punk guitarist and puts the human side of his employees first, expecting them to have interests, passions, and creative drivers from outside of work that they bring to their relationships in work.

Haydn is a sociologist and economist by training. He has been working at the leading edge of enterprise strategy for over a decade and in technology innovation and management for 30 years. 

He has pioneered platform strategy analysis and research on global patterns of disruption, covering China, Africa and the Americas. His work has led him to workplace engagement as the only remaining source of competitive advantage in a highly competitive and scaled economy. Along with Fin he has pioneered Flow as an end-to-end system for competitiveness and agility.