This latest post on Strategy Deployment and other approaches looks at the book Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action by Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis. It’s a book I’d recommend, describing some simple techniques for value stream mapping and related activities. This isn’t a full review, but picks out a few details that I found particularly relevant to Strategy Deployment.
Flow Engineering Maps
The book’s core describes five types of maps or artefacts produced from Flow Engineering, an approach to creating flow. Those five maps
- Outcome Map: To identify your target outcome.
- Current State Value Stream Map: To reveal the current state and constraints of your workflow.
- Dependency Map: To identify dependencies by studying constraints.
- Future State Value Stream Map: To create a future state definition of flow.
- Flow Roadmap: To organise insights, actions, and ownership into an improvement map.
Given that these are actions taken to engineer flow, from a TASTE perspective they could be considered to be Tactics.
Elements of Effective Action
Those five maps are described in terms of three elements of effective action:
- Value: “our individual and shared preferences for some outcomes over others”
- Clarity: “the ability to accurately understand the key aspects of our situation”
- Flow: “unobstructed action that emerges from the effective pursuit of value”
I have already described flow, value and potential as potential Strategies, so this struck me as an interesting overlap. To reference Rumelt’s Strategy Kernel, they could also be described as Guiding Policies for Coherent Action.
Flow Engineering as Strategy Deployment
What particularly jumped out at me, was the following diagram, which shows the contribution of the maps to the elements of effective action.
If the elements of effective action are Strategies, and the maps themselves are Tactics, then this set of relationships could be visualised on an X-Matrix as follows.
Of course, this is only part of an X-Matrix. However, the book also mentions various metrics which could be used as Evidence. Further, I can imagine Flow Engineering being an interesting starting point for a conversation about True North and Aspirations.
So while I wouldn’t say that Flow Engineering is a complete Strategy Deployment approach, I do appreciate the way the elements, actions and relationships are described. It can certainly be considered as outcome-oriented, continuous transformation, engaging everyone everywhere.