The Flow of Value
Why doing less helps you deliver more, faster and with better quality.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on the flow, not just being busy.
- Limiting WIP accelerates delivery.
- Context switching drains productive time.
The Busyness Trap
In many organizations, we measure success by how 'busy' everyone is. However, high resource utilization is often the enemy of fast delivery. When everyone is 100% busy, any new request creates a massive queue, and everything slows down.Are you watching the Runner or the Baton?
To understand Flow, we must look at the difference between Resource Efficiency and Flow Efficiency.Resource Efficiency focuses on keeping people busy. It’s like a relay race where the goal is to make sure every runner is sweating 100% of the time. If a runner is waiting for the baton, we give them a different baton to hold. Flow Efficiency focuses on the baton. It asks
— "What percentage of time is the baton actually moving towards the finish line?":The Relay Race Analogy
The Reality: In most organizations, work "waits" on a desk or in a digital queue for 90% of its life. Focusing on "busyness" optimizes the 10% where work is active, but ignores the 90% wait time.
📹 Video Resource: Henrik Kniberg: Resource Efficiency vs Flow Efficiency
Understanding WIP (Work in Progress)
WIP is the amount of work you have started but not yet finished. High WIP creates 'cognitive load' and 'task switching' costs that drain your productivity.The Physics of Speed (Little’s Law)
You don't need to guess if lowering WIP works; it is a mathematical certainty known as Little's Law.Little’s Law:
Cycle Time = WIP / Throughput (Doubling your WIP doubles the time it takes to deliver value. It's physics.)The "Context Switching" Cost
Did you know that if you work on 5 concurrent projects, you lose nearly 75% of your productive time to 'context switching' (regaining focus)? You are effectively paying your team to re-learn what they were doing an hour ago.📹 Video Resource: The Cost of Context Switching
The Bottleneck Secret
Every system has a bottleneck—the one point that limits the total output. Optimizing anything other than the bottleneck is an illusion of progress.The Traffic Analogy
A highway at 100% utilization is a parking lot. Your team is no different. You need 'slack' in the system to move fast.📹 Video Resource: Shockwave Traffic Jams: The 80% Rule