The Triple Helix of Flow: The Flow System Playbook with John Turner, PhD and Nigel Thurlow | Ep 51

Ever wondered how to bridge the gap between theory and practice when dealing with complex problems in your organization? Are you searching for practical and evidence based solutions that address  human factors, human performance, and mental health? As we discuss the  upcoming Flow System Playbook, set to release in November, we take you on a deep dive into the evidence-based approach of the Flow System. We highlight the importance of comprehending how to apply the methods and techniques to your unique context.

The conversation takes a fascinating turn as we, Ponch, Professor John Turner and Nigel Thurlow, reflect on our diverse backgrounds, from flying fighter jets to working on the production line. We share insights on how these experiences have shaped the Flow System Playbook. We also discuss the Flow System's potential in bridging the gap between theory and practice when dealing with complex problems. We delve into the application of the Triple Helix of Flow in interconnecting the complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and team science to achieve flow. The conversation doesn't stop there as we also highlight the importance of adapting in organizational coaching and the critical role of distributed leadership.

Finally, we explore the wealth of knowledge contained within the Flow System Playbook, the role of the practitioner, and the power of understanding this knowledge. We highlight the new Hexi Tool included in the book, which allows for exploration and facilitating workshops. We also shed light on free tools and resources provided to help organizations get started with the Flow System. So come, join us, as we navigate the fascinating concepts of the Flow System Playbook and discover how it can help you and your organization handle complexity with ease.
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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

All right, I'm here with Professor John Turner, nigel Thurlow We've all met each other in the past. Some of you may be familiar with the Flow system. We are the co-creators of that, co-authors of that. But here today we're here to talk about the Flow system playbook, which is going to be released here in the next few weeks. I believe the release date is November. Is that right? November 1st, november 2nd, somewhere in the-.

Nigel Thurlow: 1:21

November 4th, I think, is what Amazon's got listed. It's on a pre-sale at the moment with Amazon, so I think November 4th in the USA and very close to those dates around the world. It is listed globally. Local delivery dates may vary and the Kindle version will be issued first because the license arrangement with Amazon, and then the Apple Books version, and EPUB and other formats will be available soon after.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:47

All right. Well, let's get right down to some of the elephants in the room, because there's multiple elephants. Number one why is the Flow system going to fail, right? Why is it not going to work for your organization? I want to start there.

Nigel Thurlow: 2:01

Wow, let me just jump in Any thoughts, because I recently did a talk on something known as bullshit jobs and fake agile, based on Professor David Graber's work. So it's not just me being on coof, but a lot of organizations desire change. A lot of organizations believe change is necessary, and indeed some of the large consulting houses tell them they need to change and sell them a whole host of PowerPoint decks for millions of dollars to help them with that change. And so then what we start to see is that the change that's required is actually extremely difficult, and the leaders that apparently lead that change need to participate actively and engage actively to help that change happen. And they actually believe that change should happen somewhere else. They can sponsor the change, but other people will change. They don't need to change, and of course, the incentives out there for them to change are somewhat skewed.

Nigel Thurlow: 2:58

And so what they tend to do is go buy a framework some big, giant, big picture sort of framework and then try and implement that as their approach to change. And if they start to think that the flow system is another big framework and that will magically solve all their problems, then it will fail. The framework sorry, the flow system is not a framework at all. It's. It was designed as a system of learning and understanding for people to understand why challenges exist within their contextual situation, and it was designed to provide a lot of different methods, tools and techniques and approaches for people to understand how to operate in various different environments in different different contexts. So if they take this as a one size fits all replacement for scaled agile, then it will fail. If they don't look at change initiatives seriously and consider what's necessary to change, it will fail.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:59

So over the years I've been accused that everything I show folks is too theoretical. Right, that it's just too theoretical. There's nothing in it. So so, john Turner, I want to turn this question over to you. You're an academic, you're. You get into theory quite a bit. You write papers that are peer reviewed on team science and complexity theory. So why should any organization put trust into the flow system, which may come with a lot of theory? And what did you do to mitigate that with with the playbook?

John Turner, PhD: 4:34

Yeah, well, the first book was, was more, if you want to call it, theory, a little more abstract, but, but more importantly, it's evidence based, and that that's the key point to be made.

John Turner, PhD: 4:46

So it's not just someone's opinions, or we tried this at three organizations and it worked there, so it's going to work everywhere. That's that's not what we're doing. We're picking out what does the literature say, what does research say works, and and that's what we're using to develop the framework, the methods and the techniques that we presented in in the flow system. And then so that that's the flow system, the book, and then so in the playbook, what we're doing is we're taking all the methods, techniques and tools that are identified and we're bringing them down, introducing them, what they are, introducing, the main points, and then we have the worksheets on how to apply that method or begin applying that method in your workplace. So it's a kind of a place where to start if you're not familiar with the specific technique. So it's more about how to guide on how to apply these 40 or so methods and techniques that we present.

Nigel Thurlow: 5:45

I think the important thing to add on the back of what you're saying, john, is that we're providing how tos, but we're not providing a recipe.

Nigel Thurlow: 5:54

We're not providing a methodology. We're providing knowledge and understanding in very different areas, from complexity thinking through distributed leadership, through team science, with our foundation based upon Toyota's production system and the Toyota way approaches. But we're not giving you a magical recipe, because your context and your environment and your situation will vary and the way you intertwine and interconnect the various tools and techniques will vary within that context, and so part of what the playbook does is explain that, explain how to interconnect methods. It actually teaches you to play with different interconnections. There's the new tool in there we can talk about, called Hexie, but it also gives you, as John was describing, the ability to download from the website connected to the books and worksheets that are in the book. Use those to learn those techniques, to teach others those techniques and to coach those techniques and to be able to then follow additional learning if those techniques are valuable and powerful when used in your context. So that really is a book about praxis, not about theory.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:04

So, nigel, you and I worked together in the past and I remember we've had very smart coaches around us, very prominent folks in the agile space, and I remember them questioning what do you call this? What do you call this thing? You do, you know, just back then we were adding red teaming techniques and lessons from the cockpit, which we're calling Team Science or is known as Team Science. We're pulling from these different or disparate workplaces or domains and bringing concepts into the agile space, if you want to call it that, and we showed folks how to do that. But they always came back and said what do you call this? And my response was it's how you work, right, this is what do you mean. What do we need to call it? So the flow system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:47

I think I think we got lucky with the name. I can't remember how much alcohol we all consumed, or Nigel and I consumed that day when we came up with that name, but it means more today than it did four years ago. It means more today than it meant five, seven, eight years ago, when you and I were working together helping organizations trying to create agile or do agile anyway. So my question to you is why now? Why the flow system now. Why do organizations need this today?

Nigel Thurlow: 8:19

You know it's interesting with the name Flow because of course, when we were talking about Flow, with my background in Toyota, we always talk about Flow and actually we talked about this in the book because I did a lot of research and people like John Shook and others helped me and we went back to the original books written by Toyota and TPS. The Toyota production system was actually originally called a flow system for manufacturing, so they actually referred to it as a flow system not the flow system but a flow system, and so that was quite a nice connection back. But in lean and lean thinking and in the Toyota production system we always talk about Flow Flow value for products, for services, and continuous one piece flow through a manufacturing line. But we were I was really focused on the flow value of the whole customer service. So customer first focus.

Nigel Thurlow: 9:09

And when we started to look at the sort of industry we call knowledge work, which is really all that work that isn't directly involved in manufacturing or hands on machines or in manufacturing processes, but where we use various different techniques that are abstract from, as they're not physically connected to is in some way I hesitate to use the word that we're sort of working environments with greater knowledge, because that's disingenuous to the people working in manufacturing with huge skills and abilities and knowledge is required. But if you're talking about software development and other discrete industries where we're not physically hands on building something, we're creating some value in a more abstract way. That's what we mean by knowledge work, and we started to realize that the way industries work wasn't like manufacturing, and indeed some people have tried to create feature factories and software factories which don't work because the work is more complex in its nature, whereas the manufacturing sort of work is easier to see, it's physical, it's in front of you. And so we started to look at how flow could be a construct in these more discrete knowledge working industries, and we found that actually the majority of these industries were be dogged by constraints and bottlenecks and other other other constrictions to the flow of value within the industry.

Nigel Thurlow: 10:35

And what we actually found is that when people are applying these agile frameworks and these agile ways of working, it wasn't actually solving those challenges. The first thing it didn't do is teach anybody how to be a team and punch. You know about high performance teams in the work in your background in the military. It wasn't teaching anybody about how to be a team. It wasn't teaching any of the fundamental lean skills about removing constraints, removing bottlenecks, removing things that prevent flow within the organization. And we found that these agile frameworks weren't actually doing anything to solve organizational design and silos and basic patterns that I'd learned back in Toyota. So why is it more relevant now? Well, flow. We can talk about flow as a construct and the various different definitions of flow and all living systems being a flow system.

Nigel Thurlow: 11:29

But in companies they've been trying to implement agile for some years and a lot of the people who listen to this may not realize that this agile thing was born in 2001. So it isn't young, and scrum was born in 1995. So it's even much older and scrum being the predominant approach for using agile methods and tools and ways of working and extreme programming the other sort of discipline that sort of came together with scrum to birth. Agile is also back in 95, 96 from its origins and yet we're still implementing agile frameworks and we're not improving the flow of value or the efficiencies or the effectiveness of the way we work in organizations.

Nigel Thurlow: 12:08

And when we all sat down a few years ago and thought about this and thought about the work we'd done collectively at Toyota all of us have been involved in Toyota in one way or another we started to realize that what there was there was a disparity, a separation of these different disciplines. They hadn't bought them together and they're all looking for a one size fits all universal solution and they're all following case based approaches. And when we actually sat down to look at this and thought about this, we realized that's where some of the problems laid. And what this was more about is people having a deeper understanding of complex problems, a deeper understanding of our organizations functioned, and then looking at a contextual situation their contextual situation and then looking what would work in their particular context, pulling from multiple methodologies and tools and techniques from across a whole wide range of holistic range of disciplines, not just a very narrow focus discipline like an agile framework. And we actually started a fine in the testing we did at Toyota and we'd done in other organizations subsequently.

Nigel Thurlow: 13:17

That was far more effective, and so that's where I think the relevance for the work we've done over the last few years and the fact we're now able to articulate that in a practical, very visual guide for practitioners I think will make it very powerful and will help solve some of the challenges that organizations are talking to me about. We've been doing agile for five years and we're not any different than we used to be and I actually joke only the other day and I apologize to the scaled agile practitioners out there, but I talked about safe as being disciplined project management or disciplined waterfall, and I think that's what's happening in the industry. They've just applied some rigor and discipline and some new naming conventions and structures around traditional project management, project delivery and waterfall delivery. They haven't really become this agile machine that they rarely desired to other than the odd, you know, edge cases of super duper companies that do this right. I was a long answer punch, but that's some of my thoughts.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:20

No, I think it's a great answer. It's a great answer and I want to shift over to John here in a moment and rephrase that and look into the context of the index within the playbook. And if you look at that index, you start to see names. You know names like Tannenbaum, salis, hackman, edmondson, baker. Keith McCandless is in there. There's many names I'm not going to cover right now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:42

These are names of researchers that looked at things not from an agile perspective and that's my opinion and John may have more on this but mainly from a team science and safety resilience perspective. So Nigel's talking about agile, john, I believe, is coming from more of a safety human performance aspect, and I want to check in with John on this. John, when you met Nigel and I and we start talking about agile, did it resonate with you? With you guys, you're trying to do what you've been studying for years. I mean, that's kind of the vibe I got from you when we met you was you guys are doing the right thing. Let me help you with this. So, going back to your background in a little bit in the military and the government and then your career choices being an academic, what do you see as the gap between what the research is and what today's consultancies are trying to show industry.

John Turner, PhD: 16:04

Yeah, a few points to hit on there. So, yeah, the look at the references there's large body references from leadership research, from complexity field and from team science and the science and team science. So it's very cross functional, cross disciplinary, multidisciplinary whatever term that you prescribe to it pulls from all different fields. It doesn't just pull from one, one location or one discipline. So it's very multidisciplinary. So the focus was to bring in from all other different streams of research, not just focused on one.

Nigel Thurlow: 16:50

I think that, just to add to what John is saying and you caught out some fantastic names there, ponch we spent a number of years, we three spent a number of years.

Nigel Thurlow: 17:02

But you know, huge credit to John.

Nigel Thurlow: 17:05

He spent an enormous amount of time digging into all the books that have been written, the peer reviewed papers, the literature, the stuff that we'd collaborated on, we'd collaborated on with other people and really pulled from the various different aspects of industry about what have been written, about what have been practice, what have been noticed, the reflection.

Nigel Thurlow: 17:26

So you do application. Then reflection looked at the empirical data, the real data that we could evidence and see the stuff that, of course, you've done with your military background and the college you work with day to day, and we really wanted to ensure that we were bringing into the work we'd done collectively, you know, I dare say best of breed, but certainly the practices and the approaches that we'd seen, that were not only written about academically but were proven and time tested and were backed by scientific research, peer reviewed research and that application in industry and that deep reflection. And I think because of the work that John did and then collectively, we pulled things together in the first book. And then you know, we spent an inordinate amount of life expectancy pulling together the second book to really bring I'm telling you to really bring to the practitioner things we know work, and not only the individual things we know work, but the combination of those things, how those things interact. I mean, john, anything to add on this?

John Turner, PhD: 18:37

Yeah, I'll just go back to what Panch was asking. So the gap from what Nigel was saying, so we pulled from the research, yes, but we also pulled from Toyota, we pulled from Nigel's experience, we pulled from the military with your background, panch. So it's not just research focus that we're presenting, it's also practice. So the main gap is we really cross that theory to practice divide, which we find all in research is very heavy. We find an agile which is methods heavy, but we brought them both together through the three of us. And that is really crossing that theory to practice gap. And that's one of the biggest advantages of the flow system is because we covered the two sides and brought them together and so it kind of counters the one side of the fits all, because we really pull and use the assemblage theory saying that you may have three or five techniques, methods that work in one organization, in one context, but if you change the context or change the organization, you're going to be pulling a different set of methods and techniques to solve that problem, depending on the problem type, context, situation and the people experiences. And so there's no prescription there.

John Turner, PhD: 20:01

The only thing that we call out in the flow system is the triple helix of flow is that to achieve flow, you have to interconnect the three helixes. So the complexity thinking, the distributive leadership and team science and that's one of the things we focused on in the playbook is after each method was introduced and then the worksheet. At the end of each worksheet we said okay, you just looked at sense making, for example. Okay, sense making is in this helix. We have two other helixes. So if you have a problem, you think sense making might work for this problem.

John Turner, PhD: 20:37

What other technique will work in conjunction with sense making from the other helix? And then what other technique from the third helix? And bring those together. And that's how you interconnect the three helixes, because without bringing leadership in or addressing complexity or working on teams, if you don't bring them all together, then you're going to be in a similar situation where you just apply an agile to one department, because when you bring it to the large organization, the organization wins and the department and agile initiative fails. So you really have to interconnect all three and that's the only thing we're asking. What method you use will be different set of assemblies in different situations. What you just have to connect the three together to achieve flow.

Nigel Thurlow: 21:22

You know, pons, if I can just add this quickly on that when you start to look at a situation and you start to think, you know, hey, we're talking about complexity in this organization, we have a complex problem apparently. So what do we mean by that? So we start to learn about complexity from some of the tools and the techniques in the playbook and also in the previous book with the theory in there, and you start to go OK, as, like John says, we want to do some sense making. And then sense making starts to reveal we have an organizational design problem. Well, now we need to start looking at leadership. And we start looking at leaders behave and things like leaders intent and we did the thing.

Nigel Thurlow: 22:04

There would be talking about the moment, psychological safety how do we create an environment that's psychologically safe?

Nigel Thurlow: 22:10

Well, they're in the leadership part of the book and they're in the disciplines that come out of leadership theory and distributed leadership.

Nigel Thurlow: 22:18

But hey, if we're going to look at all design, we also need to look at team design. We need to look at shared cognition, shared mental models, we need to look at team learning and that's all from team science. So you suddenly start to wander down a path, looking at a problem within your organizational context and you start to realize, well, hell, if we're going to address this, we need to address that, and this and this or this will be needed to help us address that. That's the difference in the work that we three collectively put together that makes people think about this and bring this together, because they're all going to do the two-day course, get a PDF certificate and now they're all experts in agile operations and organizational design and human factors, and we know that's nonsense. So we try to bring the book along that brought together all those elements so they could start to develop expertise in those areas and really truly help organizations to change, rather than listen to the guides with the really expensive PowerPoint decks.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:17

So this goes back to that first question I asked why is it going to fail? In my view, it's going to fail if your organization does not build up the internal capability, meaning you need people to come help you. That's number one. Number two and this is another viewpoint perspective for me and that is there aren't enough people that are qualified to coach this at the moment, and the reason for that is let's go back to what John brought up.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:41

When we're engaging with an organization, a business unit, whatever it may be, and they say, hey, I want this, and we spend some time with them and we learn a little bit about what they actually need, it's not what they started off for, where they started, what they said they wanted. So we start co-creating a potential workshop or an approach that we pull from the playbook and we deliver to them and go okay, this is what you're going to need. And, by the way, it looks nothing like what I delivered last week to another business unit. It looks nothing like what I delivered to software teams three weeks ago, and this is very hard for organizations to understand. Leaders in organizations understand sometimes, and that is when they come to us. They go what exactly are you going to show me and my response is I don't know. I don't know what you need, right, and that's tough for them to understand. And that's the whole point of the playbook, right, when you go play a game, you have a playbook. You have a bunch of stuff you're going to pull from and you have the landscape. You have your competition. They have a say in this too, right? So that playbook you have to be able to adapt based on what you're seeing in the moment and your coaches, your leaders, need to be able to understand that playbook, and I don't think they're teaching this in business management schools right now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:56

Right, this is not and we talked about this a few weeks ago, nigel, with Steve Denning.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 25:00

So this is I think this is the critical point in this conversation is what John brought up, right, and where we are right now that it's a playbook, we don't know, and you don't know what you're going to use next week, because your context is going to change, right, and that's what's awesome about this is there is no. Give me a step-by-step approach to how I'm going to do this. It's kind of that finger spitting of fuel that we talk about, that fingertip feel that you get from coaching organizations and having lived experience with things like the flow system in order to deliver it sufficiently. So, going back to that first question, if you don't build up that internal capability, you will. The flow system will not work for you. You can't be dependent on external capabilities. And number two, the qualified coaching problem I believe we have is enormous. It's just something that is going to take some time to build up and I want to throw that back to you and see if either you have a different view and potentially a solution to those.

Nigel Thurlow: 26:04

Let me just give you my answer and then I'll let John give you the educators answer, because he's a real educator and, like me, I just stand up occasion with a few PowerPoint slides and sound clever based upon the knowledge that other people have helped me gain. But let's talk about that qualified professional. A couple of days ago I had a person reach out to me who's just finishing their three slash four year degree in engineering and so we're talking about manufacturing, plant operations, continuous improvement, design, this type of stuff, and he's nearly finished his three, nearly four years of studies in that and he's obviously going to graduate and be able to then go to work in industry. And he gets endlessly frustrated with the LinkedIn culture of somebody reading a book or doing a two day class and then changing their sort of LinkedIn headline to lean, agile flow, guru, coach, master of everything type sort of tagline. How can you possibly ever consider yourself an expert in lean thinking if you've never actually worked in an organization or trained with an organization? That applies that thinking at the Gember, at the real place where the work is done, doesn't have to be manufacturing. It can be software development, it can be another type of industry. It doesn't have to be physical manufacturing but to call yourself an expert coach in something you've never actually done.

Nigel Thurlow: 27:31

I developed software for years. I mean I'm old enough to have developed in basic and COBOL and JCL and things like that that some of the younger audience love. No idea what I'm talking about. My original software programs assault, saved on inch and a half wide punch tape binary punch tape. There was no disk drives and SD cards to save these damn things to.

Nigel Thurlow: 27:52

So I'm a bit old, I've been around for a while and I've worked in a lot of these industries at the front line doing the work.

Nigel Thurlow: 28:00

So when people come to me for coaching they come to me for somebody who's got experience to share that experience and to show how I've solved problems within those contexts and I'm afraid there's a lot of the training that's out there at the moment, for a lot of these get certificate quick type courses is being disingenuous to those people.

Nigel Thurlow: 28:22

It's instilling a level of perceived expertise within the person but also within the industry, and I think we're letting industry down. I think what I'm looking for is practitioners to dig deeper, to go beyond the superficial, to really learn a greater depth in some of these topics. I hope the playbook will equip them as a tool in that armory to help them, but we've really got to start training people in the context and helping them understand how to bring these different areas of skill together and apply them more effectively. The reason these frameworks and these change initiatives are failing is because they're being coached and run by people who don't have the experience and don't have the skills and have been let down by the PDF certification factories. John, I mean more comments from you as an educator, because you're better equipped at this than me.

John Turner, PhD: 29:14

I'll give yourself more credit, man. So the coaching leads to more of a organizational capacity problem. So as organizations grow, as they expand the new markets, things become more complicated, and as they become more entangled with other countries and so forth, then it gets from complicated to more complex. So that's why complexity is a component in the flow system. But in order to achieve the capacity within the organization, you need people at all levels to be schooled and trained on how to deal with complexity. So the original organizational model of leaders Go on top down. Here's the initiative, here's the strategy. We did agile training and now we're going to tell everybody and coach everybody downward how to do it. That doesn't work when you're dealing with complexity and you have too many things going on.

John Turner, PhD: 30:15

So that's really where the distributed leadership comes into play.

John Turner, PhD: 30:18

So if the flow system fails, it's because it's not being distributed throughout the organization. Not everyone is not being taught how to think and how to address problems, what problems are, what types of problems there are and how to work on them. But the distributed leadership really focuses on training people at the entry level all the way up to the executive level, and the training is different at each level of analysis of individuals how to be self-leaders, self-efficacy, leader identity and then teams work more on shared leadership model. As you scale teams, you look at more at the boundary spanner, the functional leadership, and then executives. We have specific leadership theories that they can borrow from to support the teams, the multi-team systems below them, but it has to be distributed throughout and everyone gets trained on the different methods and techniques so they can solve one problem and then another people can solve another problem using the different, the assembly of techniques that we described. But it really needs to be distributed because that's where you build a capacity within the organization and that's what we're trying to focus on and build.

Nigel Thurlow: 31:25

I just want to add to that, john. I think I talk about incentives from time to time and I was having a really interesting conversation. You mentioned Steve Denning the other day. We were talking to the other day Ponce, but I was speaking to him recently in a group of people who are working with him on some of these leadership theories for organizations and reimagining management. I said if you're an executive earning $10 million a year, you don't really have a problem. Your life's fine. Your perspective of the universe is fine.

Nigel Thurlow: 31:56

Now, if their organization is struggling and starting to collapse around them or the share price is tumbling, they may start to care. The first thing is why do they care? Why do they go through all these change initiatives? If everything's working fine, why change? You should stop wasting your money with consultants and consulting organizations if everything's working fine. But if it isn't working fine and you need to change you need to adopt, adapt and evolve and improve then you need to get involved. You can't just hand this off to somebody.

Nigel Thurlow: 32:28

Part of distributed leadership is transferring the ownership of decision making, the accountability. Accountability to responsibility. People sometimes get confused between the two words, but accountability in English is giving away the ownership of the decision making. That's where we talk about distributed leadership, because either those leaders have got to empower and abdicate and allow others to make the decisions and guide the direction, or they have to engage and participate. One of the biggest challenges and I'm sorry to say, but one of the biggest challenges I find when I engage with organizations the leaders that bring me in want to hand it off to somebody else to make the change, but they still want to own the decision and still want to control the narrative, but they're not willing to participate and get engaged. That is a real challenge in industry.

Nigel Thurlow: 33:16

I think that if any leaders ever do listen to this and they pick up the playbook, at least if you're a leader and you pick up the playbook, please read at least the introduction. The preface and the introduction are two pieces we wrote specifically for leaders, executives. The rest of the book the practitioners can be equipped and be formidable at delivery with the rest of the book, but at least please read that first introduction. We wrote it in a way it'll take you 20 minutes or so to read and it'll give you the reason why. It'll give you the differentiator of what we're talking about within the work we've done.

Nigel Thurlow: 33:52

When you read that, you'll realize that you must participate, you must engage or get out the way, because you become the problem, you become the constraint, you become the bottleneck, and that's one of the lessons we're trying to teach leaders.

Nigel Thurlow: 34:06

But it's a hard lesson to learn. In parts of the world where I go that isn't corporate America Latin America especially I find that people are much more willing to engage, much more willing to try, much more willing to experiment and when they ask us for help and we provide that feedback and provide what we think is the direction they may want to go in, they actually will try it. Where in America I go in and I give them this direction, I do exactly the same things they do in Latin America, and then they argue with me why I'm wrong. Well, that's part of the problem we need to overcome. We need these leaders at those levels to participate and engage or, as I say, just move out of the way and empower and transfer the ownership of decision making to somebody else who wants to actively engage in that change initiative Fonch.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:58

So I want to explore areas where the flow system may not be traditionally thought of as useful and, for example, we kind of kicked around ideas of operational excellence, human and organization performance or getting more on the safety side of things.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:13

In my view, a lot of the lessons and methods and ideas that are in the flow system actually originated from the world of safety, high reliability organizations, high reliability theory, sense making that John knows quite a bit about. So some of the things that I've seen with the flow system is that we can use these same methods, same ideas, everything in there, to an organization that is focused on hop Human and organization performance or safety, two safety differently. Whatever it may be, it's, at the end of the day it's still a complex adaptive system. It's an emergent outcome to get safety. It's an emergent outcome to create some type of innovation, resilience in your organization. So the idea is the same. So, John, when in your world, in your academic world and in supporting those coaches out there, are there any other applications of the flow system that I didn't touch on that you can take of?

John Turner, PhD: 36:09

Yeah, I mean, if you look at the Cadevan framework you have the clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and then in the middle you have a poria, confused but other than the clear domain, because you have your standard practices and procedures that work in that domain. But once you get further up in the complex, complicated area and into complexity, that's where the flow system really strives a little bit in the chaos. But the other three domains, the flow system, works well. It's just a clear domain, it doesn't. I mean you have your standard procedure so you don't need a whole assembly of other methods. If that's worked in, it's just when those procedures break down, things change. Then you get into complicated. So now you're in a different domain and that's kind of how we use the Cadevan framework. No, that would be my answer.

Nigel Thurlow: 37:09

So, pons, you look some of your experiences I know you're working with at the moment, with veterans with PTSD, with some of the psychotropic medications and treatments, and you're talking about human factors, human performance, mental health, welfare, and we start to look at the work that John put into the book around team science and how humans interact with each other. You know, hey, look, here's a page from the book with this thing called the oodaloo that you're a big fan of. So when we start to look about how people make decisions, how the brain works, how it functions, these are all flow systems. These are all constructs that come from the descriptions of flow, whether it's Mihai Chicks and Mihai's work about you know, individual flow and that being in the zone and that human performance, that, when nothing else ever matters, or from a social construct where we have groups of people interacting together and various other elements with the ways we can express flow. When we start to look at the challenges, you talk about safety 2.0 or hop. You know prevention better than cure. We talk about the medical profession. We talk about high stress manufacturing environments, even the military environments, with many of the challenges the military faces, the way people make decisions, the way they understand the skills of others, those shared cognitions, the way they develop a level of sharedness, these shared mental models, the way they start to come together and act together as a high performing team, the things that you've bought in the past when we talked about crew concept, where you train people to a high level of skill in teamwork training so they know how to function as a team and then you can randomly bring them a problem and people can self-organize into a team, a dynamic team, and execute, which of course comes from a lot of the strategies in the military to make effective teams under stress. All these aspects are covered in many of the elements of the flow system playbook and the flow system theories and the papers we've dissected.

Nigel Thurlow: 39:15

But when you look at anything, whether it's an organization, whether you look at anything which is a high stress, high critical environment, we're talking about the one common theme amongst them, that's, human factors. Humans are complex adaptive systems. They're not predictable creatures. We tend to be very unpredictable, depending on how we feel that day and whether we've had a grumpy morning or a happy weekend or whatever the case may be, or a tipple too much of an adult beverage the night before. We are very complex in the way we operate. When we bring multiple humans together, that increases the complexity significantly.

Nigel Thurlow: 39:49

So, understanding how a complex adaptive system works, understanding the types of problems we may face, and then understanding the tools and the techniques used to effectively coach or nudge a complex adaptive system, predominantly human factors based, when we're talking, as I say, about safety, critical environments be it the operating room or military engagement or something else those techniques are crucial to enabling us to function effectively. And if you bring it back to the organizational context, the new kid on the block psychological safety. It's all human factors, folks. This is all about how people communicate, collaborate, resolve conflicts, cooperate, how we empower people, how we do active listening and various other aspects we cover in the book, which enables you to build a much more effective organization. Sorry, panch, I'll go off on these little tangents.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:47

No, you brought up something that's very important here. Right now, mental health is the number one concern in the US. That's according to some research or surveys that came out in the last couple of days. So, in the context of flow and psychological safety because in my view, mental health is psychological safety, the ability to go and speak up and do what you need to do to take care of your mind and body To me, the flow system has allowed us to explore things that I normally would not explore. So you brought up psychedelic, intensive therapies.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:18

We've looked at that, we've seen the research behind that. We found things that look like substrate theory. We found things that are connected to Adrian Bijan's work in flow, the physics of flow, of course, the free energy principle, which is built off of cybernetics and cognitive and neuroscience and statistical physics. So we're seeing these things because we in my opinion, we were able to bring all this together and find the underlying science and research that's evolving, and it's evolving today, and that means the playbook today will not be the same playbook you use five years from now or 10 years from now, but it's going to evolve as we learn more and more. And this is important because you look back at Scrum and people are doubling down on Scrum right now and I'm like guys, that is not what you need to be concerned about. Scrum should take you five minutes to learn. If it takes you any longer than that, then you have a serious problem. You're wasting too much energy to do that. So what are we trying to do? Well, nigel and I heard at the World Agility Forum that the future looks more like flow. It looks like something out of mental health, looks like some work that Steven Kotler is doing with his flow work and work in several books that he has on human performance and what it looks like for the individual. So I'm with you, nigel. I think what we did here is we opened something up that allows us not just us, but everybody around us to explore what actually scales, and it comes back to the human side of things and not necessarily the technical side of things. So I want to come back to another elephant in the room. I said there were two. The second one is cognitive diversity. I know people are looking at this right now and they see white guy, white guy, kind of a white guy Right, and I don't like that. Necessarily. We're very different people. I'll share 30 seconds of me. I wish you guys do the same, but we are very, very different human beings that came together to come up with the flow system, for example.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 43:27

I was a kid. I was picking cherries. First generation college graduate, hispanic Native American heritage, first generation officer in the military A lot of firsts for me to come here. I am a knuckle drager. I'm not an academic. I went to public schools, went to the University of Colorado, go buffs, go coach, prime All that good stuff right now Did some cool things in the military, had some fantastic mentors along the way. And here I am Right. So that's a pretty, in a nutshell, who I am. I'm not Nigel Thurlow and Nigel, give me your background. What's your background?

Nigel Thurlow: 44:03

You know I've told I'm glad there was no internet when I was growing up, just letting everybody know that I was. You know I came from a working class background, very poor background, broken home, all that type of stuff and for many years went off the rails a bit followed the wrong people, followed the wrong direction. Apparently it was quite bright but didn't apply that knowledge and those skills at an early age. But you know, I started several businesses, failed at a few of them and found I was reasonably good at, you know, putting my capabilities and skills to work and making some money. But it took me a few years before I realized, you know, there was actually a better, more professional way to structure that and got lucky. I got really lucky. I worked with some very clever people. I was given opportunities in great companies like Toyota and others to help learn and get a diverse range of skills.

Nigel Thurlow: 44:54

Talk about cognitive diversity. Even as an individual my range of skills are pretty diverse. I have a lot of hobbies and a lot of interest. But I also have worked in a lot of different industries, both physical at the plant production line, but also in the software and the management and in tech support and in other technology based industries. So I've had this wide diversity of experience and it took me a long time to sort of realize that.

Nigel Thurlow: 45:22

You know there was a different way of doing this and I'll let John give his background in a second. But actually meeting you and meeting John, it's sort of if we talk about the triple helix of flow, this thing behind me in what we created. We are the triple helix of what created this, because you bought a certain level of experiences punch I never had, could never have had, could never have experienced flying fast fighter jets in a high stress, high stressful environment in an area where teamwork and communication, collaboration and being having this level of sharedness and oneness was crucial to survival even. And then we get John, who started life as a real engineer, who did real work, real engineering He'll tell you more in a second but then went into academia, sort of by accident really, and it's become one of the most phenomenal researchers anybody could ever have the privilege and pleasure to work with them and I describe myself as now being in this lifelong free of charge PhD. But if we three hadn't had come together and it was an accident how we did we'd never have been able to combine the level of experience and knowledge and backgrounds we had to create the piece of work we've created in what we've designed.

Nigel Thurlow: 46:33

And so when people look at diversity I have a lot of colleagues that work in different diversity sort of threads and I was very proud of the last engagement. I put a team together. I was the only person who wasn't, who was white, in that whole team. So I was very pleased from the point of view of bringing together diverse people from different backgrounds. But I bought people together based upon their skills and abilities, their cognitive capabilities, and then they were just great people who just work well together and had worked with me in past lives, some of them you punch, and so this cognitive diversity is so critical but I'm ignoring John. Tell us a bit about your background, john, because without you none of this would have glued together, you know.

John Turner, PhD: 47:19

Well, like Ponch mentioned, he's first generation college graduate and his family on first generation, my family. My father was the youngest of six and he was the only one in his family who graduated high school, so they grew up very poor. But when I got my degree in engineering and I worked 15 years for a Cia Brumba Berry building and working in coal fire power plants, coal, oil and gas, fossil fuel and during that time I lived and worked in China for two years, south Korea a year and a half and I did two trips to Argentina for six months total. So I got a lot of good experience internationally. But living in other countries was probably where I really cut my teeth, especially on the diversity side of things. And then, after traveling, we started family.

John Turner, PhD: 48:19

I went back to school and by accident it wasn't by plan, but I just ended up with PhD and teaching work at the university where I graduated from. So that's really my background, but experience and degree. So just to note that intelligence is not I'm, your degree is not a sign of it. It does not reflect your intelligence. People are highly intelligent from all circles of life and your degree is just showing you where your key knowledge base resides, but it's not really saying that you're more intelligent than anybody else, but because I know Nigel is extremely intelligent on what he does in his experience, so it's been a pleasure working with him and then punch everything from the military. I mean, we've learned from one each other immensely during the last four years. But it's reflected in the flow system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:19

That's awesome, john. I really like that. It's not about the degrees. We can all bring something to the table, and this is important in an organization too. Those people that are not in leadership roles may have the answer to a problem you're trying to solve, what we can help bring out using some of the techniques in the book, in the playbook. I do want to talk about something else. Here we are on a podcast called no Way Out. Nigel brought up the Oodaloop. John Boyd's Observe Oriental Site Act loop is in the playbook and in the flow system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:54

For a reason I do want to point out something that most people may not know and you may not know, and that is when you listen to the guests that are on the podcast, the majority of them are referenced in the flow system, and then there's some that are on the outside of the periphery. We get the Adrian B Johns of the world. We get some folks that are working in the Free Energy Principle Act of Inference, which is amazing because somehow, some way, not only has the flow system become an attractor, but so has this podcast, because we can bring just about anybody in here to talk about anything human related, which is fantastic. So that's a little secret behind the podcast. You can call it the flow system podcast, you can call whatever you want. We just happen to call no Way Out because of John Boyd's conceptual spiral brief, which is really about going through a cycle of reorientation to adapt to a changing environment. So I want to check in with you guys If you have any questions to me or anything else. You want to leave with our listeners.

Nigel Thurlow: 50:56

You know, ponce, one of the things listening to you both and sort of reflecting on some of my comments we talk about a lot of really cool people that have influenced our work and that are very much embedded in the work we've produced and heavily referenced and cited. Even Dave Wesson Scrumog said the price of the book was worth it for the glossary alone, because having something like John's research capabilities, the just the list of references will keep you. And Dave texted me and said he disappeared down a rabbit hole for two hours following one reference and it had led him to all these other places, which is part of the power of what we wanted to produce. But what I tried to do because you know a lot of people said the first book and I've got it here somewhere, the first book here which we've now put into paperback to make it more accessible when we wrote this. There's a lot of academics research in this, but we wanted to write a book now where the practitioner could just pick it up and understand quickly and easily and start to learn new techniques and learn how these techniques interact. So whilst we've got these fantastic influences and a lot of the words, we've talked about a lot of the science that we've talked about. That's contained within the book and the research.

Nigel Thurlow: 52:08

The book's actually written in a very accessible language and we wanted to write it in such a way that anybody could pick this up and benefit from that deep breadth and depth of knowledge that's out there without having to learn the vocabulary of a scientist or the vocabulary of a professor. There may be the odd big word in there, but we tried to make it very accessible because I wanted a book that every practitioner could use and I hope and it is here this is a great big thing, but I hope that in its I don't know if I can show this on the camera this multitude of colour pages with hundreds of diagrams and worksheets and book things we wanted to make this a practitioner's book. We wanted to distill that immense body of knowledge in those endless I can't even count how many professionals are referenced in this and their own work, and you've mentioned many of them, including John Boyd, of course, and the Oodle Loop and Adrian Bijan and Construct All Law and various other things. But we didn't want to teach them Bijan's Construct All Law, because that's really heavy theoretical and scientist-y type stuff. But we wanted to be able to bring all the tools in there in a very accessible way, and I hope and I think we might have achieved that. So my message is the practitioners out there will benefit from this immense amount of knowledge and research from all these various different places that have been bought together and produced in a way that's accessible.

Nigel Thurlow: 53:36

The book acts initially as a learning platform, as a study guide to learn these techniques, and you can dip in and out of different sections, and then it becomes a valuable reference. You mentioned the index, an extensive index that we had created and put in there because we want people to be going. You know how we heard something, and even Dave West did that when he was talking about this. He said it's a book you keep on your desk and every time something comes up, you conflict to that section and you've got data, information, references, further study, you've got a worksheet you can download. We didn't even mention the new tool, the hexi tool. So there's a new tool in the book based upon an approach called hexi, because they're hexagons and that's why it's depicted on the cover of the book is these hexagons, and that's a tool we've developed in combination with the Canebbin company and Dave Snowden's team, which allows practitioners and this is a free tool, you can download, make your own or buy some fancy produced versions and then actually do exploration workshops and facilitate workshops with different people to look at a contextual problem and to start thinking well, where are we now, where are we now and maybe which direction we could be going and what might we need to bring into that conversation to actually help us move in a different direction and nudge ourselves in a different direction?

Nigel Thurlow: 54:58

And later this year we're bringing out, in collaboration with Ivor Jacobson, a tool based on the Essence platform, which will both be a digital and a physical platform, free of charge to practitioners, which will allow people in workshops, remote or otherwise, to explore different tools and techniques at what Dave Snowden calls the lowest level of coherent granularity.

Nigel Thurlow: 55:20

So you take something like Scrum or another technique, you break it into small component parts and then you look at elements that you can recombine in different ways and that's how a complex adaptive system scales. And I just throw in for the listeners Scrumorg are working with myself and ourselves at the Flow System and the Flow Concertum, as well as with Dave Snowden at the Canebbing Company, to develop a full set of hexes for Scrum and the practices from Scrumorg as well. So there's a lot of other contributors are bringing their tools together so that we can help people find the right combination to be able to exploit and utilize within their contextual situation. So two summary points we built something that anybody can pick up and use. It's extremely visual, extremely practical and we've tested it. We know it works. So it becomes a valuable learning and reference guide, and there are new tools that we're providing free of charge. The practitioners, anywhere on the planet, irrespective of geography or financial ability, will be able to use those tools and exploit them for better change within their organizations.

John Turner, PhD: 56:33

John, yeah. So one of our colleagues, pam Dukes, posted the Flow System and in the comments I kind of give her a guide on how to get started with the book, because it's a large reference book. You don't read reference books cover to cover and she'll see comment did on it. It's a playbook for the playbook, right. So a good comment. So basically read the introduction, the preface and the introduction and then read the conclusion and that gives you a general idea of what the flow system is about. And then go and read the introduction to lean, the introduction to complexity thinking, introduction to distribution, introduction to team science, and that gives you kind of a general idea of what each of the helixes are all about. And then you can go into whatever section you're interested in or that you need to learn more about the different methods in each of those helixes. So that's a good way to get started in the flow system. The other way is just go into the index and then if you're thinking, does it apply to me or does it apply in my environment?

John Turner, PhD: 57:41

If you look at one of the hot topics today, whether you're in academia or in organizations, it's artificial intelligence, and I know in academia it's a big issue. Students use it, which is good to use it to help them write and study, but not so well when they use it to copy content. And then organizations. There's AI is going to be around for a long time. But figuring it out how does AI figure into my environment? Whether you're in academic or organization, you're practicing a form of sense making, and if you're not familiar with sense making, then go to the section on sense making to get a better idea of where it starts. And then each method in the book has a worksheet. The worksheet has a QR code, like Nadja was saying. It brings you to the website and you can download it and print out that worksheet so you can have it and use it and fill it out on your own without having to write in the book. So those are for you, free to download and print on your own, so you can start applying them in your place.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:44

Great stuff, so I want to congratulate the best selling authors. Is that correct? Best selling authors on Amazon right now is that correct? Apparently so.

Nigel Thurlow: 58:53

the three sales have driven so many things. We can become number one best seller in 24 hours. It's just bizarre but humble. Thanks to everybody who supported us and who is putting up the faith in the playbook. I promise you it's a good book and if you don't like it, send it to me and I'll give you your money back.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:13

Yeah, and I think you can find us on the road next year. In fact, nigel and I and John are talking about where we're going to be in delivering workshops. These are going to be maybe standalone workshops where we just pop up in Dallas or Denver or who knows where, maybe at Laramie, wyoming we don't know yet. Depends what we want to do. Right, but be on the lookout for that. That's coming. Keep your eyes out for that and just realize this. I want to go back to that first question Right now. At the moment, not enough people who can coach this. It's going to take some time to build up some folks. To do that, internal capability is key. Go get the book, find one of us, find somebody that's associated with us. Bring them in. Let them help you build that internal capability. Don't be dependent on the pseudoscience that's out there. There's plenty of it. That's another reason we have the podcast is to help people make sense of what actually works and what doesn't work. The playbook scales. It works. It just needs a little bit of guidance and you can cut that dependency off your external consultants almost in half overnight, maybe even more. There's a good money save for those that are actually looking to buy a book and maybe get rid of a consultancy.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:25

I know we're going to have a lot of hate mail after people hear that, but that's fine. That's why we're here, right, so people can attack me. Awesome guys. Hey, I appreciate your time. Thanks for being on no Way Out. Clearly, we'll have you back on. I'm fortunate I get to call you guys anytime I want, which is fantastic for me. But our listeners can find you on LinkedIn. They can find you on your personal web pages. You can find Professor Turner down at the University of North Texas. There's so many ways to get in touch with us and I'm going to use a quote from Coach Prime we ain't hard to find. You can find us. That's it from the no Way Out podcast. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, all right.