Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast, where we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody.

 

Simone Cicero 

Good to see you. And today we are thrilled to be joined by Håkan Forss, Assistant Lean and Agile Coach, Speaker and Mentor with I would say decades of experience supporting organisations, teams and leaders. Hello, Håkan, it’s good to have you.

 

Håkan Forss

Thank you for having me.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much for joining. Currently, you work for Postnord, but you have a long track of record of, let’s say, enabling many, many business with agility across organisations of all sides. And your work has been widely recognized within the global lean and agile community for, I would say, your ability to bring theory and practice together.

 

On a personal note, I’ve been a big fan of yours for years. I remember referencing some of your slides more than a decade ago when I was trying to get my customers through this agile thing. And a few days ago, I was working on a project in a rather complex setting. And I went back to one of your iconic pictures, the famous – how you to be able to improve picture with the Lego figures trying to carry this cart on square wheels. So I’m really happy to have you finally here on the podcast. Today, with you, would like to really, together with Shruthi, we would like to really, I would say, dive deeper into the core ideas that exist beyond, sorry, behind lean and agile as enduring practices that allow this continuous improvement and change in organisations. 

And as a starting point, I would like to maybe start from the title of one of your latest talk. 

 

So really, what is the hidden purpose of Agile?

 

Håkan Forss 

Yeah, so it’s very easy to forget sometimes that the whole purpose about doing clean and agile is to achieve business results for our organisation. So always kind of bringing the customer and the needs of the customer, if it’s the internal customer or of course the external customer or partners, achieving the actual results for them is what is really important.

 

And the method and the approach that you take is just a means to achieving that goal. And that’s something easy to forget if you’re in a large organisation and there’s a lot of talk about the method and the approach and maybe you apply a certain framework or something like that. So you forget about the actual purpose is to achieve real business results.

 

Simone Cicero 

So that’s an interesting starting point because at the same time I would say people sometimes, for the sake of business results, sometimes also for other reasons. I would say if you are lucky, for the sake of business results, they do everything. So they override policies, they switch people, especially management sometimes gets annoyed by the results not coming and they can do really harm to the organisation. So at the same time, I believe that also in your work, of course, agile is about business results, but at the same time, I feel like we can achieve business results by adopting certain core ideas, principles, practices, systems. 

 

So what is your, if you have to paint like a framework of what are the key ideas that or the key approaches that you believe are worth mentioning, maybe we can go deeper into each of these, what are those that allow an organisation to achieve business results?

 

Håkan Forss 

Yeah, so there’s of course many different ways to achieve business results. And as you said, it’s like if you just focus on the results, you can also over the long term, maybe not achieve what you want. So you have to have a strategy and an idea on how you want to achieve it. So from my perspective, is that you need to base these things on a belief system or a core principles that solves the problem for you. Maybe looking into this from my point of view, when I engaged in organisations, they are often looking for kind of a big system with fast feedback loops from where the customer are we building the right thing? Are we adjusting? Are we having a good time to market and so on?

 

And the core ideas then when they asked me to come in is to base this on the lean and agile principles. And depending a little bit on how you look at it, kind of one of the core and the fundamental parts that I’ve applied for quite a few years now is to think about always optimising for flow efficiency first. And when we talk about flow efficiency, flow efficiency is the concept of the need of the customer, is it actually being worked on all the time or is there a lot of waiting time? And flow efficiency is then to try to eradicate the waiting time and make the workflow to the customer as fast as possible. And then you can apply different approaches to this. I was quite early involved in the lean Kanban part of the agile movement, so to say. 

 

So a lot of my thinking comes from based on David J. Anderson’s work around the Kanban method. And then of course, the predecessors such as the Toyota production system, Eliyahu Goldratt’s work around the theory of constraints and so on. And then we can talk about things like visualising the work, especially for us that do product development that nowadays is mostly digital, how do you actually see the work and what is happening. 

 

So visualising the work is really important and then focusing on flow by then applying working process limits so we build a pull system. And then of course on top of that is always to have a continuous improvement mindset kind of checking in that whatever we do is to actually achieve business results. 

 

And of course, we want to have very engaged employees that is working with us. So they are engaged with have a good purpose that they believe in and they are empowered to actually being able to achieve what they want to and that’s what the organisation need to.

 

Simone Cicero 

I would like to ask you, Hogan, one consideration. How is that something so simple as visualising work has such an important impact in organisations and

 

How is that we as organizers, organisations, we often fail to do so? I mean, Kanban means bored, basically, right? So it means really visualising the work. It’s such an important thing. What is in your experience? How is this in your experience so radically impactful?

 

Håkan Forss 

Yes, so I think when we do knowledge work, a lot of the stuff that we do is in our heads. And when you do knowledge work nowadays, it’s mostly digital as well. So it’s like hiding in our computers. And we as humans, we have a much easier time to understand how things are when they are in the physical space, and they are visible.

 

And even if you can touch it, it becomes even better because then you engage even more senses. So I think when we are doing these things, that is kind of knowledge working in our head or in our computers, actually bringing it out and being able to see it, especially in a physical space, it’s a very good way to trigger thinking about the bigger context and engage people. You get more feelings so you can react on those feelings. So for instance in most large organisations you have so many things being worked on in parallel but if it’s hidden in the computers you don’t really know. So bringing it out in the open and actually show how much work it is that is going on in parallel people can start to react and have feelings on it. 

 

So making things visual and visible is for me is a core enabler to get into the continuous improvement mindset and looking at how we can actually achieve the business results that we want to achieve.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yeah, actually on the visualization point itself, right? Do you, let’s say, see people also collaborating outside of their own visualization? So how do you sort of cross collaborate or do a little bit more of upstream in that in terms of visualization? And I also see that maybe there is fear of visualization because it makes things more transparent, right? Essentially. So how do you see – maybe people adapting or not adapting to visualization therefore.

 

Håkan Forss

Yeah, so I think it’s very common if we take Scrum for instance, or Kanban implementation, and if you do it on a team level, it’s not uncommon that you visualise your own work. But you are often dependent on others to actually achieve the best results. 

 

So what I typically want to encourage is to visualise at least one or two steps outside of your own context. So that might be for a team, it’s either upstream or downstream or both. So you can see where work is coming from and where it’s going. And also as an organisation doing a shared visualisation of the work of what we’d work on together. 

 

So a common approach that I tend to use is what we can call to an a visualisation room or a iobeya or actually that’s a tool but an Obeya concept where you have a big room where you can see things together. And if you do that, you can bring people together and cooperate and collaborate in a much easier way because they understand more easily that this is something part of a bigger thing that we do together.

 

And what I do, someone else will pick up later. And when you focus on flow, then you want to minimize the time it takes it between these steps if you need to have handovers in an organisation. So bringing it out, visualising at least one step before and one step after where you do the work tends to be a very powerful way to kind of start those conversations in terms of collaboration.

 

And also if you do like a big room planning type of events, bringing things together and visualising what you’re working on and planning on together tends to be very, very powerful and helpful, especially if you’re in a physical space together.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

So let’s take visualization, let’s say as the first bucket. And then you also mentioned about flow as well. Let’s talk about flow. Are organisations, let’s say, which are generally designed around projects, budgets, and sort of siloed structures, how are they operating in flow? How are they taking into account some of these constraints and adapting these agile methodologies therefore.

 

Håkan Forss

So the most common pattern I observe in organisation is that we might be organized around, as you say, projects, or we might be organized around specific IT systems or products and so on. But many times the needs of the organisation when we need a change or we want to maybe introduce a new product or we want to make a change to a business process, something like that, it cuts across either like the project boundaries or it might be across the organisational boundaries and so on. 

 

And then it tends to create a lot of waiting time in between these different parts of the organisation. So when using visualization and trying to visualise that the work is actually being waiting on someone else can then help us to easier achieve flow. Even if we are kind of not designed for Flow as an organisation. We can at least see where the problems are and then we can start to continuously improve and see how we can actually make it better.

 

Simone Cicero

So like once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

 

Håkan Forss Yeah, many times that’s true. So when you see that there are challenges, it’s much easier to start to actually get a sense of urgency to address them.

 

So if we kind of go back to the original idea of a Kanban system that comes from when Toyota went to the United States looking at the supermarkets. So when the shelf is empty of a product, it’s a pull to actually restock the shelf with new products. So when they took this into the product, development and the manufacturing processes. They use a kind of similar idea. We only bring things to the production line in the pace of the process. And we use a Kanban system to then ask for new material when there is a need. So when you’re running low on the buffer and so on. So having these visualizations and looking at it in that way, kind of helps you to see the system and you can start to act on it and you can then kind continuously improve to achieve the better business results that you’re looking for.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Can organisations therefore, you know, see designing or visualization of this from, let’s say a set of rules or constraints rather than simply seeing it as maybe toolkits or, you know, just like templates that they apply. How do you visualise it beyond you know, templates essentially.

 

Håkan Forss 

So my approach is based on David Anderson’s work as well when he talks about like visualise the actual situation and maybe nudge it a little bit in the direction that you want but you want the visualization to be as close to the actual situation as possible.

 

So rather than kind of applying, okay, so this is how the visualization should look like, you would like to visualise things, how things are. So the visualization would be a supporting tool to kind of uncover the problems that you have in how you work as an organisation. 

 

So there’s like a classic metaphor where if you have a lake or a river, where you have water running and there’s a lot of water, you might not see if there’s like challenges in terms of the flow of the water. But if you start to lower the water level, you then start to see where the problems are. So one of the metaphors I use is like you have a canal and a sluice gate. So you can then, if the canal is full to the brim with water, it’s kind of hard to see if there’s any problems in your way of working or process. 

 

But when you start to kind of lower the water level, you will start to see the challenges you have and then you easier can start to address them.

 

So the visualization should be a tool to help you understand where you have challenges or opportunities to improve. There’s not the goal of visualising itself. That’s not the goal. It’s like a tool or approach to uncover the real challenges that you have.

 

Simone Cicero 

So maybe the core principle at the root of all this is that of continuous improvement.

 

Håkan Forss 

Yes. And the continuous improvement you validate that against are you achieving the actual business results that you want to achieve.

 

Simone Cicero 

So you improve towards the business results and you have to make a space for these reflections and these practices, improvement practices to happen. 

 

Simone Cicero 

So I was wondering of one thing. So the first point that we brought up was visualising work. Then we discussed the flow. You know, so basically be sure that work can progress towards creating value for the customer through also these moments of, I think the metaphor you use of stopping the flow of the water for a few, for a few minutes or at least like cleaning the canal. It’s really important because otherwise, a lot of things can stack up, and then you have just the delusion of delivering value to the customer. 

 

You are not really delivering value. But I’m also fascinated by another principle and that is the principle of limiting the work in progress. 

 

Sometimes, you know, the idea of limiting the work in progress is, first of all, it’s counterintuitive for people. And in these people, I also put myself in because I’m also always failing to limit the things I do. Because sometimes you really cannot prioritise. You cannot put, I would say, voluntary constraint on your work. 

 

So I think this is another principle that is worth exploring. So what is the concept of value of intentionally limiting your work in progress flow?

 

Håkan Forss 

Yep. Yeah, so that’s a really good question. And I think there’s a number of different parts here. You can start with one aspect that we talked about by limiting the work in process. And I call it work in process rather than work in progress, because most of the time the work is actually standing still. So it’s in the process, but it’s not progressing.

 

By limiting the number of things that you’re working on in parallel as an organisation, you will start to force yourself to see where the problems are. And this is kind of the equivalent of lowering the water level in the river or in the lake. So you can see where the challenges are. 

 

And then the other aspect is also when you work with processes, they are based on some queuing theory. So there’s some mathematics that you can apply to how you get things done in an organisation independent if it’s knowledge work or if it’s a production of physical goods or even if it’s a network problem of transporting data over a data network and so on. 

 

So there’s some core mathematics that kind of helps you to understand that if you lower the number of things in parallel as an organisation, you tend to get faster feedback, or the time to market to get things through the process will go faster. So if you want to optimise for fast feedback from your customers, because you might not know exactly what the customer needs, so you need to try different things.

 

Actually, limiting the number of things that you’re working in parallel might not make every individual in the organisation busy all the time, but we will get feedback from the customer faster. And that’s kind of one of the core ideas around optimising for flow in the Lean and Agile point of view, is to bring feedback from your customer and validate if your assumptions are correct or not.

 

Simone Cicero 

So basically I was thinking that, you know, the question was raising in my mind is what is my WIP limit? And first of all, I kind of like the point that you said it’s work in process limitation because I feel like, you know, as long as progress is happening, we don’t really have to limit it. But what we have to limit is the number of things which are stuck in the organisation, right? So we don’t want to have like 15 things stuck into the organisation. Maybe we can tolerate three, four, but not 15, right? 

 

So work in process limit is something that is very interesting for me. It’s the idea that there is a number of things we can tolerate as a stack inside the organisation. At the same time, you also raise another very interesting point you said that if we limit the working in process or in general, if we reduce the throughput in the organisation, we do it because we want to capture feedback from the customer. 

So it resonates with the idea of doing the right work versus just doing more work because we want to produce more. So anything that doesn’t get customer feedback is not good work in our organisation.

 

You also mentioned something else when we started and you said theory of constraints, which I feel it’s a very fascinating approach to looking at problems I recently used quite a lot with customers. So what is the constraint you should be thinking about when you think about optimizing your work? 

 

So for example, in what you said, I feel like getting the customer feedback is the constraint we should be optimizing for. And everything should be sacrificed to get customer feedback.

 

Håkan Forss 

Yeah, theory constraints then say you can never go faster than the constraints of your system or your way of working and how your organisation work. And another way to kind of frame it is like the bottleneck in your system. That’s the same thing as a constraint in the theory constraints perspective, which is the bottleneck will determine your speed or actually your throughput of the system over time. So you can never go faster over time than what your bottleneck in the organisation can actually achieve. So in the idea of theory constraints and also kind of if you apply work in process limit or is to work to the pace of your bottleneck, because then work will not stack up in front of the bottleneck waiting for the bottleneck to take on the work. 

 

And then you will kind of, when the bottleneck is finished, then the rest of the organisation should be able to work on it immediately. So it kind of goes out to get actual customer feedback as soon as possible. So the idea of theory constraint is really to set up your organisation to work to the constraint or the bottleneck to that pace.

 

So you minimise the waiting time between the different steps in your way of working. And applying a working process limit, or if you would ask Eli Goldratt, he has another approach called Drum-Buffer-Rope approach, where the drum will be your bottleneck, they can kind of set the pace.

 

So then you don’t add more stuff into the beginning of the process than the drum is beating. And then you might add some buffer before your constraint or your bottleneck just to make sure that the bottleneck always has some work to do because that kind of sets the pace. So applying this thinking as a large organisation is extremely hard if you don’t see the system.

 

Doing it in manufacturing,where you can actually just look at the factory. This is quite easy. But if you do it in knowledge work, it’s extremely hard if you don’t see the flow of the work.

 

Shruthi Prakash

How does it then look like, you know, sort of differently, especially when you look at larger systemic or portfolio level challenges that, you know, organisations are handling with where you can’t physically see the problem. So how do you maybe adapt internally? Governance structures, maybe things like that. Yeah.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, if I can jump in, because I was asking a similar question. So one of the signals we are seeing from the market at the moment, which is also very much what Boundaryless does, is to work with companies that are developing two motions. 

 

One is the more coherent motion, sometimes called the platform motion. Which is about getting pieces together, the system, the connections and a coherent experience from the customer, whatever. But there is also another motion, which is a portfolio motion that is necessarily going towards, I would say, unbundling the organisation into smaller pieces which care less about the system and care more about themselves. 

 

So essentially, I can connect these with also what’s happening in the market now with much lower transaction costs and much more empowerment of the small teams. People, especially in knowledge work, we can achieve a lot by remaining in a small team. So how is this theory of thinking and agile more in general adapting to this world where together with a more systemic view flows and customers and end-to-end connecting the flows?

 

There is also motion that tells us we have to leave the units free to go wherever they want because they can achieve an impact that is transformative for the whole system. 

 

So I’m curious to hear from you about this.

 

Håkan Forss 

Yes, so I think if you want to achieve flow, of the kind of desired ways to redesign your system would be to give the organisation more autonomy to act by themselves and not be dependent on somebody else in the organisation. 

 

So if you can make a product, it might be one or a couple of teams be very autonomous and can act on their own. That tends to increase the flow in the organisation. You can faster respond to things and so on. But then if you don’t have a shared set of values or a shared set of goals or strategies that you want to achieve, you run the risk of the organisation start to run in many different directions. You might even in one part of the organisation, you might go to the left and another go to the right, and essentially the vector of the total change will be zero. 

 

If you want to flow in a large organisation, you can either act as just one bigger system and start to manage the bigger system. And that, of course, tends to be quite slow. But it might be very coherent. So if you then want to optimise more for speed, you might want to be a little bit more, give more autonomy.

 

But then you need to be very clear on what are we trying to achieve and what is the bigger goal and what is the bigger purpose. So one way to think about this is to kind of define a set of a business strategy. What do we want to achieve? But also what is the some core concepts of how we want to do things? 

 

So from my point of view, when I work with a lot of organisation, we try to set the number of principles. This is how we want to act, how we want to achieve business results. But then we give the organisation freedom to experiment and work autonomously more on the method and the approach that they actually apply as long as they are looking at the bigger system and achieving the bigger purpose. 

 

So finding this balance between autonomy and having a great alignment of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it is really important if you want to also achieve flow and the kind of shared business results. 

 

I’m not sure that made sense or not… 

 

Simone Cicero 

No, it makes a lot of sense. think this is the central question. I don’t want to, I would say, make too much of a grand announcement here. But this is really the problem of organizing today. What do I mean by that? Transaction cost is going down. Empowerment of teams is going up, especially in knowledge work.

 

Largely, know, with AI, we’re talking about automation and so on. We’re talking about many industries. So.

 

You know, the question we have as organisations is how do we convince people to build inside the organisation versus building outside of the organisation? Because, know, basically, as you said, know, organisations are at the moment are all about purpose, business strategies, right? So these are constraints. You go to people and tell them this is your purpose. You cannot go beyond the purpose. This is the direction you want to go, the vector you mentioned before, right? So the point here is really how do you convince people to build inside the purpose? And does the purpose make sense today with all these possibilities that are being opened up? And so I feel like this is really the problem of organising at the moment. So how do we create a story that convinces people to build inside? How do we get them to build a collaborative strategy? 

 

So the question in a few words is trying to understand – What is different that we can achieve as a collective of teams, units, people versus what you can achieve on your own? And if we understand what is that this different thing we can achieve as a collective, this is where organizing should move on and should focus in the future.

 

Håkan Forss 

So one way to think about this is there is no right answer. Yeah, so you always need to try and verify. Is it better to have autonomous teams running kind of separate? Well, try it and see what the results is, but make it safe to try. So it’s not the, you make decisions that you can’t kind of move back on.

 

So that is one way to think of it. You need to try and verify what is best for you. But also as an organisation, we’re thinking in systems theory, system thinking theory. There’s some pattern called the tragedy of the commons. And the core idea there is basically, you let’s say one example is you have a field with grass and you have a lot of sheep farmers. And if each farmer tried to optimise for their own maximals, their own benefit, you will have all the sheep eating the grass. And eventually, when the grass is starting to kind of all is eaten, then they will start to eat the roots of the grass, which means that the grass will not rejuvenate. 

 

So you are basically over time ruining the whole system by trying to be kind of optimizing for yourself. So in those cases, you need to make the people in this shared system be aware of the bigger system. And you might need to put some constraint in of making sure that we all will have grass on the field for our sheep over time not just for a short duration. 

 

So applying some kind of a rule set or a shared marketplace or something like that to understand that if we are too selfish, we run the risk of making it bad for the bigger system. 

 

So kind of bringing that back to if we make all our teams act very autonomously, in a large organisation, we might cannibalize on our customer base because we are kind of doing different things and we are not having a shared purpose. And therefore, over time, this might not be beneficial for us.

 

So then we’re coming back to visualization again, showing the bigger system, showing us the results, showing what is happening, making it very tangible, helps us then to see that system and have a shared sense of purpose as an organisation.

 

Simone Cicero 

I think this resonates a lot with me on two levels. One is that in these large organisations, let’s imagine, for example, PostNord, the organisation you work for, you have to let people participate in the business strategy. They need to see the big picture. Because if they see the big picture, they feel like they understand their role. They actually start to think about the company and the strategy as a common.

 

And so it’s really about we’re doing this, not that because if we do this, if we do that, we’re going to harm the system. And maybe we miss achieving our shared vector of strategy that we have co-designed together. So when we work with organisations which are very distributed, I always make the point that it’s not just about creating the mechanism for teams to be autonomous, but it’s also about creating a shared – the obey a thing you mentioned, the big room where we don’t just visualise the work, but also do the strategy, you know, take the decisions and so on. So there needs to be this big room moment where everybody feels like they’re part of the big picture because otherwise people just go that actual, right? And this is for existing incumbent organisations, right?

 

Then when it comes to building new types of organisations, I think that’s another question we have on the table, Because things have shifted so fast, right? So it’s like we have kind of AI and other things have shifted the territory of organizing. For example, PostNord, I think PostNord started centuries ago, if I’m not wrong, right? 

 

I was talking to somebody from PostNord a few years ago, and he told me like that. And so things have shifted under the hood for them. And now we have this situation, and we’re building new type of companies. And I think the point that you make that as power grows at the edge of the system, we need to create these commons and let people see and have a shared skin in the game. 

 

I think it’s pointing towards something more like dynamics where the people in the organisation must have deep skin in the game. So it can be, for example, a cooperative form or in general forms of organizing where people can really have equity in the organisation. So it bodes very well for us to create a new type of organisational agreements where people really have skin in the game in the organisation.

 

Håkan Forss

Yes, that can be very, very beneficial and it depends on is it more of an extrinsic motivation or intrinsic motivation. Post Nord is a large organisation and we are not really giving equity to our employees, but we want them to be shared of the bigger purpose of applying our services to our customers and achieving that. 

 

So feeling that belonging so you have that intrinsic motivation to be part of this bigger thing. Yeah, so this is really, really important. And the more you can focus on creating that alignment of what you want to achieve and that shared purpose, you can then give more autonomy to the organisation to actually act. And they understand that they are helping to kind of move towards that shared goal or that shared direction. And then you can, as a large organisation, then you can put less emphasis on mechanisms of how to decide what to work on, prioritization lists and so on. They will be less relevant because everyone knows what is the right thing to do. If you have visibility into what is the right business perspective. 

 

So I recently listened to a podcast around Tesla’s approach to what they call digital self-management, where they make kind of the core KPIs of what is what makes us successful as an organisation and that’s visible for everyone. And then you as an employee, you self-manage and you work on the things that you believe will kind of move that key metrics that is currently what we want to move as an organisation. And they self-organize around what is the actual thing to work on today. And they in this podcast I talked about, have I made the battery pack one gram lighter today? Or have I made the performance of the engine or the design of the vehicle better today so we can provide value to our customers in a better way? 

 

And having this almost radical transparency in organisation so people can buy into that and actually start to self-organize around how we actually make that happen. That is, I think, kind of a something to aim towards. 

 

And then of course, if you’re like an older organisation like Postnord that comprises a number of different organisations that bring together, but I think that we are more than 300 years old as an organisation. Then it’s not easy to kind of make 100 % radical things if you don’t have a good buy-in for everyone. So you need to make a continuous evolution over time rather than kind of making a radical moves in the organisation. But being in a startup, you have much more flexibility to make these kinds of things happen much faster. you might for your survival, need to pivot very fast when there are opportunities. Having that clarity, and then again, coming back to – How do we make this visible? How do we make the comments known and visible for everyone so you can act in a correct way?

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, final consideration, what I was thinking is that we used to think about a flow as, you know, something that we want to achieve in an organisation in a way that all the organisations can connect to the customer, basically, and get the feedback from the customer. 

 

And if it’s true that these decentralised models are making it much easier for people to talk to the customers. Maybe what we want to achieve is less a problem of flow, because it’s less of a problem of putting all the nodes together, but it’s more of a problem of coherence. So the new problem for organisations in this new setting is less about flow and talking to customers and getting things in line, but it’s more about getting all the signal we get from the customer coherent and yeah, achieving this big picture strategy that we have been talking about. 

 

So I think this is a good point to end the somewhat end the conversation.

 

Håkan Forss 

And I think because we don’t, in most cases, we don’t actually know what is the right answer because we are in a complex world rather than a complicated one. You actually need to test and verify. And that’s why flow is still very valid because you do not know before you have done something and put it in the customer hand if this is the right thing with fast feedback. So therefore flow is the kind of the tool or the approach to actually achieve coherence.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yeah, so, I mean, for me, I’ve just been listening. So I think I’m also curious about, let’s say, I think we were talking about autonomy shifting and so on. like Simone mentioned as well, like having skin in the game. So I’m also curious to see how that whole cycle of ownership to, you know, consequences of your ownership therefore looks like as, you know, a part of the ecosystem essentially. 

 

And I was also wondering whether looking outward, not purely from a customer point of view, but looking at larger, let’s say, societal shifts, things like that, how that again plays into the flow of your organisation, your structures and so on. 

 

So, yeah, those were a couple of my points. 

So firstly, we want to say thanks for I think much needed conversation after a long time. I thank you for that. Towards the end of the podcast, we also have the section called as the breadcrumbs where we ask our guests to share some insights, maybe podcasts, they read books, movies, anything they do differently that may be inspiring to a listener. If you could share something from your side.

 

Håkan Forss 

Absolutely, and I think I mentioned a few things here, one of the core things that I’ve leaned on, it’s quite a few years since the book was released, is David J. Anderson’s book, The Kanban Book. I think that is a great book to think about how we can apply flow in an organisation and it’s very based on knowledge work and it’s a very context to that. 

 

To kind of dive deeper and have kind of maybe a wider perspective there’s a book from a friend of mine called Niklas Modig that he wrote a number of years ago to call it This is Lean where he talked about flow efficiency versus resource efficiency and like the paradox of efficiency is to actually try to look at how do we get flow so we can get higher resource efficiency over time. 

And I think that is a really great read as well. And we talked about the theory constraints, of course, Eli Goldratt and The Goal is an awesome book. 

 

And if you want to read the of the software version of that would be the Phoenix project which is basically the goal, but in a software context. Both great books. And me that’s very passionate around continuous improvement. I also like a book called Toyota Kata, where Mike Rother talks about a continuous improvement approach based on a very repetitive pattern that’s focused on thinking about things as a hypothesis that you need to test and see what happens. 

 

Then you kind of based on what happened, what can I learn from this? What would be my next step that I would try to kind of strive towards a goal or something like that. Those are some of the books that I find has really shaped my way of thinking and where I think can help others also to kind of understand this kind of a flow approach. 

 

And then there’s a ton of other books, of course, and a ton of other great people that I’ve learned from standing on their shoulders to kind of try to help organisations. And being curious and always thinking about how you can try things out and see if it works or not is something that I really believe in.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. I think these reads will never get old. Really, too bad the Christmas break has passed. So that would have been a good suggestion for the Christmas break, but maybe summer break. You never know. I wanted to also mention that we have another podcast episode in the least with, Joe Justice, uh, where we spoke about digital self-management and I think it’s a good, you know, follow up listening for our listeners. 

 

And again, thank you so much. As Shruthi said, it was a new conversation. I think we managed to really go to the, uh, to the depth of the conversation about Agile and as a bonus, and lean and as a bonus, we also, I think we successfully put these principles in perspective in what we’re living now, in the world where AI empowers the small teams and companies deal with much more potential, but at the same time, they have to maintain a certain coherence. And this big room idea that we have discussed, I think, is a very important one. 

 

So again, companies need to have everybody to join and participate to their strategic thinking and vector of innovation. So thank you so much. It was a great chat. I hope you also enjoyed.

 

Håkan Forss 

Indeed. Thank you so much for having me, and it was an honour to be invited to this awesome podcast.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. And for our listeners, of course, you should head to our website, boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, where you find this episode in the featured space, where you will find all the links to the fantastic things that Håkan spoke about, plus the mentions that, you know, we will mention some of the talks he’s been giving recently, and also the podcast we just mentioned.

 

In the meantime, of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.