Why Traditional Management Fails & How Adaptive Organisations Succeed with Erica Engelen

Volatility is rising, complexity is everywhere, and the old playbook of adding people, tools, and process is slowing teams down. We sit down with Erica Engelen to unpack what an adaptive organisation really looks like and how leaders can move from control to flow without losing quality or momentum. The beehive is our metaphor: self-managing, high trust, clear signals, and decisions made close to the work.

We trace the journey from purpose to practice. Starting with a meaningful purpose gives teams direction when markets shift. From there, we use systems mapping to bring diverse voices together and make hidden dynamics visible: feedback loops, delays, and unintended effects that basic dashboards miss. Erica shows how a startup with a strong AI vision discovered that customers needed governance and data maturity first, reshaping their priorities, partnerships, and messaging. We also dig into the scaling trap: silos, handoffs, and mounting cognitive load that create drag just when growth demands speed.

The Blue Lagoon case study highlights what changes when you map flow end-to-end and then map user needs outside-in. By creating bounded contexts and aligning teams to value streams instead of projects, they cut onboarding from months to days and shipped five new products within half a year. We talk about why technology is never neutral, how cloud and AI can either accelerate excellence or amplify bottlenecks, and what to fix before you deploy more tools. The practical takeaway: run Trojan mice, not a Trojan horse. Start small, invite a critical mass of people, and learn your way into autonomy, clarity, and sustainable speed.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who’s wrestling with silos, and leave a quick review so others can find us. Ready to try your first Trojan mouse? Tell us which small experiment you’ll run next.

Read more on: https://arkaro.com/why-traditional-management-fails-and-how-adaptive-organizations-succeed/

🔗 Connect with Erica: https://www.theflowhive.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaengelen/

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Transcript

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Welcome And Why VUCA Matters

Mark Blackwell 0:47

Hello everyone. Welcome to Arkaro Insights. This is Mark Blackwell. This is the show where we help B2B executives thrive in VUCA. What is VUCA? This is the world that we live in. It's a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world where you really need adaptive leadership and adaptive skills to thrive. But what are these adaptive skills? Well, that's what we're here to tell you about. By goodness me, we're lucky today. We have Erica Engel, who is an absolute expert practitioner in this area with her consultancy, the Flowhive Consultancy. Welcome, Erica.

Erica Engelen 1:25

Welcome, Mark. Thank you so much for having me. It's a really awesome uh being part of your podcast. It's amazing.

Mark Blackwell 1:32

I'm looking forward to this conversation so much. So, Erica, tell us about yourself and tell us, whilst we're doing it, why you founded the Flowhive Consultancy and why you named it, because I think that's a lot in there.

Erica Engelen 1:46

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so so my name is Erica. I'm glad that you were able to pronounce the last name. I can imagine it's not really that easy. So, as you might expect, I'm from Belgium. Came from the north of Belgium. A lot of people

Erica’s Path And The Flowhive Origin

Erica Engelen 1:59

might think that I'm from the Netherlands because I'm quite outspoken and bold and blunt. That's why people sometimes make uh make that mistake. So I have an amazing son, he's six and a half, the half is important, and I have uh a great wife who supports me in everything that I do. And my career path is anything but linear. So I did many things, going from graphic design and photography over to internal communications marketing. And now I ended up supporting organizations through change so that they can become more adaptive. So I've also worked as a consultant in consultancy agencies as an employee, but then ultimately um came up with uh the realization that I actually very often felt a bit unsupported as an individual, as an individual's consultant, because organizations going through change need a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different capabilities and expertise in order to help them move forward. And very often, if you are a consultant coming into an organization, you are alone. So I started the Flowhive, which is actually a collective of individual experts who all bring very unique capabilities. So we have people who are more experienced in engineering maturity, we have people specialized in Finups, we have people specialized in flow engineering, people from the value stream network consortium. So we have people from all over the place who bring their own specialist experience and viewpoints, and together we actually unite around the shared vision of what adaptive organizations could look like. And that's very people-centric. That really evolves around trust and the people having those capabilities and doing the work. So that's actually what unites us in our vision of how we collaborate with organizations.

Mark Blackwell 3:57

And so you called it the flow hive. Is that a reference to a beehive?

Erica Engelen 4:01

Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.

Mark Blackwell 4:04

And why?

Erica Engelen 4:05

Well, because in a beehive, all the bees are self-managing. So they organize the work themselves without having one person directing them in what they should do. They do that in the most effective way. And I think for a lot of organizations that can be very inspiring. Because how is it possible that if you just let people with intrinsic motivation go out and do the work, that it is being done in such an effective way? And that self-organizing nature of beehives is super interesting. For example, they also have this waggle dance with my vivid imagination. I can see that

Lessons From Beehives And Self Management

Erica Engelen 4:45

that really happening. So they have this waggle dance in which they inform other bees of where um new homes could be found or where they could harvest new um um food from from from the plants and from the from the flowers, and they communicate with the other bees through a waggle dance. And actually, uh that dance is performed many times, and the bees can then choose which dance or which location they would prefer, which one they think is the best. So there's actually also some sort of distributed decision making and collective decision making going on where they strive for consent, not consensus. So it's hugely interesting in many, many ways why uh hives are very inspirational, I think, to organizations.

Mark Blackwell 5:34

Absolutely. We have so much to learn from nature, and that's a great example of it. And so you mentioned earlier an adaptive organization. What would be your interpretation of an adaptive organization and what would you compare it against?

Erica Engelen 5:51

Yes. Well, a lot of organizations today are still organized as if they come from industrial times, where organizations are like machines. One of the things that we still very often do is we think that if a problem arises within an organization, you can just fix it very simply, that you can isolate it and replace it or fix it, or and that's the mechanistic view. It's almost like we see our organizations as nothing more complex than a vacuum cleaner, which is strange. So one of the things we also still do

Defining Adaptive Organisations

Erica Engelen 6:26

is we hire specialists in certain functions, and they have a certain education and capabilities and skills, which makes it easy to replace them. So also that individualistic idea of how people function within organizations is something that comes from industrial times when in education we prepared kids to work in a life for manufacturing. But today, in very complex organizations, we actually can't fix things anymore as easily because there is no linear causal effect between a problem and a solution. Because problems are very often emerging. They are emerging from a very complex system, which is very often not visible to us, might not ever be visible, to be honest, but we can start spotting patterns and structures and mental models which could indicate which problems or solutions might be arising. So we need to start learning about that system constantly. So, and you can't do this alone. So if only the person at the top of an organization is thinking about the system and learning about it and trying to spot what is emerging, then we would always be too slow because one of the things that also arises in our complex society today is the immense speed at which things are changing and disruption hits. So, what we need is all the people in the organization need to be sensing what is emerging. They need to start experimenting with solutions and learn about what is happening then in the system. They need to learn about those feedback loops. And that sensing and learning is not something that they can always teach you at school. So it's not the capabilities or the expertise that we looked for before when we hired people. It's something completely different. And also in industrial times, we try to motivate individuals to perform their capabilities and their skills through, you know, the carrot and the stick. You gave them a higher wage or you gave them a bonus, you did individual performance reviews. And that all worked so that people who you hired delivered on their promise. But also today, when you want them to sense and to learn, it's not something that you can incentivize as you did before with a carrot and a stick. It's something that can only arise through intrinsic motivation. So we we just spoke about something that you did earlier yesterday. You can't own, you can't learn through force. You learn best when you're having fun, when you're enjoying yourself, when you do something with intrinsic motivation, with a purpose. So that is something that organizations need to understand is that if you want to become adaptive, then you need to trust the people and you need to allow the people to have real, uh really a sense of purpose, a sense of motivation to constantly sense and learn together. So that is hugely different to how organizations survived in the past. All those things that we did before won't work anymore today. So we need to do things radically different.

Mark Blackwell 10:01

Fascinating, amazing, exciting, but a little bit daunting maybe to some of our listeners, perhaps. Can we try to, in some way, think of a real-life business case that we might want to work through to give us some tools, some levers to think about? Say there was a business which I don't know, for some reason its orders to certain customers kept going out late or of poor quality, but could no one could really understand why. Or any example that you can think of. Say a company rang you up and asked for help on that. How do you approach that challenge?

Erica Engelen 10:42

Well, one of the first things is always to go back to the origin of the organization. You know, what is your purpose? What is it that you are delivering of value to your customers, to society? How does that drive you and your people in your organization to each and every day wake up and feel motivated to go to work? So, what is that real purpose underneath? Some call it vision or mission. I'd rather call it purpose because it feels a little bit closer to the heart. So, what is it that you want to achieve? Because very often organizations get wrapped up in doing and they constantly do because they are being forced to do it by competition or external factors influencing them or neighbors who are doing things and they think they need to do the same or whatever. So it's going back to why are you doing what you're doing? And then together

From Purpose To Systems Thinking

Erica Engelen 11:40

with your people in your organization, bring in different perspectives. I think that's the first thing that you need to do. Don't, don't, you know, lock yourself up in your little office and start thinking about what all the things are that you should do and why it's not working. It's not very productive. You can't do this alone. So you need to bring in other people with different perspectives and different opinions. So we would say bring together a huge variety of people in your organization, maybe even also stakeholders to parties, people who are external to your organization and ask them what is going on. One of the things that we very often then do is systems mapping.

Mark Blackwell 12:19

Tell me more what is systems mapping for the benefit of our listeners?

Erica Engelen 12:22

Yeah. So systems mapping is where you start mapping all the elements which are influencing a problem statement or an aspiration. So it could indeed be we want to deliver a new product to market, or we want to get a better understanding of our market. You know, it could be anything. So it could be a problem or it could be an aspiration. And you then start mapping all the elements which are influencing that statement. And you map all those elements with a very diverse group of people. Again, there's no use in doing it on your own because you won't even get halfway through all the elements that would be involved. So you need very different perspectives here. And then you start drawing the relations between those elements, which is called the causal loops. So, how is one element influencing another element? And then you create this maze. You can start seeing how all these different elements are actually all playing their part in the whole. And then also you have the ability to start learning about your system. Maybe you already have experiences in the past, maybe you already tried some things to deliver value faster, but it wasn't working. So, what could you learn from those feedback loops? What did you do? And what was the response of the system? And very often here it's the challenge of not looking short-term, you know, looking long term, because very often the most interesting effects within systems take place maybe weeks, months, years after. So this systems map is also something that you need to keep alive, you know, that you need to keep on doing with that group of people, maybe even invite other people to make sure that it evolves. And it gives you a better understanding of the system in which you're trying to achieve something.

Mark Blackwell 14:16

So have you experienced situations where the team goes, My goodness me, I had no idea that's how our organization works.

Erica Engelen 14:24

Yeah, absolutely. And very often it's because. So I recently worked with a startup organization. They're of course doing something in AI, which most organizations do today. And you have this very passionate founder, somebody who

Systems Mapping Explained

Erica Engelen 14:41

has this brilliant idea for a product which is going to help so many people and organizations, and they just want to build that product. So they gather people around them who can help them build that product, and they start focusing on the product, on the build, on the features, on everything that they have within their scope of control, because they imagine this future and it's going to be amazing. The product is going to be hugely desired by companies and organizations. And then when they start talking to VCs first, and they start talking to possible customers, and they start attending the conferences where they also explain what they're building and doing, they first start to notice that hey, this is this is not resonating with everyone. Some people are very confused about what we are building and how that works and how it could possibly be beneficial to them. And we thought that it was cookie cutter, clear. You know, this is awesome. So we did a systems map with them.

Mark Blackwell 15:49

Does that include the customer's view or just the business view?

Erica Engelen 15:52

Well, we invited the people who are building the product and we invited some VCs and some people outside of their scope, but who have a lot of knowledge in that domain. So we tend to go a little bit outside of just the people who are inside of the organization so that you get some very diverse perspectives. Now, and what they realized was that they kind of missed all the elements which were influencing their customers, not necessarily only their product and the way it could be built and it could be beneficial, but also the worries and the needs that some of their customers would have first. And those go back to regulations, to governance, to data maturity, to not just being ready yet to adopt that product that they were offering. So it gave them a lot of perspectives of which things their customers might need first before they would be able to adopt their product. And it also showed them, because of that realization, which possible partnerships they could seek to make it more accessible to those potential customers to do some things first. So actually, through those partnerships, they could start preparing their potential customers for then afterwards adopting their product in the best possible way. So it opened up a completely new perspective on what their priorities were, how they needed to communicate, how they needed to market, which communication they needed to get to their potential customers first before overwhelming them with the information on their product because very often those potential customers weren't ready yet.

Mark Blackwell 17:43

Fascinating. I can easily imagine how that means. But I'm sure this applies as much, if not more so, in more mature organizations with silos.

Erica Engelen 18:02

Yes, absolutely. And also even at the point where organizations start to scale, because then very often it gets painful. So in the beginning, a lot of organizations, a lot of startups are have a huge motivation to get their product or solutions to the market, and they um are supported by by investors, by VCs, by their teams, and they just go. And they need to grow, of course, because that's one of the things that I always found, find very um eye-opening is how they are being forced to constantly grow. So they do that. They keep hiring people. There's investments coming in, so we hire more people and other investments. So we hire more people because we need to grow, we need to expand, we need

Startup Case: Missing Customer Context

Erica Engelen 18:52

to have more capabilities of bringing more products and more services to the market. So they they exponentially grow. And they do it in a way that they've always seen in organizations around them or organizations in which they worked before, which is growing in silos. You start with one person for marketing, one person for sales, one person doing front-end development, one person doing back-end development. And then you feel like, okay, we need to grow. So we hire for those capabilities and we add them to the people we already have. So you grow in silos, and it's something which organizations do without thinking about it very much. And in the beginning, it's quite okay. It's not so painful yet because communication still flows. You know, you have this smaller group of people, and you can still communicate and know what everyone is doing and have a barbecue together and have that trust and that psychological safety to work together. But then at a certain point, you grow to this size where it becomes difficult. All of a sudden you feel that communication starts to fail, that not everybody is still aware of what you need to do next, of where priorities are, or what the intrinsic purpose is of the organization. People, it starts to fade, it becomes a bit fluffy. And then all of a sudden, you get all those dependencies. One person needs first to talk to that person or get requirements from that person, and you need to hand over the work to this team, and then teams also don't know anymore what other teams are doing, and it becomes messy. And when you want to scale or grow in that type of organization, then growing actually means becoming very slow. Because adding more tools, more people, more money, more processes actually just slows you down. And there's nothing worse, I think, for a founder of a startup or founder in a scale-up to experience that that energy, that drive, that speed that you had in the beginning when you were very still small and nimble, that that suddenly becomes, you know, it disappears, it fades. All of a sudden, everything becomes difficult. And then you're like, how is this possible? Aren't my people motivated anymore? Am I not being directive enough? Do people still know what our focus is? And so what do they do then? They start introducing rigid processes. They start to hire people to keep an eye on other people. Everything that is actually a form of control then suddenly becomes the next best thing because you want to take control of your organization again, because you feel that you're losing it. It's actually at that point that you need to start looking at it. How is our organizational structure or organizational dynamics actually working against us being able to scale and grow? And how can we do something different which is really sustainable that can grow and scale indefinitely so that we can, you know, feel the freedom of being able to pivot, to scale, to adapt to disruptions at any time we want because we have it built in into our organization. And that's a reflex that a lot of organizations don't have at that point because they think it takes too much time. They think we need to just quickly get a sense of control so that we can keep going. But all those things actually pile up the mess of bureaucracy that will ultimately bring your organization even to a standstill.

Mark Blackwell 22:48

So at this critical growth point when they're on the verge of a command and control, largely because we don't know any other way of working. So we resort to what we know. The flow hive comes in. What would you do now with the leader and the team of the organization to try to find another path for them?

Erica Engelen 23:09

Yeah. Well, the people who reach out to us very often understand that then rolling out a safe framework or bringing in more bureaucracy or processes won't work. So usually they call us because they know they they need something different. So one of the examples I can give here, it's it's not really a the flow hive engagement.

Scaling Pain And The Silo Trap

Erica Engelen 23:30

We did it for team topologies, but it's with people from the flowhive, is something that we did with Blue Lagoon. So some people might know Blue Lagoon. It is an amazing wellness resort in Iceland. So it's blue waters in the midst of volcanic ashes. It's amazing, it's very surreal the scenery there, but it's also a very high-end luxury resort with an incredible focus on making their customers feel like kings and queens. So it's it's amazing. So they had the opportunity to grow in Iceland. So there was a demand to build more of those types of experience resorts, more hotels, maybe even other services. But they felt they had hit the limits of their organizational structure, their software architecture, which was a huge issue at that point, but also the cognitive load of their people. They hit all the limits. So what other organizations would do would be, okay, push harder on the system, bring in new technology, bring in more people, you know, so that we can get that capability up to scale. But what they did is they they called us and they said, listen, we we think we need something different because we want this to be sustainable. We want to be able to keep growing and keep adapting, not only today, because they also, of course, know what disruption is. You know, they've been hit by um the volcano eruption 12 times just in the last year. So they need to be very, uh, very adaptive. So they say, okay, what could we do? Because we actually have the urge to give this challenge to the people. And we said, well, that's just perfect because that's what we do. So we went on site with them for three days and we gathered everyone who wanted to join. So it was like the 35 to 40 people that are from the data and digital team came. And then we also had people from sales, from marketing, uh, from other departments in the organization. And we started exploring with them what actually their flow of value looks like. So we visualized and we mapped the hell out of their organization, to be honest. So we used all kinds of different tools. You can find the case study online. Maybe you can add a link somewhere so that they can read it so that we don't need to go through all the details. But what we did is we mapped the organization from the inside out, which is like with value stream mapping or with events storm, you can map everything that is currently happening within the organization so that you can start see, okay, what does our flow of value currently look like? So we did some, it's almost like domain storytelling. Everyone from each department talked about their experience through a recent project. And that was eye-opening because many or many people hadn't even spoken to each other during that project. They were just in it together, but they didn't really collaborate. So they had no idea how other departments were experiencing that same project. So by doing that, they got a real good idea of how value flowed through their organization, but also where bottlenecks were, where they were losing critical information, where they were slowing down, where, you know, because of miscommunication or not aligning on the real purpose of what they were doing was actually decreasing the quality of what they were building together.

Mark Blackwell 27:07

People might just say, well, it's obvious, isn't it? If you work in an organization, you know where the bottlenecks are. Were there any surprises or aha's that were exposed from this process?

Erica Engelen 27:21

Yes. Well, it's it's always the fact

Choosing A Different Path To Scale

Erica Engelen 27:26

that when you visualize the flow of value to your organization, it's a hugely enlightening process by itself. But it is mainly that because of the conversations that happens whilst you're doing that. In many organizations, because they use digital tools to map the value streams, or they know what the lead times or the wait times or time to market are. So organizations could say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have this under control, we know what it is, we have the numbers, we work on them. But it's actually when you start doing that work with a lot of people in the room and they talk about their experiences and what is actually happening, then only it comes to the surface what is really the biggest constraint underneath. And very often, in this case, a lot of people were constantly context switching, for example, because they got work in, they could do part of it, then they needed someone else, so they needed to hand over the work. And whilst they were waiting, they started something new, and then the other work came back, so they started on that again. You know how that happens, and then cognitive load of the people just goes through the roof because they're working on so many things at the same time, and they don't want to waste time because all of those people were hugely motivated by the work that they did, so they worked very hard. So each and every time they needed to wait for something, they just picked up something else and they started on this and they did this and they did this. They were also a little bit understaffed, so that also made it a bit worse that they actually needed to do so many things, so many different domains, so many

Blue Lagoon: Mapping Flow Of Value

Erica Engelen 29:08

different areas in which they were needed, that they were actually um their cognitive load went through the roof. And that's something that you can't always see when you just visualize things. Those are the things which come up when you talk about all the things which are happening underneath, why people are context switching, why they're picking up other work, why they need to be everywhere doing all those different things, uh, and what the consequences actually are on the speed and the quality that they are able to deliver. So, one of the things we did then, because we realized that people were all over the place, was we mapped the organization from the outside in. So we did Winter Needs Mapping, which is to be honest, I didn't knew it before I started working with Rich Allen. So Rich Allen is the one who coined user needs mapping. He's also a Team Topologist Value Practitioner, and he's part of the Flowhive. And we started first with them saying, okay, but who are your users? And then already you could see, okay, there's a lot of different users that we didn't even consider. It's not only the people who come to the spa, it's also the people who buy some of the products, it's external stakeholders that you work with, like travel agencies and all those kinds of things. So you map all the users and then you do you think about the user needs. And again, here the discussions are endless. You could do this for days because in many organizations they have no clue what user needs actually are. So you you did this podcast on jobs to be done.

Mark Blackwell 30:41

Yeah, jobs be done with Scott Pearson. Yes, it's a fabulous podcast.

Erica Engelen 30:45

Yeah. So if people watch this. Otherwise, please do. There's huge valuable information in there about what user needs actually are. User needs are the things that stay constant, and they are independent of the means by which you deliver on those user needs. So talking about what are the user needs in an organization is an eye-opening thing. And then you start going deeper. It's based on Wadly mapping for those who know it, otherwise, just go into it. You start with the visible things on top, how you're delivering those user needs. For example, a website, an entrance ticket, a skincare product, all those things. And then you start building down to the layers underneath, which people very often don't see. And that's where front-end and back end development is, where you store data, where you do analytics, all those things are underneath. And then we could see that a lot of people were involved in covering each and every customer need. All the different domains, all the different tooling, all the different areas in which the organization was working to deliver on all those different customer needs. A lot of people were involved all over the place. So that becomes very difficult. The cognitive load is way too high. So what we needed to do was create new bounded contexts for teams, for value streams, to make sure that people could really take ownership of that specific user need. So they could focus on understanding that need, seeing also how it would evolve, because the means through which you're delivering on those user needs constantly changes. So we needed to create new bounded context for those teams. Those were things that they which exist in many siloed organizations, but very often aren't seen because we map organizations or we visualize flow not in the best possible way.

Mark Blackwell 32:46

Just listening to what you're saying, I can imagine the counterstory could have been the old-fashioned approach, which would mean, show me your organization chart. From what I can see is there aren't enough people in your organization because I'm hearing people saying it, so we're just going to add some more people to the organization tree. And that's it, we're done. That may have been the classic command and control type of approach to this problem. And what would have been the outcome?

Erica Engelen 33:16

Yeah, throwing more people at it is one of the best practices that we did in the past. And also one of the things, and I think we really need to unlearn that one right now, is bringing in technology. So in the past, we made that mistake already with cloud technology. A lot of organizations jumped on that hype because the CIO woke up on a Monday morning, 9 a.m., sweating, going like we've missed the train here. We need to go to the cloud, otherwise, we'll lack speed and innovation power. So we need to now go to the cloud. Exactly.

Mark Blackwell 33:54

Lots of shiny new tools because the fear of missing out is too much.

Erica Engelen 33:58

Exactly. And one of the things that they then forget, and that's what you also can see when you map socio technical systems, is that when you bring in new technology, it has a huge effect on all the other elements in your system. The culture, the structure, the cognitive load of the people, the way people collaborate. It's hugely disruptive. You can't just bring in technology as you did before with a disk that said Windows 95, plug it in and think that it works. It doesn't happen that way anymore. So it's hugely disruptive. With cloud technology, you need to learn cloud native development. You need to do a shift left on your security and on your testing. People need to collaborate differently. So DevOps is also another tool, it's a mindset. So all those things you need to take into account when you bring in new technology. And very often organizations don't do that. They just put it on top of everything else

Cognitive Load And Context Switching

Erica Engelen 34:56

and expect people and teams to just take it on board and run faster with it. But they don't. It slows them down. And then they're like, cloud should have made us faster. It should have saved us money. But now the bills are higher and people are slower. What happened? Yeah, well, it has huge consequences in your organization and AI will be massively disruptive in that area because it accelerates everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. So if you have bottlenecks in your organization, if you have places where cognitive load is already too high, if you have messiness anywhere, then this just will make it accelerate as well. It will just make it explode. So before you bring in AI in your organization, please make sure that you have a good idea of what your system looks like, how flow of value goes through your system right now. And if you see bottlenecks in there or things which you could optimize to make sure that people can sense where they need things to change, where they can take fast decisions, because that's really important. Do those things first before you pile on AI to the mess that you might already have, otherwise, it will just explode.

Mark Blackwell 36:21

This has been an amazing podcast. It's connected so many podcasts that we've already done and bringing them together into a coherent story. We mentioned the needs of understanding the user needs with jobs to be done. And with Scott Burleson's podcast, you mentioned busting bottlenecks, which is a great theme of our uh emergent approach to strategy that we employ in our carrots. We've had a number of podcasts on AI. We're not Luddites with AI. We we see this as an embracing opportunity. But you've got to get it right because it's going to amplify the best in us and amplify the worst in us. So we've got to make sure it that's the case. So a couple of wrap-up questions. First of all, what happened at the Blue Lagoon? Is it much better now?

Erica Engelen 37:10

Well, actually, so we usually urge people to take small incremental steps. But of course, we always follow the people and their motivation and what they want to do next. So they actually decided that they really wanted to start working around those value streams and those different types of teams, so product teams instead of projects from the get-go. So we started working with them for another three months where we actually supported them in uncovering how they could work within those value streams and within those product teams, um, even whilst they were still understaffed. So we had people in multiple teams

User Needs Mapping And Bounded Contexts

Erica Engelen 37:53

with multiple different capabilities. So we we actually brought in the visual of wearing different hats when they were doing a certain job to make sure that the cognitive load stayed under control. Um and because they did it that way, which was very courageous, they were able in the next half year to deliver five new products to their organization, which was amazing. Their onboarding, because they now had these clear boundaries for teams, went from three months to just a few days. And because they knew, okay, I'm now responsible for this value stream, this user need. I have the responsibility for these teams who are delivering these products. They felt the intrinsic motivation to do whatever they could to make that value delivering as amazing as they possibly could. So they started to reach out to other stakeholders, external parties, people in other value streams to see how they could better collaborate and bring initiatives together so that they themselves could deliver higher value to their customer. And they're super happy. So that they're now so enthusiastic in their work that it also inspires people from the other departments in the organization. So they're curious, they're like, you know, what is it that you're doing? Because how can we somehow be part of that? Because you're working in such an effective and purposeful, driven, motivated way. And they aspire at some point to really work towards being a microenterprise organization with really autonomous value streams, almost individual businesses who collaborate together around a certain shared purpose. So it's amazing what they're doing. I must say this is this is a unique precedent also for me working with such an organization. And one of the things that that is to me most obvious in why they succeed is because they trust the people to own it. You know, they did it themselves. And we we left. So after then those three months, we left and we thought they will ask us back in to support a little bit further. But they actually they they used the vocabulary, the methodologies, the practices, they keep using it and they keep evolving. They don't need us anymore.

Mark Blackwell 40:13

That's success.

Erica Engelen 40:14

I have to then it's a shame to be honest, because we keep looking for new ways in because we love working with them so much, but it's it's it's amazing that you can just let go. It's a little bit like a parent watching their kid, you know, grow up and thrive and and not need you anymore. It's uh it's a huge sense of fulfillment.

Mark Blackwell 40:33

You mentioned another theme that's been emerging already in this series of podcasts. Innovation comes when you put boundaries on a system. Last question. I'm sure there's gonna be uh listeners out there who are working in organizations that can now recognize that they're in the old-fashioned way of working and can see the weaknesses as a result of your great wisdom. What would be your advice to an executive in an organization who's seen that actually? What would you what should they do next?

Erica Engelen 41:07

Yeah. Well, it doesn't really matter if you're an exec executive or in any role, to be honest. I'm convinced that change always happens through collective work. It can't happen because of just you. But it also won't happen without you. So you need to start talking about the things that you see, the things that you experience, how you think things could be different, and then create a critical mass of people who all start sharing those perspectives. So if you think this podcast is interesting, send it to them and start having a conversation on it and see how they respond. I think that's a first good step. It's also about, you know, I always I like the metaphor of not thinking like a Trojan horse, something that I did before. So when I was frustrated and passionate, because usually it's a combination of the two, about something that I saw in the organization I was working in, I just barged through the door of the CEO and said, listen, I think we should do this differently. I was thinking like a Trojan horse. And very often it resulted in a huge conflict, me being even more frustrated and leaving. So it wasn't very effective. I didn't achieve anything within the organization. It also made me miserable. So I would not recommend that. Instead, think of Trojan mice. So Trojan mice are many people, but also many small initiatives, small experiments where you can see what works and what doesn't work in systems, in complex adaptive systems. Thinking of Trojan mice actually works much better than thinking as a Trojan horse. It's small incremental improvements on the system. So bring together as many people as you possibly can to create this critical mass that can start doing

Why Headcount And Tools Backfire

Erica Engelen 42:53

really small experiments on the system to see what it triggers. I think that is that it's much better so that you can learn from the system together and see how it can evolve. Of course, if you're the CEO of an organization and you're listening to this, then you have the power to bring those people together and start experimenting for them to start. So there's no excuse for you. You can just do this instantly.

Mark Blackwell 43:17

Thank you so much, Erica. This has been a fabulous session. The listeners, I you don't know, but I've got a long list of questions that I haven't been able to ask because we just learned so much already in our time together. So, Erica, I'd like to have you on again at some time in the future because I've just enjoyed that so much. Thank you very much indeed.

Erica Engelen 43:34

I would love to. And if anyone has any questions or wants to start a conversation about this or things differently, because that's hugely interesting as well, please just reach out and send me a message, tell me where I missed something or how you experience things, or if you need help.

Mark Blackwell 43:50

So we'll have your full contact details in the show notes. But if they want to go now, what do they search for on the internet?

Erica Engelen 43:57

But on LinkedIn, you can just search for Erika Engler. Or you could go to the website, which is theflowhive.com.

Mark Blackwell 44:04

Perfect.

Erica Engelen 44:05

If you just enter the flowhive in in Google to search for it, you get beehives. So it's not very effective. Just go to the flowhive.com.

Mark Blackwell 44:15

That's brilliant. Thank you, Erika. I really appreciated your time.

Erica Engelen 44:18

Thank you so much, Mark, for this opportunity. Bye bye.