Systemic Flow Mapping

Systemic Flow Mapping is a technique for visualising organisation-wide flow, bottlenecks, and constraints. Its aim is to provide enlightenment into wasteful, inefficient, and stressful workplaces helping to inform and shape organisational change using Kanban.

Systemic Flow Mapping facilitates the implementation of Kanban at scale showing the negative systemic impact of local optimisation and provides alternative mental models to affect change.

Organisations tend to have multiple value streams. Most large organisations are complex. Making sense of the various value streams is difficult. I’ve developed this mapping technique to help with the visualisation of multiple value streams in order to understand more about the wider implications and decisions in organisational structure and flow.

I’ve identified a number of organisational structure anti-patterns that I’ll be writing about and will be publishing real examples of Systemic Flow Maps. This is very early experimentation so any feedback would be appreciated.