Going up in smoke

Ancient traditions, writing down wishes with pen and paper, letting them go up in smoke to hand them over to the universe on the darkest nights of the year.

Pushing my coaching work to be more asynchronous to escape zoom fatigue, creating connections, learnings, and room for reflection through text and voice messages driving digital transformation, and scaling product organizations.

Sounds like it doesn't fit together?

For me, it’s two sides of the same coin. I have taken a lot of my leadership coaching work async this year honoring that problems arise when they arise, that the right moment to pause and reflect is not necessarily Thursday at 11 each week, not wanting to contribute to overly full calendars and zoom fatigue. Honoring the principles of great async communication and coming together 1:1 when it makes sense not when the calendar says. Creating space for reflection and growth continuously.

The above-described ancient ritual of the Rauhnächte still alive in the valleys of the Alps does a similar thing. It honors the moment - the darkest nights of the year, opens up room for reflection, and provides a little nudge. It goes as follows. Sometime in December you sit down and write down 12 wishes and then each night following Christmas you take one of those wishes and burn them so that the ghosts who are thought of being especially close to our world during those dark days can pick them up and make them come true for you. By January 6th only one wish remains and that one is for you to take care of. No matter if you believe in the ghosts the ritual provides you with a format to reflect at a time of the year when we are drawn towards reflection.

So today I want to offer you a combination of those two worlds and invite you to do your own Rauhnächte ritual with a little twist. One wish instead of handing it over to the universe you send it to me by voice, text, email - your choice. And I'll try to find an impulse, a tool, a nudge to help you get just a little bit closer to that wish.

Your are the builder not the architect. Thoughts on the craft of leadership

The architecture is clear, we need builders who can actually bring it to life, adapt, and maintain it.

Hundreds of books have been written in the past decade on the perfect modern software product development organization. If you have read only a few of them or visited a conference or two in the past year you know everything you need to know on what makes an organization excel.

The summary goes vaguely like this: Things are changing fast (tech, competition, legislation you name it) therefore you need an organization that can adapt quickly over and over again. For that, you need self-organized, autonomous teams, and a clear bold objective that keeps them aligned, and then you need to iterate towards it in small increments whilst being close to your customer and being able to react to new insights on the spot.

Many different frameworks have been created to describe the above in more detail agile, lean, Scrum, SAFE, flight level, OKRs, team topologies, blue ocean strategy, insert newest Marty Cagan to name a few but strongly simplified it comes down to those couple of sentences.

These sentences describe what I call the architecture and we do not need more of that we have enough of it for now.

What we need is builders who know how to bring this modern architecture to life.

It is about actually doing it. About mixing the mortar, putting brick on brick, making sure the wall are level, getting the place watertight, and fitting it out. And then maintaining it against wear and tear, climate change, and rogue inhabitants.

It is about how to do all the magical things the architects have put out there. It is about the craft of leading in these types of organizations. About the practical day-to-day. Not about how it should be like but how to get there and how to keep it going every single day.

It is about dancing the line between giving enough guidance and opening up the space for self-organized teams to thrive and about knowing how to course correct when you have overstepped into either directions. It is about actually truly creating alignment and communicating it consistently through a growing organization so that when the direction changes every single person involved knows.

It is about truly empowering people, and helping them if they do not know how to yet. It is about handling every single escalation in a way so that the next one won't come to you but so that a little part of the org has learned to handle it themselves.

It is about complete transparency so that no valuable information falls through the cracks and the experts in the teams can make the right decisions.

It is about consistently reslicing and rearranging to reduce complexity and dependencies and managing those that cannot be reduced.

It is an ongoing battle against the chaos that wants to creep in because things are changing all the time and humans have bad days.

It is an uphill battle but it is a craft to be honed and pure joy when you realize that you have mastered yet another aspect of the craft giving yourself one more option to bring the architecture alive and therefore create the space people actually want to work in and great products can thrive.

My work over the past two decades has been about exactly that the hands-on work of creating great product organizations and I love it - I am not an architect, and I will not add to the canon of architectural blueprints but if you need a couple of additional pages in your how to builders guide you have come to the right place.

Coaching - what is it?

There is plenty of content out there around coaching. Every coach loves to talk about their method. There are plenty of half-scientific discussion where the line is to be drawn between coaching, mentoring and consulting. What I missed when I first started working with a coach was practical info on what happens during a session, what will we talk about, do I need to be worried? So I made a video trying to answer exactly those things.

How nature can influence our flow

Are you aware if the moon is waning or waxing today? Have you felt the incoming wind this morning or noticed any of the other signs of the shifting seasons? Have you registered if it was a high tide this morning? Or did you jump into your car, kept at a stable 20 degrees year-round by your trusty air con and only got out of it again in the underground parking of your company's office building?

We have lost touch with nature, its cycles, its ebbs and flows.

But just because we fail to notice them it does not mean they don't continue to influence us. The moon moves our entire oceans twice every day. We are 60 to 70% water so who would argue that the moon doesn’t impact us?

Why does losing touch with nature, and failing to notice matter in the context of flow?

Flow as described by the late Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has 9 dimensions and almost all of them have to do with awareness. Today we are starting to understand what flow is psychologically, physically, and from a neuro-scientific perspective. What do all these perspectives have in common? Flow is a state of balance. Aroused but not too stressed.

Connecting to nature in this context can do two things for us. It teaches us awareness of what happens within us and around us. Sitting mindfully focusing on all our senses, perceiving what happens within ourselves. Registering how our internal weather is impacted by the weather outside, by the changing seasons teaches us to become aware and adapt. But it also can help us to be in the here and now, focus and pause. Feeling the wind and the sun on our faces keeps us present. Did you know that we cannot be stressed when we are in awe? And there are many moments where nature puts us in awe. Sunsets, rainbows, turquoise beaches, powerful breaking ways. All great prerequisites to get into flow.

In my work, I draw on ancient knowledge just as well as on the latest science to understand, become aware, and slide into flow more frequently. Let's find the connection to nature on your personal Flow Map.

Flow Maps - two ways

I am a product person at heart with an obsession for alignment, clear strategies, great team setups, and putting the user first. I build organizations that can thrive in our ever-changing world.

I am a skier, a kite surfer, a climber, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. I work with individuals to up their mental game to be fully present in the moment and perform at their best when it matters.

These two things have one thing in common they are about reaching flow. And to reach flow you have to focus a lot on the base that you are building so that things can then unfold on top of that base.

In a product organization that is creating alignment, setting goals and a strategy, breaking it down, making sure information flows so that people can follow. It is about shaping teams according to strengths and needs and establishing ways of working together that people can rely on.

On an individual level, it is about rechecking your motivation and your why, it is about getting the skill and challenge balance right and developing an awareness for yourself and therefore developing self-confidence and trust.

Sounds pretty similar to me.

My first personal experience with organisational flow was at AutoScout24. For everybody who is not familiar with the concept of flow, this might sound more familiar to you. That time I am talking about here is decades ago now and if I meet people who were on the team at the time their eyes light up and the conversation goes something like: “Do you remember Werkstattportal? It was such a good time. We did great stuff there. I think we got some things right. And here they will mention something we used to do. The examples will differ but they will always be about deep collaboration, trust, and a shared goal. And then they will close with “And we had so much fun doing it.” Unfortunately often followed by “I feel like I have never found that in my work life since.”

And I deeply share that feeling and have since dedicated my professional life to recreating what we had. We didn’t have words for it then. Today I would call it team flow. Team flow is this awesome feeling when things just click. When you effortlessly work together. When you tackle hard problems with ease. When you have arguments but always with the purpose of getting to the best possible results. When you are at ease with each other and everybody can be themselves. When you are creating impactful products. When you are learning and developing. Growing together. Oftentimes this is attributed to luck. In that particular team accidentally people who work well together came together, they will say.

It is not. It can be created. You need to build that base through great leadership. A Flow Map is a way of going through all dimensions of that base. To look at them and decide how important they are for you and your organization right now to enable flow going forward.

I feel the warmth of the sun on my black wetsuit. It has just broken through the dramatic black clouds. The last rain shower of many in the previous days has just passed. At the end of the bay, a fading rainbow still stands against the dark sky contrasting with the white sand and the turquoise water.

The wind is hammering now. Throwing white caps onto the waves. I start moving towards the edge of the water. The sand under my feet is already heating up from the first rays of the sun. The kite is pulling me in further towards the water. I drop the board onto the water. A quick steering impulse to the kite and I am off. My feet hit the board with ease and we start moving as one. The kite, the board, and I. We hit the first of the incoming waves. The first splash of cold water on my body is a shock to the system. There is the next wave and then we are out of the shore break gliding along. I feel the ripples of the water under my feet, the spray coming up to my knees, the pull of the kite just strong enough to lean into.

I turn around to ride the first wave. A wave that was created days ago by a storm all the way out there on the Atlantic that now rolls into this beach in the west of Scotland to allow me to play. The wind is pulling, the wave is pushing and I am flying along. No better feeling than those moments when those two forces align. I hit the bottom turn perfectly. The waves are clean now that the tide has come in. There is no fear just the urge to play with those waves again and again. I catch a glimpse of the road and see my buddy in the red van appear. He is not a kitesurfer. I met him some days ago when he offered me tea as I came off the water after a particularly cold session. He used to live here and is currently back to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. His joy of being on this beach on this particular day was contagious and now a little bit of this joy ignites inside me whenever I see his car pull up. It is the kind of session we dream of. When everything feels easy and playful, we are 100% in the moment. When the powers of nature, the wind, and the breaking waves don't feel scary but fully within our limits of ability. When there is no effort just play and the joy of the movements coming together. When we don't want it to end. When only back at the beach we realize the energy it has cost.

This particular session is engrained in my brain and body. I was in full flow. Even though kite surfing is destined to create flow and it is something that I do for fun it has not always been pleasurable. There have been plenty of sessions driven by anxiety, by being overwhelmed, by being mad at myself by simply not being in the moment. And I didn’t seem to have any influence on when a session would be amazing and when it would turn sour but similarly to organizational flow also individual flow can be created.

So I built my base. Today I have a deeper understanding of why I kite, what motivates me, and what it is for me. I have more distance from what I think other people think, I make sure I get my skill challenge balance right and I have tools to make sure I am fully present and focused at the moment. All elements of flow and therefore my personal flow map for kite surfing.

Flow Conference 2024 Recap

There were many great insights and conversations at this year’s Flow Conference. From the latest academic insights to best practices, there is one thread of conversation that kept popping up throughout the day. What is it that we are selling to our clients?

Flow as a concept is relatively well-known in sports. Many high-performing athletes are familiar with the concept or at least work on different aspects of it with mental coaches. In the corporate world that is not always the case. Some of my colleagues were advocating for a Trojan Horse approach. Selling something more familiar to the business world hiding flow inside. And we had an interesting discussion on what that might be. There is the angle of looking at value streams and the flow of customer value from idea to market. It is tangible and a relatively easy-to-explain concept with measurable results. Faster time to market, higher customer satisfaction, business value realized. Nice, super helpful, and definitely contains flow elements. But we are all flow professionals at heart and there is so much more to it on an organizational and individual level. VCs tend to say they don‘t only invest in an idea but also the founding team. The yearly state of DevOps report has been telling us for years that there are common factors that lead to team satisfaction and performance. These factors just as well as the magic ingredients that investors are looking for are elements of flow. So what if we could connect the DevOps report factors to the dimensions of flow to show the impact flow can have?

Measurable results are definitely helpful when pitching to a customer but we as humans learn from stories. We have for centuries sat around the fire and listened to stories to make sense of the world and gather new perspectives. So if we think in pictures and stories what is it all about? The roles of consultants and coaches have been used and misused in so many contexts that the words in themselves are meaningless. Can we see ourselves as sherpas or mountain guides who help our clients safely scale the mountain? Providing moments of reflection and learning at base camp. Establishing belay so you can venture further without being afraid to fall. The metaphor of mountains and those who help you to summit provides space to integrate the different aspects of flow. Things such as purpose, motivation, skill challenge balance, and self-awareness come to mind. As does the flow of a story or game that gamers and game developers are familiar with. A communication scientist originally and a storyteller at heart those conversations resonated deeply with me. Finding the story or metaphor that helps you understand what flow is to you matters. But in the end, my product heart came through. The basic belief in user-centered product development is to find a user problem that is worth solving, deeply understand it, and develop a fitting solution. All else comes from that. So let‘s talk about the organizational user needs that flow can help with. In my eyes, there are three.

You as a leader. No matter the field your organization is in, where you are positioned in the market, or how well you are set up. Things change, quickly and frequently. To be able to lead through this constant change your personal flow matters. It helps you to manage yourself, focus, and find calm in the storm.

Your organization at large. How is value flowing? Where are things getting stuck? Is there alignment? Does everybody know where they are moving and why?

Teams and individuals. As important as it is for you as a leader to be able to find flow it is equally important for every single person, every team. Finding Flow means focus, purpose, quick feedback, and satisfaction with what you do and how you do it.

And this brings us right back to stories, metaphors, and even more powerful - pictures. I start each engagement by building a flow map. What are the areas within your organization and for you as a leader you want to work on? Which are the flow enablers influencing those areas? From there we can identify the levers we want to work on and start scaling the mountain.