We Focus on Flow
The Flow Tool
The Flow Tool is a simple and secure cloud-based system designed to unlock the full potential of the workforce’s intellectual capital and establish this as a primary source of competitive advantage. It aims to help businesses achieve greater efficiency, adaptability, and sustainable growth by increasing the availability, range, and quality of the basic building blocks of value.
The Flow Tool serves both as a diagnostic device and as a means to capture and mobilise intellectual assets that support improvement targets, such as cost savings, revenue growth, customer experience, operational efficiency, and workforce well-being. The Flow Tool output creates tactical and strategic responses to turbocharge progress towards achieving an improvement target.
Flow Capacity
The key to mobilising intellectual assets is collaboration, but not in the conventional sense. Traditional views of collaboration often fail to recognise or exploit its role as transport system for moving intellectual capital to where it can make the greatest impact. Harnessing a workforce’s intellectual capital means boosting their ability to mobilise their intellectual assets. To do this, we first need to measure and understand this ability.
For this we have Flow Capacity, the measure of how well a business and its workforce can mobilise their full range of intellectual assets.
The Collaboration Cycle
Flow Capacity depends on the capabilities demonstrated through the six phases of the Collaboration Cycle. These capabilities build and maintain the transport system for the workforce to mobilise their intellectual assets. These phases are shown in the Collaboration Cycle diagram. The Flow Tool tracks how well a work environment and workforce support each phase of the collaboration cycle. It provides a clear picture of their ability to mobilise diverse intellectual assets to achieve an improvement target.
Throughout my tenure as Chair and Chief Executive of BUPA, The Open University, and the Financial Reporting Council, as well as in my role as President of the CBI, empowering people to do what they do best has always been a challenge. However, with 'The Flow Tool' and Kangen Shugi, Chris and his team have transformed empowerment into a living, breathing part of everyday business operations. This shift is indeed long-overdue.
Flow Diagnostics & Asset Capture
The Flow Tool employs a range of pioneering psychological and behavioural techniques to (i) determine the workforce’s available energy to pursue an improvement target, (ii) identify personal and social barriers restricting the mobilisation of intellectual assets, (iii) identify structural and systemic barriers restricting the mobilisation of intellectual assets, and (iv) directly capture high-value intellectual assets—observations, opinions, insights, ideas, questions, challenges, and requirements that will accelerate progress towards an improvement target. Diagnostic data from the Flow Tool is used to develop Strategic Responses aimed at maximising the Flow Capacity of the work environment and workforce.
Asset Xploration, Packaging & Delivery
The AssetXplorer, an integral part of the Flow Tool framework, develops Tactical Responses to harness and mobilise intellectual assets. It operates in two main phases: Recognition and Mobilisation. During the Recognition phase, captured intellectual assets are assessed, valued, and added to the portfolio of assets. In the Mobilisation phase, these assets are packaged and delivered to stakeholders to support the achievement of improvement targets. These asset packages drive better decision-making, critical thinking, innovation, problem-solving, and collaboration.
The Critical Role of Energy in Value Creation
It requires emotional, cognitive and social energy for an employee to express an intellectual asset and for others to support it as it moves around the organisation, combining with other assets to maximise value. As work environments become more complex, bringing an asset to life, keeping it alive, and helping it grow demands more energy. With only a finite amount of energy to draw from, employees find it harder to express and move their most valuable intellectual assets.
To address this, the Flow tool identifies and eliminates restrictions that, if ignored, would increase the employee’s energy burden and affect their performance and well-being. In addition to increasing the flow of intellectual assets, the Flow tool anonymously captures high-value intellectual assets that support high-priority performance targets and delivers them directly to where they can add the most value. This reduces the energy burden on everyone.