Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action

We have been doing it for many years without realizing it: flow engineering. The book of the same name by Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis describes a pragmatic, visual and collaborative variant of value stream mapping. It is about how teams improve business processes by improving the work flow and thus the value creation.

To do this, they combine systems with design thinking, data-driven with human-centered mindset, organizational with process design, and mapping with Miro. Using examples, they explain the various mapping techniques:

🎯 Outcome map: The “Why” and the Goal.
🏞️ Value stream map: The “How” and the Flow.
🕸️ Dependency map: The “Who” and the Blockers.
🔭 Future state map: The “Vision”.
🛣️ Roadmap map: The “When” and the Plan.

They combine this into a process that ultimately aims to help:

✅ Identify value.
✅ Build clarity.
✅ Enable flow.

Admittedly, our approach is a little more simple, but similar:

1️⃣ We sketch the process steps and results on the Value Chain Canvas.
2️⃣ Then, we identify potential problems, solutions, and benefits.
3️⃣ Finally, we prioritize the use cases.

Business (process) understanding is followed by user understanding, i.e., stakeholder analysis using the canvas of the same name and (analytics & AI) use case definition (there is also a canvas for this in the Data & AI Business Design Kit).

So the good news is: Data & AI Business Design and Flow Engineering are compatible, so combine them! Because there was one thing I missed in the book: how AI powers the flow.

On the one hand, there is no point in automating shitty processes with AI; often, processes have to be reengineered from scratch to make the work flow. On the other hand, there is also no point in reengineering processes without letting AI do the work.

I would even go so far as to say that process, organization, flow, and agentic design will become one thing in the future: system design. So who’s going to write the book “System Engineering: From Humans and Agents to Business Value”? 😉