Essentials

The jagged frontier illustrates the unpredictable boundaries of AI capabilities, where it excels at complex tasks but often fails at simpler ones, highlighting the need for systematic testing and awareness of these limits.

Exploration of emerging AI work patterns and their impact on work systems design, emphasizing experimentation and evidence-based insights.

Interaction triggers enhance responsiveness in worksystems by combining cadence and event-based signals for effective team interactions.

Core question on the coherence of interaction design using five dimensions as thinking lenses for verification.

Meeting Containers bundle activities based on shared participants, sequential dependencies, or common purpose to enhance meeting effectiveness.

Board to Activities outlines a process for defining necessary interactions based on coordination points in a workflow, ensuring each interaction is purpose-driven.

Activities become visible on the board through interactions that trigger decisions and changes, creating a living record of outcomes.

Meeting cadence is a deliberate design decision that varies by flight level, requiring different frequencies and durations for effective interactions.

The Interactions Network illustrates how information flows between meetings in a structured manner, emphasizing connections and feedback loops for effective collaboration.

Meeting Canvas outlines the purpose, outcomes, decisions, participants, and inputs needed for effective meetings to ensure clarity and alignment.

Analyze existing meetings to identify activities, their purposes, and problems for purposeful redesign.

Board and meeting alignment explores how board structure influences meeting systems and vice versa, emphasizing the need for coherence between both.

Activities determine necessary interactions in workflows, emphasizing action-oriented naming and purposeful meeting design.

Agile Interactions focus on purposeful activities rather than meetings to enhance workflow and decision-making.

Inherited - Integrated - Independent pattern allows corporate groups with autonomous subsidiaries to execute independently while inheriting strategic outcomes set by the parent company.

Unified organizational strategy with distributed execution across multiple coordination systems for effective implementation.

Direct Strategy enables specialized strategic work to flow directly from FL3 to FL1 teams without requiring coordination through FL2.

Inherited - Integrated - Aligned pattern describes corporate groups with subsidiaries that actively manage cross-product coordination to maintain strategic alignment with inherited corporate direction.

Integrated - Independent pattern for small organizations with one product/service, featuring a single board for strategy, coordination, and operations.

Inherited strategies involve a parent organization setting corporate strategy that subsidiaries adapt to their context without redefining the core strategy.

Integrated - Aligned describes a single integrated work system with coordinated areas for organizations managing multiple products/services, emphasizing transparency and active coherence management.

FL3 Connection Patterns outline how to link strategic work to execution in organizations, emphasizing the importance of clear flow, autonomy, coordination, and scalability.

Studio Mode optimizes collaboration and creativity for ambiguous work through intensive, synchronous communication and structured problem-solving.

Factory Mode optimizes well-defined, routine work through specialization and standardized processes, emphasizing efficiency and minimal coordination.

Ineffective Iterations occur when ambiguous work is organized serially through email, leading to slow feedback loops, and can be improved by shifting to direct collaboration in Studio Mode.

The Axis of Frustration describes how organizations fall into destructive cycles by failing to switch effectively between Factory Mode and Studio Mode, leading to inefficiency and wasted attention.

Fast Oscillation is a Dynamic Work Design pattern that enables organizations to quickly switch between Factory Mode (efficiency) and Studio Mode (collaboration) to solve problems effectively.

Wasted Attention is an anti-pattern caused by excessive collaboration and meetings that hinders productivity in well-defined work, requiring a shift back to efficient Factory Mode.

Dynamic Work Modes emphasize the need for organizations to switch between efficient and flexible work approaches based on current requirements.

Define and measure progress by setting clear metrics and goals to assess performance and identify areas for improvement.

Focus involves limiting the number of simultaneous initiatives to enhance efficiency and quality in organizations.

The 5 Core Activities of System Design from the Flight Levels model enhance business agility by aligning strategy, coordination, and operational execution across all organizational levels.

Agile interactions enhance communication and coordination among teams in complex organizations to align efforts with goals and adapt quickly to changes.

Continuous improvement in business agility involves planning and implementing changes based on insights gained, ensuring organizations actively pursue enhancements within their workflows.

Visualization of work processes enhances understanding and transparency in knowledge-based tasks by making invisible work visible through boards that track progress and dependencies.

The Formal Structure outlines the official design of the organization, detailing roles, rules, governance, and accountability systems to ensure clarity and stability.

The Value-Creation Structure outlines how teams, processes, and resources interact to create value for customers through continuous adaptation and feedback.

The Informal Structure examines social networks in organizations, highlighting communication patterns, trust, and collaboration beyond formal reporting lines.

Three parallel organizational structures—Value-Creation, Informal, and Formal—interact to shape how enterprises function and evolve.

Enabling Functions provide essential internal services and governance to enhance an organization's delivery capability and operational effectiveness.

Customer-Facing Products and Services deliver value directly to paying customers, integrating internal functions and external channels to shape reputation and drive revenue.

Supporting Products and Services provide internal products or services that enable and stabilize customer-facing systems through shared platforms and reusable components.

Pop-Up Systems are temporary, goal-oriented teams formed to address specific challenges and dissolve after achieving their objectives.

Work System Types provide a framework for understanding value-creating constellations in organizations to enhance design and coordination.

Flight Route Patterns reveal how work moves through an organization, helping leaders improve flow, collaboration, and adaptability.

Strategic Initiative pattern outlines the flow of work from strategy to delivery, emphasizing alignment while cautioning against command-and-control risks without feedback loops.

Local Coordination involves autonomous decision-making by local teams within delivery systems, promoting fast actions but risking strategic drift if overused.

Bottom-Up Initiative involves elevating ideas from teams for validation and support while balancing the need for local action to maintain efficiency.

Cross-Level Learning involves fluid interaction between multiple levels in complex systems, emphasizing learning across boundaries and requiring intentional communication and shared purpose.

Team-Only Route allows teams to independently manage localized work, enhancing efficiency but risking siloed learning and misalignment with broader goals.

Reaction card for expressing confusion or concern constructively.

The "I observe" reaction card helps highlight patterns, anomalies, or noteworthy elements that catch attention during observations.

The "I notice" reaction card facilitates pure observation of sensory input without interpretation or evaluation.

Sounding Reactions is a structured feedback method using visual cards for quick and inclusive feedback collection during presentations and review sessions.

The "I wonder" reaction card encourages exploration and curiosity by expressing questions during presentations to expand conversations and perspectives.

Reaction card for offering constructive suggestions to improve drafts.

Quality measures in delivery include escaped defects, customer satisfaction, production rollbacks, and unplanned downtime, balancing too little and too much quality focus.

Focus on delivering changes quickly while balancing quality and prioritizing valuable features, with metrics like Time in State, Cycle Time, and Lead Time to measure efficiency.

Measure the flow of raw work product to balance demand and supply while maintaining quality and focusing on valuable features through metrics like throughput and velocity.

Resilience in development and delivery systems is assessed through a "happiness" metric, indicating potential performance declines when teams overly focus on other metrics.

Value assessment measures customer satisfaction and alignment to strategy while balancing immediate tasks and long-term goals to avoid technical debt.

Consistency in delivery pace is crucial to avoid periods of low customer value and ensure process improvement without risk.

Six Dimensions of Performance emphasizes balancing competing forces in organizations to enhance effectiveness and sustainability without over-relying on single metrics.

Paradigms are deep frameworks that shape perception and problem-solving, influencing both understanding and limitations in perspective.

Overview of a hub and spoke network structure, commonly used in organizations and transportation.

Practices are adaptable, experience-based approaches that help solve recurring problems in work systems and promote effective organizational methods.

Principles are foundational rules that guide decision-making in organizations, helping to adapt solutions to unique challenges.

Network patterns describe how relationships and information flow in a system, providing a shared vocabulary for teams to discuss structures and interventions.

Essentials provide practical models for designing effective work systems, synthesized from various sources and mentors.

Patterns are recurring solutions to problems in specific contexts that standardize methods for effective workflow management and resource allocation in work systems design.

Switching team members between different teams fosters knowledge sharing and skill development but may disrupt continuity if not managed properly.

Merge involves combining two or more teams into a single unit to enhance collaboration and resource pooling, while requiring careful integration of team cultures.

Reteaming occurs when team dynamics shift due to the addition or departure of members, impacting perspectives and ideas over time.

A team grows too large and splits into smaller teams to maintain efficiency and carry on legacy and culture.

A smaller team is isolated from an existing team to focus on a specific task or project, often for specialized attention on critical work.

Summary of five key dynamic reteaming patterns that help teams adapt to change in fast-moving organizations.

Lonesome Twosomes describes disconnected pairs of nodes that are connected to each other but isolated from other pairs, representing isolated dyads within a larger network.

Celebrating diversity through a heterogeneous network that values varied interactions and different node types or connection strengths.

The Boss Is the Boss discusses strict hierarchical structures commonly found in traditional organizations and military command chains.

Homogeneous coalitions are groups of nodes that are densely connected internally with few connections to other groups, typical in networks with factions or cliques.

Get Past the Dragon discusses the concept of a Gate-Keeper as a node controlling access and filtering information in a network.

Disconnected individuals represent isolated entities with no communication or interaction.

The Inner Circle describes a core-periphery network where a central group is densely connected, while peripheral nodes connect only to the core.

Boundary spanners are individuals in a network who connect different departments or communities within organizations.

"Everybody Holding Hands" describes a cohesive clique as a fully connected network where every node is linked to every other node, representing tight-knit groups with strong relationships.