I want to talk about FlowJo.
FlowJo is our mojo. It’s our way of working.
Being such an important part of our framework, it’s something that we spend an enormous amount of time on developing.
And here’s why.
The environment that you live and work and operate in defines your behavior.
It defines, in many senses, your state of being.
Just think about a time when you really didn’t want to go to a dinner party, concert or whatever it was. But you went ahead and joined the crowd, and the crowd was having so much fun that, by default, you started having fun.
Through those experiences, we can understand how our environments actually influence our behaviour.
And this is why the idea of falling to your level of training becomes so important.
Because you build a system which acts as a structure that allows you to operate through. A framework for success.
We have built a business that breaks the traditional, fixed hierarchy.
We still have hierarchies. You are always going to have a natural organic hierarchy, but they arrive and collapse as quickly as possible based on the context and situation.
However, the key here is that our business structure acts as a network of autonomous teams.
What it has allowed us to do is to define our competitive advantage in the market. Which is our ability to deliver.
We have worked out how to ship data engineering and data solutions in the work that we do in very small buckets of work and we get it shipped.
Almost to the point that we can guarantee a delivery.
But it’s all being built into our FlowJo from the presales to what we call sprint-zero. Which is a deep understanding of the assessments that we’re required to understand, i.e. getting under the hood and into the architecture, and ultimately into the delivery.
And all of this is built around design thinking and a lean, agile approach.
It’s a very exciting framework, because what it does is replace our middle-management layer.
We’ve looked at what managers typically do, and in a structured or a hierarchical organisation, executives and management always end up whacking us.
Now if we take that management layer, pull it out and identify that we need to have strategic direction, putting that at a board level, outside of the business.
Boom.
It sits on the side and it guides the broader aspect of the business.
By taking that management layer out, we are able to build out a new framework. With that, all of the roles and responsibilities that a manager does gets built into FlowJo.
And then you’ve got these autonomous teams working within the context of our framework.
For us, it defines the metric of success and our ability to truly compete in a highly competitive, and high-performance environment.
For me, as CEO, it really helps me understand where our cultural misalignments occur, because I can see where dissonance starts forming and how to manage that in a very healthy, proactive, balanced way for the teams that we are working within.
