Why More Control Means More Chaos

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. For the last two, three weeks, we have been interviewing a lot of people in the community, the flow community, the Flowtopia community, including the chief flower, whatever you want to call her, my friend Helen Beale.

And if you haven't caught any of the, there's probably a half a dozen, maybe more, video interviews we've done with people presenting at Flowtopia, which is June 24th, virtual. I think it's 12 hours, so it's pretty much all day. tv, or our Techstrong OTT app, depending what screen you like to watch videos on.

It's available on iOS and Android and Roku and Apple TV and Amazon and all that stuff. Or you could go to our YouTube channel, the Techstrong TV YouTube. In any event, no matter where you go, look up flow or value stream or Flowtopia, and you'll be able to see them all here.

I have another presenter from Flowtopia that I want to introduce to you today. Her name is Erika Engelen. Erika comes to us today from Belgium, right outside of Brussels, actually, and she is the founder of the Flowhive, and let's welcome her.

Hey, Erika. How are you? Hi, Alan.

Thank you. I'm doing very well. It's extremely hot here today, so I'll try to keep it cool.

Thank you for having me. We are in South Florida on the Atlantic Coast here in Boca Raton, near Miami, Fort Lauderdale. I'm going to bet it's probably a little hotter here.

Probably. I always have problems with Fahrenheit to Celsius, but typically at this time of the year, we are like 90, 92 degrees every single day, which is probably close to 30, I'm going to guess- Yeah ... Celsius.

Yeah. It's similar here today. So.

But we also have 96% humidity, which makes it like a wet towel in your face, which is- Oh, wow ... that's a lot of fun. I feel for you.

The good news is, even our office studios here, we're probably a mile from the beach, so you do get a sea breeze, and- Oh ... and you can always go to the beach if you want. Yeah, I just wanted to say you have a place to go to after- Yes ...

this interview. Yeah. Well, I've got more interviews to do.

But anyway, Erika, I gave people a little bit of background. You're the founder of the Flowhive, but go into a little more detail. Give people a sense of your journey.

Yeah. Awesome. So maybe first of all, the Flowhive, because it's a little bit peculiar.

It's not a normal company. So we're a collective of individual experts. We're all independent, and we enable organizations to connect their strategy to adaptive organizational dynamics, which are owned by the people.

And we bring in the experts that are relevant at that time to help that organization and to start really from where they are in their journey. Okay. So that's a little bit what we do.

So it's a little bit different than any other normal organization that hires- Well, we're all a little bit different. Right? Yeah.

This is true. Absolutely. And what about you personally, Erika?

What has your journey been like to founding the Flowhive? Well, it's been a rocky boat, to be honest, so it's not a linear career path that I've taken. I actually started out as a graphic designer and a photographer.

Really? So that's completely different. I went into marketing, worked for technology companies for over 15 years.

Okay. Was a marketing manager of many open source technology companies. Very cool.

The last one was Red Hat. Wow. And it's actually there that I got the interest in how organizational dynamics influence the ability to deliver value to the community.

Mm-hmm. And it's from seeing how community-driven organizations can build things much quicker, much faster, much more of quality than in many other organizations which are traditionally structured. So it's from that experience that I had myself from within open source environments that actually I started to transition to enabling other organizations who weren't open source, to start working with those products.

Because very often the software products that are delivered by open source communities, they really struggle with delivering on their ability within traditionally organized organizations, because their structures are completely different. " And that was just because they needed to collaborate in a different way, and they weren't used to that, which was interesting to me. And I was like, okay, I'm in marketing, but from my marketing perspective, I can't really help those organizations.

I can talk about how awesome our products are, but if those organizations, and most of them are quite traditionally structured, if they aren't able to work with those products that we deliver, then there's nothing I can do. " That was my first going in. And Agile didn't really teach me that much, to be honest.

But then I stumbled upon Team Topologies and- Mm-hmm ... Accelerate, and all those kinds of influences that really gave me that aha moment that I knew that was going to also enable those organizations to think differently about how they were structured and how they could really benefit from open source technology. So that was the entry point many years ago.

And then, of course, I transitioned also to helping organizations just purely with how to create flow and better organizational dynamics within their organizations, aside from whether or not adopting open source technology. Open source. Yeah.

And then I founded my own company. So that's- Good for you. What a great story.

It's interesting. So I have about 25 years in security, maybe more. 35 years in technology, 25 plus in security.

The reason I originally got into DevOps was because of security. I thought it was a great way to reduce security, to make our code more secure from the get-go before deployment, so we wouldn't have all these problems after the code is deployed. com and the DevOps Institute and everything else.

Yeah. So it's funny how your passion in one area can take you into- Yeah ... these other new areas.

Yeah. At that moment, it completely made sense. Looking back at it, it might seem like a really weird route I took.

Yeah, it was kind of an abstract, yeah. In the moment, it was normal. It was, well, that's life, right?

For people who want to find out more about Flow, The Flow Hive, what's the website? com. That's easy enough.

com, otherwise you see bee hives and stuff. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Which is a normal thing, but apparently it's also a brand for bee hives. Really? Oh, very cool.

All right. com. Excellent.

io. Okay. It's a circle community.

Erika, you are discussing how to thrive in complexity. True. Yeah.

Tell us. And how to reverse control. That's actually the headline, which of course, goes together.

The thing is, for many years, I think many organizations thought that in order to be successful, you needed to be able to have as much control over your organization as possible. And I think for a while, that might have worked, just after the Industrial Revolution. But then there came a time, and that's for decades now, that we start to feel that something's off, that it's no longer working.

On the contrary, I think that even sometimes more control means more bureaucracy, more chaos, less speed. Actually, all the things that organizations don't want. And it was already kind of obvious to some, but especially during the last years when COVID hit, and we had so many disruptions with energy, with war, with, now as well, AI technology.

Everything is speeding up so quickly that organizations feel like, damn, everything that we knew, everything that worked before, suddenly seems to work against us. And we have no clue anymore what to do. There seems to be no framework, no methodology, no best practices.

Everyone is in this liminal space where they- Yeah ... don't know anymore what's up or down or what to do. And that is what my talk is about.

It's about how is it possible that we're in this situation right now, and what will get us out of it. It is. You know what they say, when God opens or closes a door, he opens a window, or something like that.

We are truly living in kind of historical times. AI is obviously the big push here. And I think it's interesting, sometimes from where I sit, I talk to people like you all day.

I observe the industry. But we're also an ongoing concern ourselves using AI, and agentics, and everything. But from where I sit, people fall into two camps.

And it's interesting. I think it has a lot to do with human nature. " They want an opportunity.

" Yeah. There's not a lot of middle. " No pun intended, right?

They either embrace it or they shun it. Yeah. And I think obviously the people who shun it are in for a rough ride.

Because it's not going away. But it is an interesting time. Yeah.

And I think there's of course, some personal transformation that you need to go through- Yes. There is ... in order to know what to do and find a way to be comfortable with this new world.

And that's absolutely true. But I think in terms of looking at your organization, your strategy, the way that you build it, the way that you go about organizing yourself with your people in your organization, it doesn't need to be that black and white. It's not like we say, okay, just lose all control, let everything run wild and see what happens.

No. Because control isn't working anymore. No, it's not that.

I think especially now that things are moving so fast, we need to create areas in which we can be that fast, in which we can be innovative, in which we can introduce new technology, in which we can take risks. And that's where we can sense for, I call it emergence. Yeah.

What is new, what's coming up? What do our customers want? What does the market want?

What can we experiment with? And you need that space in some areas of your organization. Yes.

But on the other hand, you also need stable bits. You need the bits that support in the generic and in the supported domains that can really hold the space for everything that is constantly moving. So you need both.

You need spaces in which it's stable, it's calm, and there's a number of people, as you said, who will just thrive in those areas. And then you need other areas which are constantly disrupted, which are constantly new, where you wake up in the morning, you have no clue what's going to happen. And you also have people thrive in those areas.

So just use the benefit of the people that you have to build that environment, which can be adaptive whilst also being stable. I love it. Yeah.

It's what makes the world go round, right? Yeah. But it's difficult because in order to do that, and you might see it in my talk because I'm bringing a friend on stage.

Oh, okay. It's the death corpse of control. So I'm kind of doing a funeral.

I think sometimes we need- You heard it here first. Go ahead. Yeah.

I think sometimes we need rituals to say goodbye to things. I don't know. We, as human species, we have a very hard relation with letting go.

Everything that is dying is something that we mourn. While in organizations, that's not a good practice. No, we got to move on.

We need to let things die. If it's not working, if it's too hard, just let it go. I agree.

And see what is emerging. You need to create space. But we find that- I've been guilty of this, Erica, throughout my career.

Sometimes if you're going to get to know, get to know quick and move on. Yeah. Don't sit there mourning or trying to do...

This is something I've been guilty of, and I've seen other entrepreneurs and organizations, they do unnatural acts- Yeah ... to try to keep something that just don't work. Yeah.

It doesn't work anymore, if it ever worked. Yeah. And when you've got to do unnatural acts to keep something viable, it's probably not a good thing for your organization.

Yeah. True. And it's very often a person builds an organization.

They have an idea, a vision, a product, something that they're really fond of, and they cling to it like it's their baby. And then they build that organization around it, and that's good. But at a certain point, you need to grow your organization, and it needs to be able to evolve.

And if you then keep clinging to your original kid, it just doesn't work. You need them- No, I know. You can't ...

who are able to let things go and build new things, and sense what is needed in society. And we're really bad at that. Yes, we are.

And I'll tell you another thing. It's true with people too, in your organization. This is right out of the Phoenix Project with Brent in the Phoenix Project.

It's very hard to sometimes say, they're a good person, they're just not the right person for this role. Yeah. And that also is a thing that plagues a lot of organizations.

It's plagued our organization. Anyway, Erica, we're over time. I told you these things go quickly.

But- Quickly. My God. Yes.

It goes quick. It's okay. But I want to thank you for coming on.

I want to wish you success at both the Flowhive and at your session at Flowtopia. io, June 24th. It's just about all day.

You can go there. But for now, Erica Engelen, founder of Flowhive. Thank you for being here on Techstrong TV.

We're going to take a break. We'll be back in a bit.