Finn: Hi everybody, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in the world. We are in Ireland—both Hayden and I. I’m in Dublin, and he’s in Kinsale, Cork. Today, we’re going to talk to you about this transformation sprint, how it evolved, and how we refined it through our work, which, as Michael mentioned, is with Flow.
First, let’s introduce ourselves. Hayden, I’ll get you to start.
Introduction
Hayden: Good morning, evening, or afternoon. Finn and I come from different parts of the business world. I come from a business culture background, whereas Finn, who will introduce himself in a moment, comes from the IT side. My background is primarily in business, and I’ve had the good fortune of doing a lot of writing about the things I’ve observed inside organizations. I’ve worked extensively as an analyst and currently rank as number one in digital transformation on the Thinkers 360 league table. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about.
I’ve written for the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and I’ve worked with organizations like Royal Bank of Scotland, Swift, Nokia, CLS, and the European Commission. My primary interest in this field has always been: What is it that companies know they should be doing but don’t do? Often, organizations are aware that they are making the wrong decisions, and they know what the right decisions are—but those right decisions never seem to happen. That’s something we’ll explore today.
Finn: As Hayden mentioned, I’m more of the IT guy—a CIO and CTO. I started my career in financial services, working with big banks like Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and Visa. I later moved to the U.S. and spent time in San Francisco before transitioning into the dot-com world, working with companies like Travelocity, Paddy Power, and an offshore development team in Argentina.
That experience of working on both sides of the fence—corporate financial services and fast-paced startups—was critical to my growth as a technologist. I later brought that knowledge back into the financial sector, using what I had learned in startups to help organizations transform.
About Flow Academy
At Flow Academy, we focus on fixing stalled transformations through the Transformation Sprint. We also work on digital strategy with Enterprise Flow and help organizations develop more effective operating models through the Flow Operating Model. In addition, we offer training, research, and content creation—producing books and materials based on our work with clients.
How We Met
Hayden and I met in 2013. At the time, I was working at Paddy Power. When I joined, I had a standard desk, but as the CTO, I was also given a large private office. Sitting there alone didn’t feel right—it didn’t align with my experience in startups, where space was a shared commodity. So, I transformed my office into an agora, a communal meeting space. At one point, we set a record with 50 people in my office at once. Initially, facilities management hated it, but by the end, they claimed it was their idea!
Hayden came to visit me in Dublin with some banking clients. Maybe you can pick it up from there, Hayden?
Hayden: Sure. At the time, I was working with banks on their disruption challenges. Between 2016 and 2017, it was clear that many banking executives understood what needed to be done, but as an organization, they were unable to execute it. That disconnect was frustrating—individually, they had the right ideas, but collectively, they couldn’t act.
So, I took some of these executives on a tour of companies that were excelling at transformation, and Paddy Power was one of those companies. They were doing DevOps, delivering more than 50 releases per day, and had managed to re-platform while keeping the business running—things that banks desperately needed to do. We brought a group of executives to Dublin to see how transformation should really be done.
Bridging Leadership and Agility
One of the key things we were working on at the time was integrating leadership and business functions into agility. Many agile transformations focus on IT, but we were pioneering ways to connect delivery teams with decision-makers, ensuring that leadership was engaged in defining priorities and outcomes.
That work eventually led us to write our book, Flow. We deliberately used the term "flow" rather than "agile" because, in many organizations, the word "agile" carries baggage—it’s not always well received in the business world.
What is Flow?
Flow emphasizes visualization and social interaction across all parts of an organization. While much of this used to happen physically with whiteboards and sticky notes, today, many of these interactions are digital. However, the core principle remains: decision-making should be transparent and socially interactive.
Too often, people are stuck in meetings where they’re told to align, rather than participating in meaningful discussions about important decisions. Flow provides a minimalist framework to help organizations work more effectively.
Extending Agile into the Business
Agile has long been successful in IT, but extending those principles into the business has been a challenge. Business leaders struggle to apply agility beyond software development because agile frameworks often come with jargon and rituals that make sense to IT teams but not to executives.
Another challenge is that businesses tend to view their markets as fixed customer segments rather than evolving needs. Many still operate with a 20th-century mindset, where they push products to predefined customer groups instead of continuously adapting to changing demands. Companies like Netflix and Amazon, by contrast, operate with thousands of micro-segments, adjusting their offerings dynamically.
Key Elements of Flow
Some of the key elements of Flow include:
- Extending agile upstream: Bringing agility into business decision-making and customer innovation.
- Focusing on value, not just pace: Delivering value rather than simply delivering faster.
- Ensuring IT has space for self-improvement: Refactoring, upgrading, and replacing outdated systems.
- Introducing a new form of governance: Using visualization rather than bureaucracy to track work.
- Fostering collaboration: Encouraging collective intelligence through team-based decision-making.
Flow emerged as a response to the need for organizations to transform effectively—especially those struggling with traditional transformation approaches.
Conclusion
Businesses need to transform now more than ever. The traditional approach to transformation—big, high-risk, multi-year programs—frequently fails. We believe that an agile, incremental approach is the answer.
The biggest critics of this approach tend to be consultants because traditional transformations provide them with large, long-term contracts. But organizations don’t need transformation programs that last years—they need real value delivered quickly. That’s why we advocate a time-boxed, four-week transformation sprint.
We’ll now open the floor for questions. Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter if you’d like to continue the conversation. Thank you all for joining us today!