Organisations in Flow

The Value Question

With the current economic climate, organisations are up against the most fundamental question from their stakeholders—of value.

Is your organisation able to consistently create value?

With geo-political issues receding from collective awareness, organisations are back to tracing their trajectories of revival and growth. Progress is slow and sometimes, made harder by strategies that haven’t quite hit the mark as expected. This is particularly strong in India which saw a great upswing in startup investment and growth.

Viewed simply, every organisation is a human system designed to consistently create value for its stakeholders. Value, in itself may have different dimensions, but it remains the defining denominator for any organisation's credibility and particularly, for its leadership.  

The ability to create value under challenging circumstances is what differentiates great companies from others. In addition, the capacity to be agile and competitive while wrestling with constant uncertainty is the ultimate prize every organisation strives for.

Organisations have hustled to win the race for resilience, often landing in some unexpected and uncomfortable places.

“A culture of silence is a dangerous culture.”

Amy Edmondson, author of ‘The Fearless Organisation’

Burnout, erosion of trust on the rise

In 2023, the WHO reported that 40% of people are suffering from burnout symptoms worldwide. This comes after the WHO officially declaring burnout as an occupational hazard. An Amazon India survey found that 68% of people are looking to switch industries at a pay cut. Engagement levels have continued to remain low. Gartner finds as much as 85% of companies reporting an increase in mental health & wellbeing investments. Despite best intentions, organisations are finding that trust in leadership may be eroding along with a clear increase in the ‘culture of silence.’

With such disturbing trends, it begs the obvious question.

What lessons can be drawn from organisations who are still thriving today?

Contemporary research points to two ‘human’ factors that underpin successful, thriving enterprises.

Psychological Safety and Sense of Purpose.

Psychological safety is an environment where people are not afraid to be themselves. This means, being able to share their opinions even if they are contrarian and, feeling safe to own up to their mistakes and learning from them.

While safety forms the ground, a sense of purpose provides the forward momentum. With a sense of purpose, people feel as though they are working for their reasons, not someone else’s. This is a major shift which activates a totally different part of the brain’s network, rebalances the nervous system and puts people in a ‘toward’ state. This is when people hold themselves accountable to a higher standard, to better outcomes by being more resourceful and resilient.

Balancing Safety and Sense of Purpose

As more and more research and resources on these topics have emerged, attempts to intervene into these time-tested factors have brought their own consequences.

Getting the right balance of psychological safety and a sense of purpose is critical for every organisation, based on the evolutionary stage it finds itself in.

Cultures that are high on purpose and low on safety can feel like being on a high-speed highway, where everyone is driving way faster than normal, hoping no one gets hurt, whilst still worrying if they are good or fast enough.

Where the scale tilts too much in favour of safety, it can create complacency at one level and anxiety at another. This perhaps explains why managers are feeling more stressed than individual contributors as per Gallup.

Somajna’s work in on the Human Foundations of Organisational Transformation. 

Building a robust foundation is an iterative process that involves several intersecting disciplines being integrated to support a major organisational shift such as Digital or AI-powered transformation.  

Our work is informed by deep understanding of the landscape of transformation, from our own experience of being part of numerous transformation cycles and research of established models and frameworks in the field. 

What makes a foundation robust? 

We believe the most reliable indicator of an organisation’s foundation is this:  

The Ease of Creating Value. We call this ‘Flow.’

The only state that maximises safety and purpose in an intuitive, embodied way is flow.

When one is in flow, they are in sync with their environment, creating value with ease.

The ease of creating value

The concept of flow, defined as the optimal human experience by the eminent psychologist Mihaly Csiktzenmihalyi (watch his video here) can be applied equally to individuals and organisations, with slight adaptations.

Translated into everyday terms, this is how one might distinguish organisations or teams based on the level of flow they have. 

When flow is good..	When flow is low...
Faster decision making	Analysis paralysis
Ease of collaboration	Silos within silos
Less operational friction	Innovation fatigue
Best-in-class customer experience	Superstar culture
Higher accountability and ownership	Notification overload
Openness to learn from mistakes	Play-it-safe mentality
All leading up to ...green dashboards	And ultimately… long meetings

All our coaching and consulting interventions are focused on enabling leaders and organisations to find flow; to create value with ease.

The first step towards creating flow is measuring it. Measurement that provides useful insights triggers the necessary conversations for restoring momentum.

ALiVE: The Organisational Flow Diagnostic

ALiVE serves as an indicator of the level of the flow within the team/organisation.

It is an anonymous online survey with 22 questions categorised under three themes, stacked across three levels. The design enables the instrument to provide clear actionable insights about areas that need attention. The attention may be required to mobilise leadership, remove roadblocks, build capability or any combination of factors necessary to enhance the ease of creating value. The three themes which the survey organises itself around are:

1.      Safety and Belonging: Do people feel safe to be themselves, take risk and responsibility and, express in their authentic voice, challenge authority when required?

2.     Alignment & Focus: What is the organisation repeatedly drawn to? How much of the organisation’s energy and capabilities are dedicated to distractions?

3.     Empowering Environment: With safety and alignment to purpose, do people have the right environment to accelerate and create value with ease?

The themes are based on the 3 channels of expression that shape organisational behaviour – Voice, Attention & Movement. Read more here.

A snapshot of each theme is also captured at 3 levels – the individual, team and organisation. The 3 levels correspond to the systemic, social and psychological domains which create the core concerns that organisations respond to.

It is important to recognise that flow is not the same as employee engagement.

Engagement can be high in pockets for the wrong reasons such as teams being engaged with what are essentially distractions (projects invented for optics, laissez faire ways of working with low accountability, complacent cultures etc). However, the combined perspective of themes and levels allows organisations to isolate root causes of inconsistent performance, and misaligned morale or motivation. Knowing that a certain pocket of the organisation is distracted because of a specific set of reasons creates intervention leverage. It helps organisations to take decisive actions towards enhancing flow. This is particularly useful in smaller organisations where a handful of individuals could be impacting the environment disproportionately. Again, being able to recognise and address these issues without compromising safety is a big win.

Organisations move in the direction of their most compelling conversations. The primary ask of leadership is to make the environment conducive to continuously calibrate conversations so they are aligned with the purpose of the company.

ALiVE acts as the calibrating mirror and when it is coupled with other interventions to create alignment and collective capability, it sets up the roadmap for sustainable growth.