Andrew Davis (AutoRABIT)

Hello everybody. Delighted to be here, and very happy to have a chance to speak to you about wiring the winning organism through flow engineering.

First of all, just a disclaimer that all of the conclusions you're about to hear are oversimplifications — just to get that out of the way. But that's okay, because in reality everything is an oversimplification. Reality is messy and complex; it's ever-changing.

But allow me to give a summary of the book Wiring the Winning Organization in just three slides.

In the spirit of oversimplification: social circuitry or organizational wiring are the connections by which individual efforts are integrated towards a common purpose, and the role of leaders is to manage the social circuitry that determines whether their organizations gain great outcomes or dismal outcomes.

Now, I would summarize the whole of Wiring the Winning Organization as helping engineers to become leaders through understanding liberal arts — which may be a subject you've ignored for a while. But to quote Peter Drucker: leadership is a classic liberal art.

Now, if you're anything like me, you might have shunned the liberal arts in university because things like sociology are totally unpredictable. Humans are messy — they're very, very messy. Psychology is messy. Biology is messy. The further you get to the right side of this diagram, you get to things like math. And the thing about math is that there are right answers and wrong answers. It's very, very definitive. And computer science is way over on that side of the spectrum — it's a clean discipline.

Now, I would say this is not just a university issue, because also the way we think the organization should run is very much like this. So we launch a product, we think people will buy it, we'll make a lot of money — very clear. We will hire somebody, they're gonna take over a certain department, everything is gonna run better. Everything's very simple in our minds. But the way the organization actually runs is way over on the messy side of the spectrum, right? So I refer to these three domains as reality, university, and fantasy.

I would posit further that this reflects the difference in our brains: the right hemisphere versus the left hemisphere. And I'm not talking about the Facebook memes — I'm talking about right hemisphere versus left hemisphere. I'm talking about the work of Iain McGilchrist, whose conclusion after analyzing 2,300 research papers is that the right hemisphere of the brain is focused on broad, diffuse attention of an ever-changing reality, and focus on the whole as opposed to the parts. Whereas the left brain is the part of the brain that manages tools, tool use, and language. And it's focused on analyzing, breaking down, and thinking in terms of universals that are permanent.

Connecting these two hemispheres of the brain is the corpus callosum, which is a very low-bandwidth connection that allows information between these two totally different ways of experiencing the world to try to balance out. But in general, it's very low-bandwidth. So you tend to get stuck in one hemisphere or the other at any given time.

And what the brain does is that the right hemisphere is more or less dealing with reality, and the left hemisphere goes through a process of reification and it turns everything into something that you can name. So there's a word for everything; everything has a definition. And it's made into things that can be labeled and named and put through large language models and so forth.

This is also the origin of interdependence versus silos. The reality is that your organization has never existed in silos. They simply don't exist. The reason we say "don't operate in silos" is 'cause silos don't exist. But our left brain makes us think, "Well, this is my department, this is what we do — please stop bugging me with your extraneous concerns."

And so the book Flow Engineering and this discipline deals with these two sides. Flow is the ever-changing nature of phenomena, dealing with reality and wholes. Engineering is the ability to analyze, break down, and control. And there's a paradox to flow: because if you wanna get collective team workflow, you need to step back and look at the whole picture. But when you're engaging in psychological flow, it's a very focused process. And so flow engineering is about balancing these two very disparate approaches to the world to experience.

And I would posit further that this is in fact a method for training in transformational leadership by bridging inner flow and outer flow. And I would say that because there is no inner and outer — and that's part of the illusion that the mind creates as a left-brain concept, the idea of an inner versus an outer. And that organizational transformation depends on personal transformation, of leaders in particular. And it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

And so, we have provided — the book has a rich set of exercises, and there's an extra set of downloads for leading flow engineering you can access there. So, great pleasure to be with you all. Thank you so much.