Get Your Whole Company Into Flow

Several years ago, I wrote about how the mental state of flow can help your teams perform better. Flow state is when you are operating at the peak of your capability, with just enough challenge to fully engage your brain but still within the limits of your level of mastery. It gets all your synapses firing in tandem, aligned toward one purpose. The result? It feels great and it yields extraordinary performance.

We all want flow for ourselves. Whether it’s the mental state of flow, or just the ease of flow in our personal or professional lives. But what if you could achieve the same thing at an organizational level?

What It Is Like to NOT be in Flow

Imagine a rowing team without a coxswain to call out the rowing rhythm. The team hasn’t been training together. Some rowers are stronger than others, some are more agile, and some are more determined. They get in the boat and the starting signal goes off and they surge forward. Then slow down. Then they surge sideways. Then they lurch about for a while, and long after everyone else has crossed the finish line, they’re still meandering from one side of the river to the other, tired and frustrated.

Organizations can feel this way. When departments are siloed, and projects lack coordination with each other, when stakeholders have different priorities and no one is quite sure  what other teams are doing: The company meanders. Symptoms of an organization that is not in flow include duplicated efforts, stalled projects, market stagnation, high employee turnover, and low profits.

When departments are siloed, and projects lack coordination with each other, the company meanders.

Why We Stay Out of Flow

Achieving organizational flow isn’t simple. Many companies strive for years to achieve organizational “alignment,” to break down siloes, and coordinate efforts across departments. Those that succeed, tend to outperform competitors. But it takes significant vision, investment, and often a large amount of custom tools and workarounds to ensure consistent communication. Even the most determined companies can struggle to achieve their full flow potential.

The Missing Piece

Here at Membrain, we’ve always striven to provide tools that enhance workflow. Our core product was built on the concept of visual workflows that are both educational (embedding training and coaching within the workflow) and actionable. We started with sales projects (called opportunity management in other systems), and later added prospecting and account growth.

This way, our customers have built structure capital for sales execution based on desired outcomes and prevented best-practices from disappearing through the door if and when people leave.

This has been great for sales teams, but our clients tell us they want more. They want workflows for every aspect of their business. So, they get creative. They customize our sales workflows to coordinate business planning, marketing campaigns, product launch coordination, software development, event planning, new hire ramp-ups, and much more.

They’ve told us how much they appreciate being able to do this. But it’s still a work-around. Dashboards, workflows, and analytics are built for sales teams, not other use-cases.

What If We Built It?

So we thought: If the market is doing such a poor job of providing the tools companies need to enhance workflows… and if our clients are ingeniously using our product to fill that gap… what if we just built them a tool they don’t have to work around?

Enter: Flows. Flows is Membrain’s latest product addition, coming soon. It allows customers to manage any workflow or project directly inside Membrain, with a more flexible framework that can be customized to any purpose.

With Flows, your organization can execute with clarity, consistency, and strategic focus. Flows eliminates departmental siloes and enables powerful cross-functional collaboration. With Flows, everyone knows what to do, when to do it, how, and why it matters.

Equipping your teams with Flows is like equipping your rowing team with a skilled coxswain who knows how to call time. Making it their main workflow is like training the team to row in time with each other. Instead of erratic progress, Flows enables steady forward momentum that gets you to the goal faster.