What is a Flow Clinic?

A Flow Clinic is a facilitated session where individuals or teams bring flow-related challenges, trade-offs, or structural uncertainties for collaborative exploration. Rather than prescribing answers, Flow Clinics create a space for advice-based decision-making, guided by shared principles and facilitated inquiry.

It’s not a status meeting, a steering committee, or a re-org planning session. It’s a safe environment to stress-test ideas, gather diverse input, and increase the visibility and quality of flow decisions.

Purpose of a Flow Clinic

Enable decentralized, transparent decision-making around flow.

  • Minimize rework and misalignment caused by unclear ownership or siloed decisions
  • Increase clarity and confidence in structural or interaction-based decisions
  • Reduce delay in resolving team-level blockers to flow
  • Maximize learning by sharing context across teams

When to hold a Flow Clinic

Signals or triggers might include:

  • “We’re not sure who should own this capability.”
  • “This team is overloaded but we don’t know where to shift work.”
  • “There’s friction between two teams trying to work on the same thing.”
  • “We want to experiment with a new boundary but need feedback.”
  • “A new constraint (tech, regulatory, strategic) has emerged and we need to adapt.”

Who attends a Flow Clinic?

  • The person/team bringing the flow challenge (the initiator)
  • Facilitators (e.g. internal coaches, org designers, transformation leads)
  • A diverse set of advisors—people with relevant context, affected roles, or adjacent perspectives
  • Optional: Observers (for learning)

Clinic structure (typical agenda – 30 to 60 min)

  1. Welcome and framing (5 mins)

    • Purpose of the clinic
    • Norms: psychological safety, curiosity, advice process

  2. Present the flow challenge (10 mins)

    • What’s the context?
    • What’s the decision or uncertainty?
    • What have you tried or considered?

  3. Advice round (15–25 mins)

    • Advisors ask clarifying questions
    • Offer options, analogies, patterns, risks, or similar experiences
    • Facilitator may surface or sketch possible options using visual aids

  4. Next steps (5–10 mins)

    • What decision(s) will the initiator make or explore further?
    • Record a draft Flow Decision Record (FDR)
    • Assign any follow-ups (if needed)

Clinic outputs

  • Draft or updated Flow Decision Record (FDR)
  • Shared understanding of flow constraints or enablers
  • Optionally visual models (sketches, capability maps, service interactions)

Why it works

Flow Clinics are grounded in:

  • Decentralized decision-making: empowering teams without creating chaos
  • The advice process: distributing influence without diffusing responsibility
  • Visual sense-making: using maps and models to uncover dynamics and options
  • Social learning: enabling cross-pollination of insights across teams

Flow clinics should seek to maintain the Flow Roadmap as a living document.

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