What is FLOW?

The Foundational principles establish the minimum rules required for FLOW to function at all. They ensure that work is clearly defined, consistently classified, and evaluated in context before any routing, optimization, or governance decisions are made. Without these principles, organizations struggle to compare work, assign ownership, or scale decision-making without confusion.

FLOW establishes a common language for understanding work complexity and scale.

All analysis starts by defining a single, bounded unit of work that can be counted, owned, and evaluated.

Each Unit of Effort has exactly one FLOW level at a time—never a hybrid.

FLOW is determined by how difficult and how large an effort is to execute, not by its topic.

The same Unit of Effort may fall into different FLOW levels depending on environment and conditions.

These principles explain how Units of Effort connect, nest, and interact inside larger systems. They focus on understanding hierarchy, dependencies, and aggregation so work can be coordinated without fragmentation. This layer is where FLOW moves from isolated tasks to system-level clarity.

Senior Units of Effort are often enabled by smaller supporting units that exist in service of the whole.

A Unit of Effort may contain multiple nested units, each with its own FLOW classification.

Units should be assessed both on their own and in relation to other connected units.

Accountability must exist at every layer, from senior initiatives down to junior units.

Related Units of Effort can be intentionally grouped to reveal higher complexity or coordination needs.

Assignment & Substitution principles ensure that work keeps moving even as people change. They define how ownership is assigned, shared, or transferred, and how resilience is built into systems so progress does not depend on a single individual or role.

Every Unit of Effort must have a clearly assigned owner to prevent drift or stagnation.

Spreading ownership across roles or time increases resilience and throughput.

Not all work can be handed off equally; substitution depends on context, access, and expertise.

These principles show how FLOW enables scalable judgment—allowing organizations to decentralize execution without losing control. They clarify how constraints, authority, learning, and optimization should shift as complexity and scale increase, preventing both micromanagement and chaos.

Consistent FLOW classification enables decisions to scale without centralizing everything.

FLOW is based on the effort itself, not the skill or seniority of the person doing it.

Each Unit of Effort operates within defined limits such as policy, authority, time, or capacity.

Clear upstream rules allow downstream teams to act autonomously without chaos.

The shape and flow of work often expose where small changes create outsized impact.

Improving one unit can create problems elsewhere if FLOW levels are ignored.

What someone needs to learn depends on their role relative to the Unit of Effort.

This principle explains how FLOW can be adapted to local or specialized contexts without undermining system coherence. Custom FLOWs are treated as deliberate extensions—not exceptions—ensuring flexibility while preserving clarity, comparability, and governance.

Organizations may define local FLOW variants, but only with clear rules and governance.

The capstone principle reframes FLOW as more than a framework—it becomes a lens for thinking. It integrates all prior principles into a single way of seeing work, complexity, and systems across domains such as operations, learning, communication, and design.

FLOW is not just a classification tool—it is a universal way of seeing, reasoning about, and navigating complexity.