Serendipity Needs a System to Flow Through

William Haas Evans
Dec 12, 2025
6 min read

Today our innovation teams leaned into lean delivery excellence. Not from me standing up for 4 hours lecturing (Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?). Not from slides.

A Board Game.

We ran the getKanban simulation. Teams compete against each other to run a software company through a quarter of product development. Three months in about four hours. They make real prioritization calls. They hit real bottlenecks. They see real financial consequences unfold from their choices. They see the impact a change in strategy has on their competitive positioning.

Two hours in, something always shifts as they build the muscle memory of how to collaborate, decide, optimize, deliver. They stop thinking about principles. They start feeling the physics of flow.

This is the thing about operational excellence and probably why I get so worked up about it (and Football). People think it kills innovation. Those people are wrong. They think process is the enemy of creativity. They think discipline slows you down.

They have it backwards.

The pattern is always the same. The most innovative teams are the ones obsessed with how work flows. They obsess about how they work together. They build systems. They measure what matters. They remove friction relentlessly.

This is not bureaucracy. This is the foundation that makes speed possible. This is how you start building the right mindset.

Think about Nick Saban's Alabama. A dynasty built on "The Process." Not just recruiting. Execution. Preparation. Doing your job on every single play. The championships emerged as an outcome from years of dedication to operational discipline. Not despite it. Because of it.

Think about Navy SEALs. They do not improvise their way through missions. They simulate every scenario until the mechanics become instinct. When chaos arrives, they have options and they have been here before. The freedom to adapt comes from disciplined preparation.

Think about elite athletes. They do not just train harder. They measure everything. They visualize. They build systems that remove the distance between intention and execution.

The pattern holds across every domain that I have run across. Operational excellence creates the conditions for novelty, insight, learning, and potentially innovation to emerge.

So what does this mean for innovation teams?

Start with a systems view. Map it. Understand how work flows from idea to customer value. See where it moves. See where it sticks. You cannot improve what you cannot see.

Make work visible. A board is not a task tracker. It is an information radiator to create shared understanding. Problems surface early. Course corrections happen fast. Communication conflicts are dealt with as they happen. Shared understanding replaces assumptions.

Limit work in progress. This does not slow you down. It reveals where your system is already slow. WIP limits expose bottlenecks and constraints. They do not create them.

Remove waste. Every handoff is friction. Every approval queue is delay. Every context switch is cost. Lean thinking asks one question over and over. What can we eliminate?

Manage to outcomes. Not features shipped. Not programs delivered. Customer behavior changed. Business value delivered. This requires clear economic models so that you can make reasonable trade-off decisions optimized for total portfolio value.

Build cross-functional teams with real accountability. Not silos throwing work over walls. Empowered teams with end-to-end ownership of the outcomes. People who can make decisions without asking permission.

Here is why simulation matters. This part is worth lingering on.

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus spent decades arguing that you cannot learn expertise by learning rules. You become an expert by living through thousands of situations until your body knows what to do before your mind can articulate why. The master craftsman does not follow instructions. She responds to the wood, the grain, the resistance of the material. That is skillful coping. Not computation.

This is what Heidegger called being-in-the-world. We do not learn by representing reality in our heads and then reasoning about those representations. René Descartes was wrong. Get over it. We learn by being thrown into situations and coping with them. The knowledge becomes part of how we see. Part of how we move. Part of who we are.

Reading about flow systems is like reading about hammering. You can memorize the formulas (L = λ x W). You can diagram the motion. You can pass a test. But you do not know hammering until you have driven ten thousand nails. Until the hammer disappears from your awareness and all that remains is the rhythm of the hammering itself.

"When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, we attend to both nail and hammer, but in a different way. We watch the effect of our strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail. Yet in a sense we are certainly alert to the feelings in our palm and the fingers that hold the hammer....Our subsidiary awareness of tools and probes can be regarded now as the act of making them form a part of our own body… We pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them." — Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958)

This is why SEALs rehearse missions. Why pilots train in simulators. Why Alabama runs the same plays thousands of times before Saturday arrives. Why surgeons practice on cadavers before they touch living patients.

They are not just memorizing procedures. They are building embodied competence. They are sedimenting experience into their nervous systems so that when the moment arrives, they do not have to think. They respond. The situation calls forth the action directly.

You have to experience the feedback loops. You have to feel the consequences of your decisions ripple through your nervous system, and the delivery system. You have to watch a bottleneck form and feel the frustration of work piling up, extending your lead time. You have to make the wrong call on prioritization and calculate the revenue you left on the table and then dwell deeply in that discomfort. You have to live the trade-offs, not just discuss them.

That is what the game does. In four hours, teams live a quarter of delivery decisions. They watch their cumulative flow diagram reveal a bottleneck forming. They see lead time explode when they ignore WIP limits and their Lead Time Distribution chart goes sideways. They calculate the economic opportunity cost of delay when they sequence work wrong and something get's stuck waiting on a dependency. The worst!

The board becomes transparent. The dice become transparent. The rules become transparent. All that remains is the team coping with the situation, making decisions, feeling the consequences, adjusting their approach. Ready-to-hand. Engaged. Present.

Then it clicks. This is not about following a methodology. This is about understanding how work, works. The understanding is not in their heads as a set of propositions they can recite. It is in their bodies as a set of dispositions they can enact.

They have been there before. They will recognize the patterns when they see them again in real delivery. They will feel the bottleneck forming before the metrics confirm it. They will know when to swarm and when to stay in lane. They will make the trade-off calls with confidence because they have lived the consequences of getting it wrong.

This is embodied cognition applied to operational excellence. This is how adults actually learn complex skills. Not by being told. By doing. By failing. By adjusting. By doing again.

Innovation does not come from moving fast and breaking things. It comes from building the operational foundation that lets you move fast without breaking things while ruthlessly experimenting with proper feedback loops.

The best innovation teams I have worked with do this. They visualize their work. They limit what is in progress. They measure what matters. They make decisions with economic models instead of politics. They remove friction from their value stream every single day.

They treat operational excellence as the enabler of speed. Not the enemy of it.

Because when operations run tight, people are freed to do what humans do best. Solve hard problems. Delight customers. Build things that matter.