Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 2016
Extent: 220pp
Size: 15.3cm x 22.8 cm (9"x6")
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-909470-98-9
List Price: £18
Tags: Organization design, social flows, social technology, strategic planning, organizations, leadership
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Cultivating Flows:
How Ideas Become Thriving Organizations

​Jean M. Russell and Herman E. Wagter


The Internet has transformed the way we live and work – by unleashing the power of shared ideas, the power of instant communication, the power of cooperation while being separated by time and distance.

If the old idea of an organisation as a static machine, run hierarchically and designed for predictability, ever worked - it doesn't work now. Now that the brakes are off, we see torrents flow:  vast flows of data, information, and knowledge; flows of influence and innovation; flows of ideas and people… once you notice them, it’s increasingly clear that “forms and flows” of ideas and information overwhelm  the “structures and processes” we were once comfortable with.

The force of shared ideas and information is clear: they shape how we organize ourselves. The challenge is to guide this force, to cultivate valuable flows, to nurture shared ideas into thriving organizations, to develop concepts and language to methodically approach this challenge.

Countless business start-ups, hybrid organizations and even conventional companies are frantically learning how to work with flows – there is no guidebook. Which is why Jean Russell and Herman Wagter, both long active in this field, set out to interview business pioneers and founders, researchers, practitioners, investors and others with experience of how flows work and how to shape them.

In Cultivating Flows (not ‘Managing Flows’!) they pull together that experience, and their own, to explain how flows work and how best to work with them.
  • They take us through key stages of development like Reframing, Navigating, Operationalizing and Iterating.
  • They introduce us to key concepts like Emergent, Networked, Event-Driven (ENE) efforts; Social Technology, Social Protocols, and Social Organisms; Process Hierarchies; and Coherence
  • They offer us a dozen, detailed Use-Cases of social flows in action.
And behind it all they’re building a unique resource of interviews, articles, case studies and experience in a website that supports this book.

For anyone seeking to start, join, reimagine, reshape, update, or “run” an organization or a movement in this exciting new world, Cultivating Flows is a kind of gardener’s manual, an indispensable resource and an inspiration.
"​1 – it is in my must have resources stack!
2 – I am in awe of your ability to state abstract concepts in a simple, concise manner and then to illustrate what it looks like “on the ground”. Your explanation of the internet as illustrated via the highway system is just one example....
 
Brilliant – thank you for putting in such effort for the rest of us!"
 
Tony Mainardi
Founder, Thanku Apparel, LLC

Read more:

​About the authors:
Jean Russell
​Herman Wagter
​
Contents
​Read the Introduction
​Resources for the book
Glossary

Readership

If you want to understand, engage, disrupt, create, innovate, and, best of all, transform, the social flows in organizations and communities, flows that are mediated by people—social flows—then this book is for you.

The intended audience is primarily:
members (and leaders) of a consortium or other multi-stakeholder collaborations; cross-sector collaborators or facilitators; community development innovators, online and offline; organizational design innovators and entrepreneurs; software developers for the above​

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​Leadership, Innovation & Organisation Management