Should I Drag or Should I Flow?
The forces that stop productivity and success, and how to combat them.
We Can Work Better, Easily
Work is frustrating.
We are interrupted, redirected, underinformed.
We want to get the right work done at the right time in a way we are proud of.
We start our days with clear intentions and end them wondering where all our time went and why we feel so exhausted. We do a lot of things, but feel we are missing something. This isn't just about poor time management or lack of focus; it's about things more fundamental happening that we can’t quite put a finger on…or there are so many that we aren’t sure which to put our finger on…or something, how about this one…wait, there’s someone needing me on slack….
The Problem We're Solving
At work, we want to balance (oh how we hate the word balance) Drag and Flow. These forces determine whether we end our days feeling accomplished and energized or depleted and frustrated. Understanding these concepts isn't just academic. Responding elegantly to what is stopping you and your team is essential for creating workplaces where people can be real professionals (rewarding) rather than merely making it through today without being fired (not so much rewarding).
The problem is that most of us don't recognize these forces for what they are. Instead, they treat the symptoms, like missed deadlines, quality issues, and blameable individuals. By naming and understanding Drag and Flow, we can address some root causes and actually increase real productivity and effectiveness in a way that will last and some some impact.
What is Drag?
Drag is anything that slows down work, creates unnecessary or additional Work-in-Progress (WIP), and adds to our cognitive load. All of these forces reduce our capacity to think, feel, and do. In knowledge work, those are the three key ingredients to successful work. Think about it, interpret it, and get it done (hopefully collaboratively).
Drag is the resistance that prevents us from moving forward smoothly and efficiently.
Think of Drag as the headwind you face when riding a bicycle, you pedal harder. The wind slows you down, and leaves you exhausted even when you haven't traveled very far.
At work, we see Drag is a painful number of ways:
Ways Drag Drags You:
Operational Drag: Unnecessary meetings, excessive documentation, approval bottlenecks, and other procedural hurdles that slow down actual work.
Cognitive Drag: The mental burden of juggling too many tasks, constant context-switching, and the anxiety of unfinished work lingering in our minds.
Relational Drag: Poor communication, unclear expectations, office politics, and toxic interactions that drain energy and create (1) and (2) by requiring you to figure out what people mean and discussing things over and over again.
Systemic Drag: Organizational structures, policies, and cultural norms that create unnecessary complexity and impede progress.
Overload Drag: Multiple started but unfinished tasks that our brains keep thinking that creates a constant mental burden that follows us everywhere.
This is not a complete list. I wish it was. But there are likely dozens of Drag Types that we could discuss. Drag really is a drag. Even with just this five, it becomes easy to see why it is difficult to limit our work in progress to a healthy, completable level and why toxic behavior quickly spreads throughout a group.
It’s also pretty clear why in Lean and Agile, we’ve created some really wonderful tools, but our transformations end up being taken down every time by … drag. Drag is the nemesis.
What is Flow?
Flow represents the opposite force, it's what allows people and work to move forward unimpeded. Flow isn't about removing all challenges or creating a frictionless environment; rather, it's about creating conditions where people and work have what they need to operate effectively.
In Lean thinking and psychology, Flow has three essential components.
Ways Flow Flows You
Operational Flow: The smooth movement of work through a system without unnecessary delays or bottlenecks.
Information Flow: The right information reaching the right people at the right time.
Psychological Flow: The mental state where people are fully immersed in their work, experiencing what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi described as a state of energized focus and enjoyment.
Flow doesn't mean everything is easy, it still involves learning, creating, experimenting, planning, and sometimes being wrong and needing to adjust. The key difference is that these activities happen with a system you created that supports rather than hinders progress.
There are also other kinds of flow. Decision flow, problem solving flow, collaborative flow. We can come up with all sorts of ways to describe different flow states, but for now, the important thing is … can we get our work done, together, effectively, efficiently, and with a certain degree of positive feedback so we know what’s going right and how to make the other things better?
Drag Meets WIP
Work-in-Progress (WIP) is the total amount of work that has been started but not yet finished. It's one of the primary sources of Drag in any system. Too much WIP is Overload. Overload is Heavy Drag.
One of the two rules of Personal Kanban is to limit your WIP (the other is to visualize your work). At any point in time, we want our WIP to be below our capacity (not 200 to 500% of it, which is what we usually find) because interruptions and surprises are constant, focus is what is in short supply.
Limiting WIP allows us to focus on tasks, collaborate when necessary, and finish with much higher quality (which in the future lowers WIP by removing the need for rework or defending why you did something that way.)
The Pains Of Overload
Cognitive Overload: Our brains simply cannot effectively process unlimited tasks simultaneously. Each unfinished task occupies mental bandwidth, even when we're not actively working on it.
Decreased Quality: When attention is divided among too many tasks, quality inevitably suffers.
Longer Completion Times: Counterintuitively, starting more work results in finishing less work overall. More work is a traffic jam. No, you cannot multitask your way out of it. No, you can’t delegate your way out of it. Each new task added to our plate extends the completion time for all tasks.
Increased Stress: The constant pressure of unfinished work creates anxiety and burnout.
Diffusion Confusion: The more work you have in flight, the more stories you need to keep track of in your head. Why is this happening? Who is it for? How does it fit with other things? How far did I get on this before I was interrupted? Why the heck did I do that? Each time you switch tasks, your understanding of the work suffers. Later, when you try to describe something to someone you can’t. … No, you can’t.
In the WIP Whisperer workshop, we have figured out that WIP and its Drag comes from four main directions: self-inflicted, leadership-induced, structural, and communication-related. Simply putting a number limit at the top of a kanban column isn't enough; we need to understand and address the sources of overload because they almost always come hand in hand with small or not-so-small amounts of toxicity.
Destructive Drag is Toxic
Workplace toxicity is both an outcome and a creator of Drag and WIP. When the forces impeding work become actively destructive to both people and productivity, we get toxicity. People being to buckle under stress and treat each other poorly causing, you guessed it, Less Flow and More Drag.
This is why research shows, toxicity costs organizations an estimated $917 billion annually, with $777.9 billion lost to employee disengagement and $136.8 billion attributed to turnover from workplace strife. (I can get references for you if you wish, numbers are in the upcoming Toxic Waste book).
And now, even more types of things….
There are several types of Toxicity we talk about (in much greater detail) in the Cleaning Toxic Waste workshop.
Cultural Toxicity: Environments where fear, blame, and competition dominate over collaboration and psychological safety.
Structural Toxicity: Systems and processes that consistently produce frustration, waste, and failure despite our best efforts.
Relational Toxicity: Interactions characterized by disrespect, manipulation, or hostility that poison the work environment.
Self-Toxicity: The internalized patterns of overwork, perfectionism, and martyrdom (check out the Humane Work post on this) that lead to burnout and diminished wellbeing.
All of these cause bottlenecks and Drag. They slow work, create overhead, and drag…drag…drag…everyone down with them. Every company should be investing in their removal.
The most painful aspect of toxicity is that it's often caused by alleged and often misapplied best practices in leadership, management, Lean, and Agile methodologies. When the environment we deploy doesn't match the needs of the team, individual professionals, and the work being done, the resulting mismatch generates toxicities that feel like failure (e.g. we’re not doing it right, rather than this method isn’t tailored to us right, yet).
The Relationship Between Drag, Flow, and People
This isn’t speculation. Drag and Flow directly impact how people function every minute of every day. When Drag dominates, people are frustrated, exhausted, and disconnected from their work. When Flow prevails, people experience greater satisfaction, creativity, and accomplishment.
At the individual level, excessive Drag manifests as burnout, disengagement, and a sense that work is something to endure rather than enjoy or gain professional satisfaction for. People caught in high-Drag environments will, by design, develop coping mechanisms that further reinforce the problem and take on too much work to prove their value, avoid collaboration to reduce complexity (it’s another meeting), or becoming cynical about the possibility of improvement and simply shut down.
For teams, Drag creates silos, communication breakdowns, and an over-focus on individual / group survival rather than corporate success. This is instant death for any large company strategy or initiative. Teams experiencing high Drag spend more time managing their workload (meetings) than actually doing valuable work.
At the organizational level, Drag results in missed opportunities, wasted resources, and a culture where compliance (fear) overrules innovation (response to market). Organizations dominated by Drag implement more controls and processes to address symptoms, inadvertently creating even more Drag.
Creating a Path Forward
In the next several days, I’ll be writing about specific types of drag and what we can do about it. The short form of what to do about it ends this episode, but we’ll go deeper.
If there is a specific type of Drag you are seeing, put it in the comments and we’ll discuss it and I might create a post for it. You can join one of the workshops and be in the calls where we deal directly with this as a group in a call once a month.
The Short Form Solution to Drag (if you do this, for god’s sakes, think about it, don’t go get a template):
Make Work Visible: You can't manage what you can't see. Tools like Personal Kanban (Book) (Class) help visualize both the work and the forces affecting it.
Limit WIP: Consciously (visually) reduce the amount of work in progress to allow for greater focus and faster completion.
Identify and Reduce Sources of Drag: Systematically examine and address the operational, cognitive, relational, and systemic sources of Drag in your environment. A Value Stream Mapping exercise is great for this. (Contact Toni or me if you’d like us to do one with you.)
Create Conditions for Flow: Design work environments that support the three types of flow—operational, informational, and psychological. See the Collaboration Equation book for more.
Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Regularly reflect on what's working and what's creating Drag, then make incremental changes.. See the Distributed Teams class for more.
What’s Next
There are a so many types of drag, flow, WIP, toxicity, and so on, but there are ways around them. My goal with this series like other posts (like this commitment device post) is to provide specific examples of how to visualize your way out of a jam.
This post defines what a jam looks like. Future posts in the series will address specific Drags and how to …um … Flow your way out of them.
As always, thank you all for coming along on this journey with us. Right now there is a lot of Drag. A lot more than usual, and there is usually a lot. People are in crisis, but we will work together to get through it. These will also be combined into a downloadable PDF handbook for dealing with Drag that will be available to our Substack paid subscribers.
Tune in tomorrow for more.
Modus Institute | Personal Kanban | Cleaning Toxic Waste | WIP Whisperer (arguably the Drag workshop)