A clear and definitive purpose is often hard to achieve (like starting a mechanical flywheel), but it’s a critical starting point. As Simon Sinek points out with his “Golden Circle” concept, we have to “start with why” (from his book of the same name). Once you have clarity on your why (your purpose), only then can the flywheel start turning. Liberty Mutual first had to align to three main areas of digital transformation: customer centricity, agility, and cloud-native development. This became the north star we used to direct all our future efforts. Phase 2: Challenge & Landscape

the Value Flywheel to The Map to Modernization: Using the Value Flywheel to

Network effectsalmost always lead to or create a Flywheel Effect, but the Flywheel Effect can occur where network effects do not, as we’ve seen in the previous examples. There’s a body of evidence, supporting material, videos, tutorials, workshops, and labs to help you with well-architected. You can google well-architected for AWS, Azure, or Google, and you will get a consistent response. You can self-serve and learn, and there are courses and certificates also.It’s starting to permeate through. Maybe we’re in an echo chamber or little bubble, but it’s resonating much more than ever. Teams love that we’re starting to focus on these things because they’ve always wanted to do them. And they didn’t have the capacity, the space, or the language to fight to deliver well-architected. It’s not what your boss says! Your boss should explain what the clarity purpose is, but they may not. So don’t blindly follow what your boss says. Mark McCann: And then finally, with all of the first three elements of the flywheel turning here, we get into long-term value. Dave, what do you think? What’s the long-term value that we’re going for here? The Value Flywheel Effect, enabled by cloud adoption, will accelerate your business. Each phase of the Value Flywheel is anchored by three key tenets (twelve in total). These tenets will help guide you through each of the four phases of the Value Flywheel.The Flywheel Model differs from the Traditional Model in one fundamental regard.The enterprise sales team is exclusively inbound. They are explicitly denied the option of seeking business outside the customer base, and must gin up business from only existing customers. The enterprise sales team is an up-sell and cross-sell team.In fact, so is the mid-market sales team.Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads. The “Flywheel Effect” as a business concept was introduced by Jim Collins in his seminal book Good To Great. Jim Collins originally used the Flywheel as a metaphor in Good To Great: It was used to state that companies don’t become exceptional as a result of a single intervention or initiative, but rather as a result of a series of small wins that accumulate over years of hard work until momentum takes over to power sustained periods of accelerated growth that greatly outstrip the effort being applied at that particular time. Every time they have a player drafted or win a championship, it becomes a more desirable school for the next round of players, and on it goes. Each win makes the next win slightly easier. If you wish to survive and thrive in this fourth industrial age, if you wish to understand the landscapes you are competing in, if you wish to understand how modern practices will change your organization, then I would recommend that you read and study this book carefully. Simon Wardley

Flywheel Effect Business and Technology Evolution with The Flywheel Effect

Today, every business is a technology business; every leader is a technology leader. As we enter this new era, organizations must learn to harness technology to drive innovation and power change. In The Value Flywheel Effect, David Anderson, Michael O’Reilly, and Mark McCann enable leaders to create an adaptive organization built upon embracing strategic thinking, team focus, and reduced time to value to drive business results and navigate a migration to the modern cloud. Mark McCann: The next stage is challenge. So Dave, instead of me waffling on, why is challenge important? Why is it critical for success? The Flywheel Effect is used to describe a handful of concepts at once, which are rarely split apart.Here is each component piece I could identify, and how it relates to the Flywheel illustration. Clarity of purpose is the number one job of the CEO. The company must have a vision and not just a few words written on the wall. Clarity of purpose can be tested by creating a north star–model using the North Star Framework from Amplitude. Ideally, the north star is a lagging metric (one that takes a long time to measure), and you should be able to identify the leading metrics (actions that lead to an outcome) and the effort that will drive its success. Good architecture is often hard to define and measure; therefore, efficiency can be a strong measure here. And efficiency can also be represented as sustainability. Cloud providers are starting to measure the amount of carbon burned in a specific workload or system. Quite simply, if a team can reduce their carbon burn, they are providing a benefit to the customer, the company, and the environment.

And it is interesting for an engineer or developer to hear that their purpose is not to write code! Don’t come to work to write code. Come to work to achieve clarity of purpose for the team and the company. You may do that by writing code. But writing code is not your job. Writing code is what your company or team does. It’s quite a subtle thing. But we’ve met developers in the past who feel happy and productive when they are writing code. But that’s not why they should be here. The goal for an engineer, leader or manager is to know what they are working on. And how it aligns with the value being delivered for the company. How does it align with the company mission? And how does it deliver an impact? Just answering those questions is a worthwhile endeavour for any individual or team. And to understand if what you’re doing has an impact or not. There’s much more access now, because at this event, we’re going to be speaking to you on speaker chat as we are presenting here. So maybe we can use that time to find some of the adopters of the patterns and explore further use cases. Then we can find some minds here who are trying to tease out some capabilities or some terms and we can use that. It’s a valuable capability that has emerged there. It’s not a primary need, but we need to think ahead of these things. We need to start thinking, “What are the new emerging values that we, as a conference provider, can grab.”