Friction creates chaos. Flow creates impact. In this eye-opening talk from Prodacity 2025, Karen Martin, Founder of TKMG Academy and author of Clarity First and Value Stream Mapping, reveals how organizations can identify hidden inefficiencies, eliminate waste, and unlock real business value.

From government agencies to Fortune 500 companies, Martin has helped teams transform siloed, chaotic processes into seamless, high-performing value streams. Learn why most organizations fail at digital transformation—and how value stream mapping is the missing link to true operational excellence.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• Friction vs. Flow: How inefficiency cripples teams and drains resources
• Why most organizations operate in silos—and how to break free
• The power of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to reveal unseen bottlenecks
• How to measure and improve flow across entire systems
• Moving beyond process improvement to full-scale transformation
• Why leaders—not just teams—must own value stream transformation

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:02] - Introduction: Why friction is the enemy of efficiency
[01:12] - The hidden cost of chaos in organizations
[02:29] - Why work systems—not people—cause most operational failures
[03:52] - Flow, baby, flow: The secret to high-performance teams
[06:04] - Case study: Why faster lab results didn’t fix hospital delays
[08:00] - How to see the whole system instead of optimizing in silos
[10:42] - Value Stream Mapping vs. Process Mapping: Key differences
[12:49] - Understanding lead time vs. process time (why work takes longer than you think)
[14:35] - The most overlooked metric in operational improvement
[16:14] - Case study: How Value Stream Mapping unlocked funding for IT modernization
[18:45] - Why leaders—not just teams—must engage in value stream thinking
[21:07] - The future of work: Moving from fragmented systems to integrated flow
[25:25] - Final thoughts: “We are one” – building a connected, high-impact organization

🔗 Stay Connected:
Learn more about Prodacity: https://www.rise8.us/prodacity
Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

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Karen Martin (00:02):

Good morning. So friction ever feel it dealing with it right now? Maybe friction is almost never a good thing. The only exception is when it's intentional friction that's designed to meet some sort of outcome. But you have to be really careful with inserting intentional friction into a work system, a work team, or any kind of environment. So we're going to talk about the unintentional friction. Unintentional friction causes a great loss of time. And time is money. Unintentional. Friction causes miscommunication. It causes people to not understand what the mission really is. It causes a lot of interpersonal strife. And what I've come to find out over the years is that that interpersonal or interdepartmental or interagency strife, tension that we see that's due from friction, most of it is unintended and can be solved. And when we solve that, we solve for a lot of other problems.

(01:12):

When we don't solve for that, we get chaos. Now you can get low levels of chaos that are kind of little irritants and they're not so bad. Or you can get massive amounts of chaos that are really bad, drain the organization, create organizational drag cause quality problems can even cause safety, loss of life, injuries, et cetera. So chaos is the outcome of friction, and what we need to do is figure out how to get to that root cause of friction to reduce the chaos so that we don't get a bunch of cracked eggs all over the organizations. People never mean to throw eggs on the floor and crack them and have a big mess. They never mean to the work systems and the processes, the processes that are designed and the work systems are nearly always in the way. When you see interpersonal tension or interdepartmental tension or interagency tension start first thing out of your head should not be, oh they, you really have to stop it because it is pretty habituated in most of our minds to kind of go there and instead say, what's happening in the work system that's causing this kind of reaction?

(02:29):

Because it's an emotional reaction to something. And so what is happening, we can control that. We can't necessarily control human reaction to conversations and actions that have been taken, decisions that have been made, but we can control them in the first place. So getting to the root cause of this broken egg syndrome is very helpful and fortunately we have something that can help us all. That's a tried and true proven technique and it's looking at work through value stream lenses. What we're trying to do in any work system is create flow. If you weren't aware of that before today, that needs to be like your new mantra flow, baby flow, everything should flow. Nothing should be delayed. It should move seamlessly and easily from one person department to another flow. What happens is we get obstacle upon obstacle, upon obstacle upon obstacle to flow. So your mission, you already have a very big mission, now you have another mission and that's to remove those obstacles to flow and be diligent and persistent and resolute on removing those obstacles to flow. Again, we have a good reason and a good way that you can do this. It'll make it a lot easier.

(03:52):

One of the problems that make us not as able to get rid of flow or even think about flow is mindset related. And so it's not just having the technical expertise to be able to see what the current state is and start removing these obstacles to flow. It's also up here, and I don't know exactly why this is, but humans seem to be wired to see everything in their component parts and look at little tiny pieces of a larger system as little tiny pieces not of a larger system. And we, in our organizations, we get very siloed. We have departments, we have functional areas, and they have one task or multiple tasks, but one kind of general mission within that work group, and that's their mission. And most of the time people see opportunities for improvement. And so they go ahead and they start making improvements.

(04:49):

And that may be really good and they may do really good results making improvements to their work areas, but there's a cost to it. The success of making improvements when they're done to components of a larger system isn't necessarily success. So think about it. I'm going to take it out of the world that you know right now. Well actually I'm going to take it out of your work world that and put it into a world that you all know and that's healthcare. Here's a prime example of this component thinking that gets us in trouble. Back in the late eighties, early nineties and into the two thousands laboratories, clinical laboratories within hospitals were under tremendous pressure to get those results out, get 'em out, get 'em out, get 'em out. The eds, the emergency departments were really behind it and they were saying, we can't get their patients out. Our emergency departments are overcrowded. And it's the plight of almost every hospital in the US and probably globally as well, is this whole ed crunch as we call it. And so labs did a great job. They all went to work, they studied, they learned process, and they did a great job at getting their results out far more quickly than they ever had.

(06:04):

Did a patient leave the ED any sooner? Nope, because it wasn't connected to everything else going on in the emergency department. In your case, most of you are somewhat touching technology, if not squarely in it. You can get developers to do all kinds of great things to be able to code more quickly and with better accuracy, better code as a result. But if it's queues up and it sits for testing, what good is it? We have to look at this overall system. If we really want to get flow through the system and get faster and higher quality work out the end of it, wherever the end may be. So what happens when you look at life through component lenses is that you get a really good component within the organization doing the best they can and maybe feeling really good about what they've accomplished. And it does nothing for the system.

(07:00):

Your boat, your ship, whatever you want to call it, will not go well. It will not go straight. It will not go where you intend it to. And it's a mindset thing. We really have to start seeing the whole all the time, the whole. And so what happens is those components, when you start putting them together, then you go, ah, we are a system. We are one. And when you start looking at the world through a, we are a one lens, amazing things happen and not just at work, but more about that in a minute, we are one. So what you need to do is think about a boat, kayak, canoe, whatever you want to call it with a bunch of people in it rowing away. And you want to actually get the speed of each of the component parts that are producing some sort of output that you deliver to a customer, whether internal or external, to go at exactly the same pace.

(08:00):

This requires a little bit of thinking and a little bit of jury rigging and figuring out how to actually assign the work and to whom and in what volumes in order to get that consistent pace. But that's how you get flow is that consistent pace. The boat will go where you want it to go. So it takes the thought now, why can't we just do it? Well, mainly because we don't know how to see work that can't be seen so much of the work that you do. It's very difficult to see. So fortunately some people went to Japan and started watching some people scribbling on napkins and started looking at their pictures and said, ah, they're mapping out these work systems at a high level, at a strategic level that's pretty genius. And then they wrote a book learning to see and then that beget another book and another book and another book.

(09:00):

And then finally my book and another book after that. And so we keep on learning more and more about this concept of value streams and how to be able to see the unseen so we can improve it, how it needs to be improved. So when you finally are able to see the work system, it's just like you see things you've never seen before because it's never been visualized. It's never been created, put on a storyboard the way value stream work is, and it's very liberty. It is sobering. When you see the current state, it's usually pretty sobering to go like, now I see why we have so much friction, which creates chaos. It's right there in front of my eyes. Now, value streams pivoting to the map itself. Value streams are very different from processes. So value streams are looking at a whole work system.

(09:52):

So if you think about the granularity of work, there's a value stream, which is typically some sort of request from some sort of customer to delivering on that request. So it is a loop. And then there are processes that make up that value stream. And then each process has steps, little tasks within the process to get the process done. So you want to be up here at the high level of the value stream, like a helicopter hovering over a freeway system, and you can see things you'll never see if you stick with process mapping, you can see, for example in this picture, the gaps between the cars. You can see where they've got flow, you can see where it's jammed up a little bit more. You can see where there's maybe some queuing going on. You can't see the exact model a year, but you can't see the year on the road either, but you can't see the model of the car.

(10:42):

You can maybe see the size if it's a bust or a car, maybe some colors, but you're not seeing the find details. And that's okay. In fact, it's best that you not get mired in details initially, and you wait until you have clarity over the work system before you get pulled into the details, get to the details. Now you're on the road, now you can see a little bit ahead of you, a little bit behind you in your mirror, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, but you can't see that high level and now you're at the process level and much of value stream work will require you to also get there eventually. But you start at the top level so that you can make some strategic decisions about priorities. That means the people doing the mapping have to be at a different level than process mapping teams. Process mapping teams, people who do the work, value stream teams, people who oversee the work, who can make strategic decisions, who have a vision, who have budget authority. Those level, that level of people need to be the ones mapping. And so leaders will often say to us, we don't map our teams map. I'm like, well, you keep on doing what you've always done. You keep on being what you've always been.

(11:58):

You have to do something differently. And it's a leadership response. It's like going offsite for a strategic planning session. This is strategy we're talking about here. How do we get flow through the system? And most leader in most organizations, not one leader before they do this kind of work, can articulate at an even remote level how value is actually delivered to a customer. And when you've got not one leader that can do that, that is very dangerous. At the end of value stream mapping, every leader in that team can articulate very clearly exactly how value is delivered to the customer and how it will be in the future. It's a good thing. So a basic value stream map. I'm not going to get into the how to, this is not the place for all of that because there's a lot of detail to it. But a basic map has the loop, order to delivery, request to receipt.

(12:49):

It has some metrics, it has information flow. You see that at the top of the map, information flow, and then it has some metrics at the bottom. The metrics are pretty simple and pretty common. And then there's also some additional ones you can add depending on what the work is. So it's two time metrics. Ones, how long does it take to actually do the work and how long does it take from the time the work arrives until it's been passed on to do the work? And as you probably can't see in this map, the total time for this map is 9.5 days and it took three hours total time to do the work in that value stream. So, huh, what's going on? What's taking so long to get three hours done? That's taking nine and a half days, and we have to be little investigators and figure that out.

(13:37):

But once you do, and once you get those numbers closer together, you're creating flow. The other metric, this is my favorite metric of all times, the little beast. The little beast is percent complete and accurate. The little beast is when someone delivers work to a downstream customer internally, usually what percentage of the time can that customer do whatever they're supposed to do with the work without having to do any form of rework? And those forms are correcting, adding, missing information and clarifying information that could have or should have been clear to begin with. So that metric is shocking much of the time, much the time in a value stream, at least one party will say, none of the time, can I do my work without having to correct add or clarify? None of the time means 0% across a value stream. Zero times any number means what?

(14:35):

Zero. So you have an entire value stream, never able to deliver using flow until you solve those quality problems, which are typically quality of information problems. So percent complete and accurate is the way to start looking at all the work, especially the work that is unseen in manufacturing and in physical products like maintenance, equipment, maintenance. Oftentimes it's first pass yield, if you've ever heard that. This is the knowledge work knowledge information office side of that. Now, this map you just saw a simple version of a value stream map. This one's not so simple and they never are, but this is a visual storyboard of an entire work system. And the reason why I wanted to show you this today is that you're mainly a tech group. Look at the tech, look at the lines on this map and how disconnected all the systems are. This was a very large company. Well, the team reported that they had tried for three years to get budget to connect some of their systems and to sunset, some of them, they were unsuccessful. The second day of the mapping, we had a leadership report out to all C-level. C-level, walked in CTO, took one look at the map and said, no way. And the team said way, and they got budget about two weeks later. You have to learn to see what can't be seen otherwise, and it has powerful, powerful impact on decision making.

(16:14):

But with all the glories of a map and with all the help it is, it's actually not about the map. So when we wrote our book and McGraw Hill wanted to title value stream mapping, I said, no, no, please, people are going to get obsessed about the tool and not about the process and the thinking and all that transformational work that needs to be done. And they said, but it's SEO lady, we got to go for SEO. So the book became value stream mapping, but it's not about the map. It is more about the map is the enabler for conversations that lead to decisions, to insights, to ahas. Every time we lead value stream mapping, every single time people are saying, wow, I had no idea. Wow, I had no idea. Wow, I had no idea. And so it's a very liberating, if not sobering for the current state experience to go through.

(17:05):

Then what do you do? Once you end up knowing how the current state actually is versus how you think it is or how you wish it were or whatever that is, then it's time to get to work and design the future state. That's a much better version of the work system. There are three things that you want to try to get rid of. Waste, unevenness and overburden, overburden of people and equipment both. And it seems like that sounds really, really hard. You don't do it all at once. You do it in waves. You don't have to slay the dragon all at one time. Do it in waves. And what you want to be able to do is look at, okay, so sometimes this is actually much simpler than you think it might be. Okay, can we move any work in parallel? So we shorten lead times, can we combine any work together?

(17:50):

Can we flip-flop steps? That is very fun to do and it happens a lot in engineering. Flip flop the steps so that work is happening after requirements are clearer, can we get rid of steps? You see a couple xs up there. So that's the first glance at it before you get into the nitty gritty weeds is, can we just move and get lead time reductions and get the work a lot easier and get it to flow? What you're doing ultimately with value stream transformation is these cycles of improvement, cycles of improvement, cycles of improvement. You can't be one and done. You have to go back at it over and over and over to get really well wired. So it starts by understanding current state, designing future state. Then you need to implement and maintain it. So someone needs to be watching this. Someone needs to be minding the store at a value stream level.

(18:45):

Most organizations don't have that. They don't have one person that's job is, or part of their job is to watch the work, watch the metrics, see how it's going, see if it's getting better, see if it's getting worse, see if it's stalling. You got to have it. If you don't watch it, it's going to devolve back into its natural state of entropy. It is entropy. I mean, that's just natural. So someone has to do this work. When you do this right, then you're able to move from this difficult state that makes a lot of people problems, that aren't people problems at all their work systems problems, and it's harder to attract and retain top talent. It's harder to have people go home energized from their workday instead of s. It's very difficult to get the kind of organization that you all want and to deserve and your customers all want and deserve without spending the time looking at work through a value stream lens.

(19:47):

So we are all one department, one organization, one value stream. You got to look at it together and you don't always get what you want in your functional area in for the sake of the larger goal of flow across the whole value stream. And here's the kicker. We are one works at work, but this, we are thinking this holistic thinking, this seeing the whole this looking at performance across a broader range of areas and looking at life through a broader set of lenses creates this. We are one globally, possibly beyond the universe that we even know right now. We are all one. And so this kind of thinking becomes transformational, not just for you, not just for your team, not just for your organization, not just for your agency, not just for your customers, not just for Congress, not just for your constituents, whoever it might be. This has really big implications. So I encourage you to join me on this mission, take it really seriously. Know that take baby steps and it's not going to be know it overnight and be perfect overnight, but it's a heck of a journey and it's worth taking. Thank you.

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