Your Organisation Delivers Less Than It Should
The cause sits between strategy and execution
Flow Economics is the framework, language and economic logic for the layer where most value is lost. It is the layer almost no one owns.
Most organisations invest heavily in choosing the right initiatives and delivering them well.
What they lack is a way to see how those initiatives interact once they share the same people, skills, and capacity.
That is where value is lost, and that is what Flow Economics addresses.
A framework for the layer between strategy and execution
Flow Economics is a body of work concerned with how value moves through organisations running multiple projects on shared resources.
It sits between two layers that are already well understood: strategy, where organisations decide what to pursue, and execution, where individual projects are delivered. Between them sits a third layer that is rarely made visible.
The shared resource system, where competing demands and hidden constraints decide whether value gets realised at all.
Flow Economics gives leaders a way to see this layer, understand it, and act on it.
The Project Illusion
Why fixing your projects won't fix your portfolio
Many organisations are trapped in what we call the Project Illusion: the belief that if individual projects are well planned, well governed, and delivered successfully, the organisation will perform well. In reality, portfolio performance depends on how projects interact when they compete for the same constrained resources. When those constraints are invisible, the illusion persists.
This is why investing in better project delivery rarely improves portfolio performance.
The problem is not in the projects.
It is in what happens between them.
Three ways into Flow Economics
Flow Economics is available through a free guide and a simulation-based course, with a full-length book in development.
The Guide
A short, free introduction for leaders who want to understand the core ideas quickly. It explains why portfolios underperform even when projects look fine.
→ Get the Guide
The Course
A simulation-based course for senior practitioners who want to feel how portfolio constraints actually work, and learn how to manage them.
→ Access the Course
The Book (in development)
A full treatment of the framework, its foundations, and its implications for how organisations think about delivery. Currently in development for publication.
→ Join the Launch ListBuilt on serious intellectual work
Flow Economics synthesises five streams of thinking:
- Value-driven project management (Stephen Devaux)
- Systems thinking and the Theory of Constraints (Jan Willem Tromp, inspired by Eliyahu Goldratt)
- Academic research into multi-project resource allocation (Dr Albert Ponsteen)
- Computational portfolio economics (Oleksii Mikhalevich)
- The throughput and investment view of projects shaping PMI's PMBOK 8 (Mike Hannan)
Developed by Ben Rawson, the framework brings these streams together into a practical decision framework for portfolio leaders. A framework that treats portfolio performance as a system to be understood, not a collection of projects to be managed.
Writing on Flow Economics
Articles, essays, and shorter pieces on Flow Economics, the Coordination Ceiling, and the patterns we see across multi-project organisations.
Built for people responsible for portfolio outcomes
Flow Economics is for PMO leaders, portfolio managers, transformation directors, and executives accountable for delivery across multiple initiatives.
It is particularly useful where strong project management is not translating into strong portfolio performance, and where leaders sense that something structural is being missed.
The book is coming
A full length treatment of Flow Economics is in development. It brings together the framework, its intellectual foundations, and what it means for how organisations think about delivery on shared resources.
If you would like to be notified when it launches, and to receive a small number of updates as it takes shape, leave your email below.
If you would like to be notified when it launches, leave your email below.
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A different way of seeing delivery
Flow Economics does not replace existing methods or frameworks.
It provides a way to understand how they operate together within a shared resource system.
For any organisation running multiple initiatives on shared resources, this changes what you can see, and what you can fix.
Talk to us about Flow Economics
Flow Economics
 The layer between strategy and execution.
Understanding how value moves through multi-project organisations.
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