Anatomy Trains and Business Flows

Inspired by... my own personal experiences in both the world of body therapy and business.

When I studied anatomy and physiology during a career break, one concept I loved was the "single-muscle" theory, which states that we all have just one continuous muscle which flows through our body, only sectioned off and named individually for study purposes through incision by anatomists.

Without getting too much into the science of it all, Tom Myers, inspired by Ida Rolf's work, took this concept further in his own studies and wrote a book called anatomy trains, which describes how we each have different muscle flows within our body, held together with connective tissue called Fascia, through which we can investigate and heal muscular pain, tension or postural misalignment. "Anatomy Trains links the individual muscles into functional complexes, each with a specific anatomy and ‘meaning’."

When looking at business flow and how you diagnose and go about resolving issues in a process flow there seemed to be so many parallels that could be drawn from this concept. I'm someone who loves to search for patterns, to look along the chain of a process and find the point of failure. And I've learned that it is not always the obvious thing that is the cause but something further along the line, behavioural or otherwise, having a knock on effect in the flow. And influencing change to resolve these "pressure points" can be the hardest part of the process.

Misalignment

What this could look like practically speaking is if you are working in a team across several disciplines and you find that whenever a specific thing happens, it breaks down all your processes. In development we often have to respond to urgent requests which are not planned into our normal sprint cycles, for example, where a customer site has gone down and they are unable to trade. These are the moments where we need to pause normal process and react quickly with all hands on deck. The burning fire moments. But sometimes these urgent issues are more smoking pan than burning fire, and on these occasions they become a source of frustration and disruption. If a team reacts to too many smoking pan urgent requests too often, every little panic from a customer suddenly becomes urgent and when everything is urgent, nothing is. Chaos ultimately ensues and the whole process breaks down.

This was a scenario I dealt with in the past and for us a process was required to triage the urgent requests we received, so we could distinguish the burning fires from the smoking pans. In doing so we were able to react in the most appropriate way according to priority which allowed the support team to manage customer expectations as well as reducing disruption in development and ultimately allowing time to provide a quality solution back to the customer. Everyone wins when there is alignment across teams within a flow.

Diagnosing pressure points

There are many behaviours and issues that might cause a breakdown in a business flow but unless you diagnose the actual point of pain along the line, you will only ever be managing symptoms instead of resolving the problem and truly bringing about meaningful change.

So, how do you diagnose the pressure point along the chain that is disrupting the process flow? In physical therapy you would palpate the muscles at points along the chain associated with the injured area and use techniques to find knots and tension as well as looking for feedback from the muscle in the form of muscles twitches and vibrations. You would ask for feedback from your client on where the pain is most acute. All put together this would help you to pinpoint where you can influence change in your client's muscle or fascia and in doing so relieve their pain by realigning their anatomy train.

If we use this analogy in terms of process flow it is essential the diagnosis is done respectfully and by someone who is capable and competent of looking at all points along a process flow, be it sales, support, development, the project management team or the senior leadership team. You do not want to come in all fires blazing pointing fingers around and essentially tensing up the whole process, you will never find the problem this way.

To start diagnosing you need to build trust amongst your team and your colleagues across the company. When I was treating clients I always found the more you got a client to trust you and relax, the deeper you could work to heal their muscles without causing additional pain. If they were tense and didn't trust you, you may as well be massaging a wall. And ultimately you would do more harm than good on a muscle that is in spasm. It is the same working with teams. You cannot do a diagnosis alone, it will involve investigation and feedback from different parts of the business and trust is essential so people know you are not going to do them or their business any harm.

Talk less, listen more and learn fast

By simply talking to other teams and asking questions, you can start to get a sense of the problem, it can open up all sorts of thoughts on what might be the cause of your process breakdown. Having these conversations requires trust and psychological safety so people feel comfortable to speak up without any risk to their person or job.

Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson coined the phrase psychological safety and has written many books and articles on the subject. It was found to be the number one factor in creating high performing teams from research done by two Google authors, captured in an article written in Forbes. In this research they found that where "team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of others", they will "feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea". This is essential if you want to get feedback on a process or flow between teams so you can get to the heart of the issue.

Another essential thing is ensuring a feedback culture exists within your teams. Encouraging a psychologically safe environment where colleagues from all teams feel they are able to speak up and help diagnose the problem in a process flow is key. This safety will open up the channels of feedback. Perhaps a team are being affected by a micromanaging manager and don't feel they can give honest feedback without repercussions. A safe environment would help unearth this behavioural issue and without a continuous feedback culture behavioural problems such as this are much harder to resolve and will go on interrupting process flow as well as reducing engagement and morale in a team.

There will always be micro-cultures in teams within companies yet it is important each different team's cultures are able to align within the one process flow to allow for high performance, innovation and growth on a company level.

Influencing Change

Influencing change is the next step in the path to solving process flow issues. Again I go back to my physical therapy days where if your client trusts that you are competent at what you do and they know your intentions are to heal them, you can positively influence changes in their well-being.

In business it is a little more complex as you may need to influence upwards or downwards depending on your own position in the company, or both at the same time. Diagnosing the issue is step one, next is delivering the results of the diagnosis and influencing change to help resolve the issue.

In an article in the Harvard Business Review, authors Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinger talk about warmth being the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas... Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.

Being Agile

By building up warmth and understanding and fully illustrating the "why" behind your changes, you can truly influence change in a positive way. And change does not happen fast, it is a complex and ever changing entity so the final thing required in this chain is patience and agility. In a rapidly changing world of work, being agile is essential for growth and adapting to change within companies. In this way you can ensure you are creating processes that can react, adapt and change too.

Being agile allows you to look at the whole and identify where patterns of behaviour are impacting process and people. It is an holistic approach to working. As Pia-Maria Thoren puts it in her book Agile People, "Agile thinking is similar to systems thinking in that it looks at the whole picture. We cannot predict what is going to happen or when. It all depends on the relationships, the people, the systems, the structures, the processes and the organisation itself"

I love these images from Agile People - Agile People HR and Leadership

For me, and drawing from my experiences in both the world of body therapy and business, the same components are needed to influence positive change in business flow and well-being alike. By looking at the whole as well as the sum of its parts you can see the full picture. You can connect the chain.

Like the human body which is constantly changing and evolving, affected by different circumstances, changing environments, age, health and growth, so too is business. The process of effecting change and influencing improvements in a process flow is never complete or finished. It is ever changing and an ever moving target. It is something that needs to be minded and checked in on regularly to ensure it is still serving its people, its teams, the company and the customer in the best way possible.

By building trust through continuous feedback and psychological safety, by showing competency, warmth and understanding, you can diagnose problems and positively influence change. And in doing so build high performing agile teams and companies, ensuring smooth and pressure point free process flows.

And the outcome will be happy people - employees and customers alike.