← DIY Team Building

Visualize How Tasks Flow

Activity 19

Most teams have no idea how their work actually flows. They know who does what in theory, but the reality is a tangle of informal handoffs, hidden dependencies, and assumptions about what happens between steps. Visualizing the flow makes the invisible visible.

Theory

Map the typical journey from idea to outcome together. This makes bottlenecks and misunderstandings visible. Discuss where you can simplify or clarify.

Kapitel 1 frames teams as socio-technical systems where social reality and technical structures must support each other. A workflow map makes the technical structure visible: you trace how work actually moves, not how it is supposed to move, and the gaps between those two realities become impossible to ignore. Building on the glossary from Activity 18, the terms you defined become the labels on your map — when you all agree on what "in progress" means, you can pinpoint exactly where things stall. The exercise externalizes knowledge that lives in individual heads and turns it into a shared artifact the team can point to and improve.

Outcomes

I can see where work actually gets stuck and why handoffs between people create friction.

Reflection Questions

  • Where does most of our work get stuck?
  • Did I discover any steps I did not know existed?
  • What would happen if we simplified one handoff this week?