Sensemaking and Flow: How Ideas Become Value in Organisations
Releasing Agility helps organisations understand where they are going and what is in the way. Idea → Value is a lens for understanding how ideas become outcomes inside complex systems. Together, they form the Cultivated spine for sensemaking, flow, and organisational movement.
Editor’s note: This essay sits within the Cultivated library on sensemaking, systems, and the nature of work. It frames Releasing Agility as orientation and Idea → Value as a lens for understanding how ideas become outcomes in work.
Releasing Agility and Idea → Value: From Sensemaking to the Flow of Work
Releasing Business Agility and Idea → Value are often discussed together in my work, but they operate at different layers.
Releasing Business Agility is about sensemaking and navigation.
Idea → Value is about understanding how work flows through reality.
Together, they form the spine of how Cultivated thinks about organisations, creativity, and change.
Releasing Agility: Sensemaking and Direction
Releasing Agility begins with orientation.
Before organisations execute, they must understand:
- Where they are going (a painted picture)
- Why they are not already there (current reality and obstacles)
- Who is required to get there (people and behaviours)
- How they will learn as they move
This is not execution.
This is navigation, meaning-making, and alignment in complexity.
Without this sensemaking layer, organisations risk moving quickly in the wrong direction — or optimising systems that should not exist.
Idea → Value: A Lens on How Work Becomes Reality
Once sensemaking is in place, we enter a different domain.
Idea → Value is not a delivery methodology, productivity system, or operating model.
It is a principles-based lens for understanding how ideas move through systems and become outcomes.
Every system, whether designed or accidental, follows a similar pattern:
- Ideas emerge
- Some ideas receive investment (attention, time, capital)
- Work structures itself into activities
- Creative action happens
- Artefacts are shipped
- Outcomes generate value (or cost)
Idea → Value does not prescribe how to do this.
It reveals what is already happening, and where friction, cost, waste, and leverage exist.
It is a way of seeing work, not controlling it.
From Sensemaking to Flow
Releasing Agility asks:
“What should we move toward, and what is stopping us?”
Idea → Value asks:
“How does work actually move through this system, and where does value emerge or leak?”
Releasing Agility is the compass.
Idea → Value is the physics of organisational movement.
Why This Distinction Matters
Most organisations obsess over execution frameworks.
Few step back and ask how work truly flows.
By separating:
- Sensemaking (Releasing Agility)
- Flow (Idea → Value)
leaders can:
- Choose the right problems
- Understand the cost between intention and impact
- Design systems that reduce friction between idea and outcome
- See where energy, attention, and resources are misaligned
This is not about doing more work.
It is about understanding how work becomes value at all.
A Canonical Spine for Cultivated
In Cultivated’s body of work, the structure is deliberate:
- Releasing Agility — Sensemaking and navigation
- Idea → Value — The flow and emergence of work
- Impact Ladder — Human agency across the system
- Communication, Learning, Creativity — Multipliers across all layers
Each layer informs the others. None stands alone.
The Deeper Point
You cannot design what you do not understand.
Releasing Agility helps organisations understand where they are and where they want to go.
Idea → Value helps them understand how reality turns intention into outcomes.
Together, they form a philosophy of organisational movement — one that treats work not as a checklist, but as a living system of ideas, people, action, and meaning.
This piece forms part of Cultivated’s wider body of work on how ideas become valuable, and how better work is built.
To explore further:
→ Library — a curated collection of long-form essays
→ Ideas — developing thoughts and shorter writing
→ Learn — practical guides and tools from across the work
→ Work with us — thoughtful partnership for teams and organisations
