My wife and I don’t do package holidays. We prefer the unpredictable, where adaptability isn’t optional, it’s essential.
Indonesia keeps drawing us back. On a 2016 trip, we set sail from Flores on a traditional fishing boat in the early hours. During the next 24 hours, somewhere between the swells and the stars, I discovered the Indonesian Throughflow.
The Oceanic Pattern
The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) is the sole tropical connection between the world’s major ocean basins—a massive leak from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
Here’s what makes it remarkable: it doesn’t flow as a single, uniform stream. The higher sea level in the Western Pacific creates a pressure gradient that forces water through the Indonesian archipelago. But instead of moving cleanly, it must navigate a labyrinth of narrow straits and deep basins. The water twists, accelerates, backs up, finds alternative routes. The topography creates turbulence.
Watching it from that boat—feeling the currents shift unpredictably, seeing the water forced through constraints it couldn’t avoid—I recognised something familiar.
The Variability Factor
Here’s what makes the analogy richer: the Indonesian Throughflow doesn’t run at constant intensity. It varies significantly, it is stronger during La Niña conditions, weaker during El Niño phases. The interannual variability is modulated by climate modes: El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) from the Pacific and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) from the Indian Ocean. Seasonal patterns shift it too; monsoon-driven wind stress controls whether the flow intensifies or weakens, with intense northeast monsoons in boreal winter favouring weaker flow and southwest winds in summer supporting stronger transport.
The system responds to forces acting on it from both sides simultaneously. Most of the interannual variability can be explained by waves generated by remote winds along the equator of both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Pressure in one basin, conditions in another, and local weather patterns all interact to determine how much actually flows.
Organisational ThroughFlow behaves the same way. It’s not constant. It responds to forces acting on the system: strategic pressure from leadership, market conditions, team capacity, competing priorities, and seasonal patterns (budget cycles, quarter-end crunches, holiday staffing). What flows through this week depends on the combination of pressures and constraints active right now.
That’s why weekly tracking matters. A single measurement tells you almost nothing. The trend over 4-6 weeks reveals whether conditions are building toward turbulence or easing toward flow.
The Organisational Pattern
There’s pressure from one side (demand, strategy, stakeholder expectations) pushing toward outcomes on the other. But work doesn’t flow cleanly. It navigates the intricate topography of handoffs, approvals, dependencies, competing priorities, and constrained capacity. It backs up. It finds alternative routes. It creates turbulence.
And just like the ITF, when pressure increases while channels remain narrow, turbulence intensifies. More work enters the system; less work exits cleanly.
The Metric
That’s where ThroughFlow—the metric—comes from.
ThroughFlow = Completed Work ÷ (Completed Work + Rework)
It measures what actually makes it through the system without being forced back for another pass. Not work started. Not work “in progress.” Work that flows through to completion cleanly.
When ThroughFlow is high (80%+), the system is flowing—pressure is being absorbed, work is navigating constraints without excessive turbulence.
When ThroughFlow drops below 65%, you’re watching turbulence form. Work is backing up, rework is multiplying, and energy is being absorbed by organisational friction rather than producing outcomes.
What to observe:
- ThroughFlow declining over 3-4 weeks signals forming turbulence
- Below 60% means more work is being redone than finishing cleanly
- High volatility (wild swings week-to-week) indicates unstable flow
Why It Matters
Most organisations track lagging indicators, such as velocity, OKR completion, and quarterly results. By the time these show problems, you’re already in crisis. Recovery from these often costs months.
ThroughFlow is a leading indicator. It detects turbulence 2-4 weeks before traditional metrics show degradation. That early warning creates intervention windows where recovery costs weeks, not quarters.
The pairing matters too. ThroughFlow measures outcome quality (i.e., is work completed cleanly?). Human Pulse measures process health (is the team sustainable?). Together, they reveal whether you’re achieving results at an acceptable cost—or building capability debt that will compound.
Guardrail pair: ThroughFlow and Human Pulse. If ThroughFlow rises but Human Pulse falls, you’re burning people to hit numbers. If Human Pulse rises but ThroughFlow falls, the team feels better, but output is declining. You need both to be moving in the right direction.
A guardrail pair is two metrics tracked together that prevent optimising one dimension while breaking another.
Single metrics get gamed. Track speed alone and quality suffers. Track quality alone and throughput stalls. Track output alone and people burn out.
Guardrail pairs create tension that keeps the system honest.
The principle: every speed metric needs a quality metric. Every output metric needs a sustainability metric. If one improves while the other degrades, you haven’t solved the problem—you’ve moved it.
The Lesson
The most useful discoveries often come from paying attention in unfamiliar places.
I didn’t set out to find a metric on that boat from Flores. I was watching water move through constraints and noticing patterns. The connection to organisational flow emerged later, but only because the pattern was already visible once I knew what to look for.
That’s the real skill: noticing what’s actually happening, not what you expect to see.
In three decades of leading programmes, providing business assurance to lessen an initiative’s delivery risk, and being dropped in to recover ones that were already past that point and failing, I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: by the time leadership knows there’s a problem, the problem is already expensive. Sometimes embarrassingly so.
Week 2 turbulence costs 3 weeks to resolve. Week 12 turbulence, the kind that finally triggers escalation, costs 6 months and a difficult conversation with the board. The signals were always there earlier. Someone noticed but didn’t have the language. Someone raised it but was told to “stay positive.” Someone tracked it but in a metric nobody reviewed.
ThroughFlow exists because I got tired of arriving after the damage was done.
Track it weekly. Watch for the trends. Intervene while recovery is still measured in weeks.
The Indonesian Throughflow video shows what organisational turbulence looks like when pressure exceeds the system’s capacity to absorb it. The water finds a way through, but not cleanly, and not without cost.
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