Why More Control Means More Chaos
Since the Industrial Revolution, leaders have believed that more control equals better outcomes. That belief is now actively working against them. Erica Engelen, founder of The Flow Hive and a Team Topologies Valued Practitioner, joins Alan Shimel on Techstrong TV from Belgium to preview her Flowtopia 2026 talk on how to thrive in complexity and reverse control. Erica shares her non-linear path from graphic designer and photographer to marketing leader at open source companies like Red Hat, and how watching teams at a bank “almost physically fight” after an Ansible rollout sparked her career pivot into organizational dynamics, agile, Team Topologies, and flow. She and Alan dig into why traditional control structures break under COVID-era disruption, war, energy shocks, and now AI — and why the organizations stuck in this liminal space need a fundamentally different operating model. Catch Erica’s full session at Flowtopia on June 24.
