Flowers of Eunoia

Flower Engineering · Part 2

How the Work Moves in Flow 🌻

How Flower Engineering organises the work in three disciplines that never stop, patterns that describe them, and workflows and habits that carry them into practice.
4 min
742 words
Series: Flower Engineering
Tags: Flower-Engineering Disciplines Patterns Workflows

In the first part, I introduced Flower Engineering and its nine principles I decide by. This part shows how the work itself is organised. Three disciplines split the work by kind. Patterns describe each kind of work at its best. Workflows turn patterns into steps with tools, and habits recur inside them.

Disciplines

Discipline: A type of work that runs alongside the others. Like phases, disciplines start in order, but none of them ends when the next one begins. Only their intensity shifts over the life of a project.

Flower Engineering has three disciplines: Strategy, Build and Care. A project starts with Strategy, followed by Build, and Care steps in once something important enough is running. But Strategy keeps steering while Build runs, and Build keeps coming back while Care runs. Only the effort shifts.

This split between disciplines and phases is very similar to the Rational Unified Process (RUP), which separates what kind of work is done from when it happens.

Strategy is everything that sets a project’s direction. Its effort is highest at the start of a new project and decreases slowly over time, but it never reaches zero. Build comes in spikes, one for each implementation. Care grows with every build, then shrinks as more of it becomes automated, because the aim is a system that looks after itself.

All three are equally important, and none is valuable on its own. A strategy is worthless if it’s never built. A build loses its value if no one cares for it. And without a build, there is nothing to care for.

Patterns

Pattern: A modular guideline for one kind of work within a discipline. It defines when it runs, what it does, and what it produces.

Each discipline has patterns that define its work more precisely, without naming any tools. Like the principles, they aren’t set in stone, and new ones can be added anytime. These are the default patterns so far.

Strategy

  • Inception runs once per project and sets the basics by turning a raw intention into a README.md and a collection of first ideas.
  • Capture runs whenever something needs writing down and gives every thought a quick home.
  • Steering runs as needed and orders ideas into milestones on a ROADMAP.md.
  • Planned: Empathize will understand the people who share a problem, through observation and conversation.

Build

  • Planning happens when an idea, an issue or a milestone is pulled: it sets the appetite and acceptance check, and records decisions.
  • Implementation works through the tasks and sends wrong assumptions back to Strategy.
  • Documentation runs every build day, from a daily log to a milestone report to the occasional blog post.

Care

  • Planned: Monitoring will measure the running system against clear targets, and when those slip, fixing comes before new features. My systems are young, and Care will grow with them.

Workflows

Workflow: A sequence of practical steps, built from patterns and habits, with defined tools.

Workflows are the most flexible part and the lowest layer of Flower Engineering. Patterns describe what the work is; a workflow describes how to do it. It picks the patterns and habits it needs and turns them into guided steps with defined tools.

Take the Development workflow. An idea gets its own document (Capture). When I pull it, a git branch opens and OpenSpec turns the idea into a proposal with tasks (Planning). The agent works through the tasks while I review (Implementation). Every build day ends with a log entry (Document), and the merged milestone closes with a report (Documentation).

Another example is the Provisioning workflow, which builds the infrastructure as code, deploys the service, and configures it.

Habits

Habit: A small practice that recurs on a rhythm. Workflows run when work arrives; habits run inside them, again and again.

Habits are built into the workflows. While a workflow carries one piece of work from start to finish, habits recur along the way:

  • Document. Every build and care day ends with a log entry. Write it down while it’s warm, in the shape its reader needs.
  • Measure (not yet integrated). Regularly check how long ideas take to ship, how much is in progress, and how often work needs redoing. Careful, though: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

A method only helps if it’s practised regularly. Not every workflow is written down as a document; many live as agent skills. The last part introduces the agent that carries them: Euroia.