The Physics of Flow: How the Constructal Law Can Revolutionize Product Development

In product development, the quest for better flow has been a constant for nearly two decades. From Donald Reinertsen’s seminal work in 2009 to the DevOps movement and beyond, creating smooth, efficient value streams has been central to organizational success. But what if there was a fundamental law of physics that could deepen our understanding of flow and revolutionize how we approach product development?

In the Spring 2025 issue of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, Brian Moore of RTX offers a fascinating perspective in his paper “It’s All About Flow: Applying the Constructal Law of Physics to Product Development.” Moore introduces the constructal law, a principle of physics formulated by Duke professor Adrian Bejan in 1996, and shows how it applies to product development value streams.

What is the Constructal Law?

The constructal law states: “For a flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve freely such that it provides easier and greater access to its currents.”

Simply put, this principle explains why flow systems throughout nature—from river basins to tree branches to our own circulatory systems—evolve certain patterns and hierarchies. They naturally organize to provide better access to their flows. Moore argues that this same law governs our product development processes, and understanding it can help us accelerate improvement in our value streams.

Three Key Imperatives

Moore distills three primary imperatives from the constructal theory that can transform how we approach product development:

1. Support Freedom

For flow systems to evolve and improve, they need freedom to change. In nature, water inexorably finds the fastest path downhill because it’s free to do so. Similarly, product development teams need freedom to adapt both their processes and products in response to feedback.

The paper examines how freedom exists on a continuum in organizations, with various factors limiting it:

• Team mindset (“We can’t change that.”)
• Organizational policies and processes
• Product architecture
• Tooling and infrastructure
• Alignment and accountability

Moore demonstrates how freedom is already central to many Lean-Agile practices, including SAFe’s principles of decentralized decision-making, preserving options, and unlocking intrinsic motivation. Industrial DevOps similarly emphasizes team autonomy within clearly defined objectives.

2. Embrace Hierarchy

Though hierarchy often gets a bad reputation in organizational theory, Moore points out that it’s essential in nature—without hierarchy, life would be limited to single-cell organisms. Effective flow systems naturally organize in hierarchical patterns with “many small components and a few large ones that are flowing together.”

This applies to product development in several ways:

• SAFe’s focus on organizing around value and applying systems thinking.
• Industrial DevOps principles of architecture for flow and establishing cadence.
• Reinertsen’s guidance on embedding fast control loops inside slow loops.
• Team Topologies’ emphasis on appropriate team structures.

The key insight is that without hierarchy, development would be limited to small, isolated teams rather than coordinated solutions to complex problems.

3. Pursue Beauty

Perhaps the most surprising imperative is the pursuit of beauty. Drawing on the work of Frederick Turner and Christopher Alexander, Moore argues that beauty is not subjective fluff but a central organizing principle relating to wholeness, meaning, fitness for purpose, and harmony.

Beauty serves as a powerful pull force for product development flow systems. As the paper states: “When we deliver products that create beauty in the world, we delight our customers, enhance society and the environment, and provide a profound source of motivation to our team members.”

Moore shows how this manifests in:

• SAFe’s strategic themes and solution visions
• Design thinking practices that focus on holistic solutions
• Industrial DevOps’ systems engineering sensibility
• The wholeness approach in Wiring the Winning Organization

Why This Matters

Moore’s application of constructal theory to product development is groundbreaking because it provides a unifying scientific framework for understanding the evolution of value streams. Just as Newton’s laws transformed civil engineering, enabling the construction of previously unimaginable structures, the constructal law can potentially accelerate our ability to design more effective product development systems.

The paper argues that this approach allows practitioners to:

1. See how various Lean-Agile and DevOps principles relate to each other
2. Apply these principles more confidently in their organizations
3. Communicate more effectively about transformational initiatives

“Just as structural engineers, grounded in their knowledge of physics, can confidently build amazing bridges or aircraft that are both daring and safe, so can we accelerate the evolution of product value streams in the direction of making access to better value easier and faster,” Moore writes.

Practical Applications

For leaders in technology and product development, the paper offers several practical takeaways:

• Evaluate freedom constraints: Identify where your organization limits the freedom of teams to respond to feedback and evolve their processes.
• Design appropriate hierarchies: Rather than rejecting hierarchy outright, focus on creating value-oriented hierarchies that enable coordination without bureaucracy.
• Connect work to beauty: Help teams understand how their contributions create holistic, meaningful solutions rather than just features.

Moore’s work doesn’t reject existing Lean-Agile frameworks but rather enriches them by providing a deeper scientific foundation. It shows how principles from SAFe, DevOps, and other methodologies align with natural laws that govern all flow systems.

The Future of Flow

By grounding product development theory in physics, Moore opens the door to new insights about how to design organizations that can evolve faster and more effectively. His paper suggests that as we deepen our understanding of constructal theory, we’ll continue to discover new ways to improve value flow.

For anyone involved in product development, process improvement, or organizational design, Moore’s paper represents a significant contribution to the field. It bridges the gap between science and practice, offering both theoretical depth and practical guidance.

“It’s All About Flow” is available in the Spring 2025 issue of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal from IT Revolution Press. For those intrigued by the intersection of physics, organization design, and product development, it promises to be essential reading.

As Moore himself recommends, those interested in this approach would benefit from exploring Adrian Bejan’s work directly and starting to observe constructal patterns in nature, society, and their workplaces. The more we understand these fundamental patterns of flow, the better we can design systems that harness them.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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