ANNOTATION
From Toyota to Flow: Agile's Next Chapter
Is Agile still relevant? What about Lean? What is the state of Agile in 2025? You’ve learned the frameworks and gained the certifications but for some reason things aren’t working out as you expected. Why is that? Join Nigel Thurlow, the co-creator of The Flow System, the creator of Scrum The Toyota Way, and the former Chief of Agile at Toyota as he recounts his journey from his early Toyota days to the present time with his work on Flow. Listen as he weaves an informative narrative on how you should take what you’ve leaned and how to apply what is still relevant while understanding the gaps that are yet to be filled. Understand the Triple Helix of Flow approach, and how the interconnections and interactions between methods in context are the focus, and not one size fits all solutions. This is how you elevate your Lean and Agile knowledge.
Nigel Thurlow
Nigel previously served as the first-ever Chief of Agile at Toyota, where he created the World Agility Forum award-winning “Scrum the Toyota Way” and co-created The Flow System™, a holistic FLOW-based approach to delivering customer-first value built on a foundation of The Toyota Production System. He has also taught Scrum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
While at Toyota, Thurlow worked to frame Scrum as more than just a standardized behavioral process by applying and advancing fundamental methodologies to spur innovative, forward-thinking solutions to Toyota’s most complex challenges. He also founded the Toyota Agile Academy in 2018. These efforts signaled a transformative phase for Toyota, leading the company towards organizational agility and helping its team members better understand this concept in an automotive production context.
Thurlow is currently the Chief Executive Officer at The Flow Consortium, a collection of highly regarded companies in the Lean and Agile world — as well as the scientific and academic communities at large. The Flow Consortium strives to expand the boundaries of current Lean and Agile thinking through the understanding of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science by tapping into the minds of top thought leaders from these concentrations.
As an author, Thurlow was named a Forbes top 10 author for co-authoring the book “The Flow System™” in 2020. He has recently co-authored “The Flow System Playbook” published in 2023 which presents a practical study guide and reference book to all the concepts covered in the first book.
Go to nigelthurlow.com for his complete biography.