Steve Tendon is the creator of TameFlow, an approach to organizational and team performance that synthesizes Theory of Constraints, Agile, and flow thinking. He is the host of the "Campfire Talks with Herbie" podcast, named after the character from Goldratt's "The Goal" who personifies the constraint.
TameFlow
TameFlow combines eliyahu-goldratt's TOC (particularly constraint identification and the Five Focusing Steps), Agile practices, and Csikszentmihalyi's flow state concept to address team and organizational performance. The approach addresses both the systemic level (where is the constraint in our delivery system?) and the cognitive level (are people in a state that enables high performance?). The integration of psychological flow into a TOC-informed framework distinguishes TameFlow from other TOC-Agile syntheses.
Tendon's book "Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance: The TameFlow Approach and Its Application to Scrum Project Management" (2015) documents the framework. The name "Campfire Talks with Herbie" — his podcast — is a direct Goldratt reference: Herbie is the slowest boy in a hiking group in "The Goal," used to illustrate how the slowest element defines system throughput.
Connection to Ching
Tendon hosted Ching on "Campfire Talks with Herbie" — the tameflow-campfire-talk episode 26, recorded in September 2020. The conversation situated Ching's work within the broader TOC-for-software community and explored the connections between Ching's narrative approach to TOC and Tendon's TameFlow synthesis.
Both Tendon and Ching occupy similar positions in the TOC ecosystem: practitioners who have adapted Goldratt's manufacturing-context framework for software and knowledge work, and who use accessible formats (podcasts, business novels, consulting frameworks) to reach software practitioners. Their overlap in community and approach makes Tendon a natural interlocutor for Ching's work.
Position in the transmission chain
Tendon represents one of several parallel paths from Goldratt's TOC to software practice. The goldratt-to-software-transmission-chain traces these routes: Ching's narrative path, gene-kim's DevOps path, david-anderson's Kanban path, and Tendon's TameFlow path all derive from the same upstream source. Each emphasizes different aspects of the Goldratt inheritance and addresses different aspects of the software development challenge.