What is flow? In essence it is a theory of optimal experiences for individuals, teams and organisations.
Flow is characterised as having challenging goals, but you want to meet those challenges. It had personal meaning for you. High challenge AND you have high belief in your skills to meet the challenge. You’re not distracted, you have a sense of control, though there are things you can’t control.
People love the experience for itself, irrespective of the outcome, although the outcomes are often positive and correlated with personal best performances.
Flow is being challenged, engaged, confident and at one’s best.
How Flow Builds through Interactions in Cultures
Your culture is built or broken through every interaction that happens across your team and business. Every interaction is one unit of your total culture. Change the quality of each interaction and you will change the overall feel of your culture.
Each interaction becomes an opportunity to increase the three things that facilitate being in flow. For example:
- If I help someone getting greater clarity on what their role is, what the goals are for them, how that fits into other team members and feeds into overall goals that increases clarity and increases the likelihood for clearer thinking, more effective action and better performance.
- If I help someone feel more interested in what they are doing by paying attention to how their contribution makes a difference, helping each person grow their interest what it will mean to them and in how they can achieve those goals they will have more energy and meaning in what they are doing
- Thirdly if I can help people accelerate how they learn what is working, why its working and also what perhaps is not working they will feel more confident in achieving the goals they want to achieve.
Flow is a feeling of having meaningful goals that are stretching but that a team or an individual believes they have the skills and capabilities to achieve those goals.
- Build clarity and this enhances understanding of what day by day will help achieve high performance and flow
- Build interest and the goal becomes more meaningful and people naturally have more energy and motivation for that goal
- Build learning and people build their belief that they can achieve these stretching goals
Flow therefore creates teams and cultures that have higher engagement – I enjoy and am positively stimulated to achieve this goal – and it is correlated with personal best team and individual performances.
This flows to better results for individuals, teams and the wider organization.
How does it feel in your culture?
Flow is the gold standard that every team and organizational culture is aiming for.
When achieved, flow is an experience where people feel highly engaged, enjoying the challenge and typically very happy and content in their work. They work better and stay in the organization longer than in other businesses.
It is characterized by high challenges but an equally high belief in the skills/capabilities to achieve those challenges.
Understanding the feeling currently in your own culture can help you understand where your team is in relation to this gold standard.
- Does your team feel bored in what they are doing day to day? Perhaps there is a need to set more challenging and meaningful goals
- Does your team feel worried in their day-to-day work? Perhaps we might need to help them build belief by reviewing successes and progress more to gain more clarity about what is working
- Does your team feel in control day to day? Perhaps focusing more on goals that have more meaning could unlock more enjoyment and performance
Thinking about what the team or organizational feeling is right now can help you to start to map how to move towards the top right segment of the model. Higher challenges but also higher belief in the skills and capabilities the team has to meet those goals so people can feel more in flow – that sense of being focused and happy.
Key texts include:
- ‘Flow in Sports: the keys to optimal experiences & performances’ by Susan Jackson & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- ‘Flow: the psychology of optimal experience’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi