A Strange Beginning
Playing cricket at school on a sunny afternoon we have a particular game which is postponed. We decide to have a practice match instead. This means we are playing against our own team and there is a fast bowler in our team, a guy called Steve Caruana, who scares me because of his bowling pace. I bat at number four, so I’m good, but Steve has a habit of launching cricket ball missiles at batters. Being fearful isn’t unusual.
Today, though, I have a performance, where, instead of being anxious and scared I am calm and confident. It is out of the norm. Two thoughts stay with me whilst playing this innings. One is ‘this is really easy’ and the other was ‘where am I going to hit him next?’ It is so different to the point that I get a half century and then am ‘retired’ because other people needed to have a go. Afterwards I’m left thinking ‘where’s that come from?’
The Research
Fast forward ten years. I do a Master’s in Sport Psychology studying many theories of performance. The cricket experience among others I’d had in teams and as an individual sticks in my mind as examples of best performance where I was just free, I was playing at my best, completely able to enjoy and be at my highest level of effectiveness. Had others had similar moments? Was there something to explain it?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist, had a theory for experiences people had talked about in this way: unusual clarity and confidence, unusual, yet both positive and people were at their best. Climbers would talk about it and Surgeons, too. An experience of being very absorbed. He called it flow – a theory of optimal experience.
It was characterised as being challenging, but you wanted to meet the challenge. 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.
Relevance to Organisations
What was interesting is that people loved the experience for itself, irrespective of the outcome, although the outcome was often positive and correlated with personal best performances. Challenged, engaged, confident and at one’s best. The question for teams and cultures is how do you get individuals or teams into this flow state? How can cultures facilitate this?
The working world is filled with anxiety, stress, and burnout. The experience of flow does the opposite. People love being in it, they love coming to work, they love being absorbed, they’re producing their best and they love it for the experience. It is engagement AND high performance. For organizations that is like having the ‘keys to the vault’. If teams can create a cultural environment which facilitates flow consistently then so much is possible.
