ONE word to change your workplace for the better: Flow

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HIGHLIGHTS

1. Productivity increases by 500% when you're in the Flow State.
2. Average working environments give employees only 10% of their work time to be in the Flow State.
3. A high-IQ and high-EQ work environment is critical for the Flow State to take central dominance at your organisation.
4. Your work/activities becomes their own reward.

First, I want to introduce you to two people: a psychology professor, and a group of fishmongers who live in the Zone.

I have a potential client who is interested in moving their customer service staff from a 'watch the clock'/average mindset to one of extraordinary and motivated customer service. And because of their industry (service-centric), those who take on that role know how central that is. So I feel I'm going to have some fun with his crew. And there will be one or two who will be happy to not move out of their comfort zone. As the management team are quite compassionate, this won't be as much of a big issue as if they were a more control/command-centric organisation.

And a way to get them all on board is to make a state everyone goes into 'The Flow State' (TFS) and make it conscious.

THE FLOW STATE (TFS)

Through my research, I keep coming across the concept of 'The Flow'. Now, I used to go to a few new age festivals back in the 20th century, and this often went with the word 'pachouli'. The Flow I'm talking about in 2023 is different.

'The Flow State' is a technical term that describes a 'optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best'.1 This what athletes refer to as being 'in the Zone'.

Chances are that your staff or colleagues have not mastered TFS, nor been trained in it, or even know how to recognise it. Our increased levels of loneliness and depression also bar accessing to TFS.

However, when TFS is facilitated, it turns work upside down.

ABOUT THE CONCEOPT OF THE FLOW

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly was the Chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, and in 1975 he published a large global study on optimal performance, which became a book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1990),

"An rock climber, Csikszentmihalyi noted the special feeling he got while inching his way up a challenging rock face, and began thinking about it in terms of his psychology studies. Why was the entire field of psychology focused exclusively on the study of human pathology and dysfunction? What about the positive states, the moments when humans are at their absolute best?"4

He then spent hours interviewing and observing exceptionally creative people, including leading chess players, rock climbers, composers, and writers, and normal folks as well, as they did their work.

He also developed a unique research tool in which his study subjects carried pagers for a week at a time. Beeped randomly eight times throughout the day, they wrote down what they were doing and feeling right at that moment.4

Csikszentmihaly wasn't the first to focus on TFS (Goethe and Nietzsche had written about it previously), however, he was the first to document it professionally.

HOW TFS HELPS US

When we are in the Flow State:

?? time becomes less important and takes a secondary position.

?? our self-consciousness recedes for the period of Flow State.

?? 'limitations' become less defined.

?? the brain reaches to new areas and allows access to other abilities, or development of new abilities

?? the amygdala or dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (the parts of the brain that activate flight/flight/freeze/fawn and self-criticism) or “psychic entropy” such as distraction, depression, and dispiritedness, becomes less prominent

?? you reach a level of capacity and extend it's reach

?? you achieve a new level of complexity

?? you feel more self-confident, capable, and sensitive.

?? your experience becomes “autotelic,” meaning that the activity actually becomes its own reward.4

“To improve life, one must improve the quality of experience,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

HOW TFS BECOMES IMPORTANT ENOUGH FOR DECISION MAKERS TO PRIORITISE

"Few business leaders have mastered the skill of generating [TFS] reliably in the workplace. First, consider what creates flow in your own work situation. We [asked] this to more than 5,000 executives during workshops we’ve conducted over the last decade.

Individuals initially think about their own personal peak performance with a team. Then they pinpoint the conditions that made this level of performance possible: what in the team environment was there more or less of than usual?" The opportunity cost of the missing this is enormous. When we ask executives during the peak-performance exercise how much more productive they were at their peak than they were on average, the most common at senior levels is an increase of five times … and their employees are in the zone at work less than 10% of the time, though some claim 50%. If employees working in a high-IQ, high-EQ, and high-MQ (moral intelligence) environment are five times more productive at their peak than they are on average, consider even a modest 20% increase would yield in overall workplace productivity—it would almost double."2

HOW WE KNOW WE'RE IN TFS

Most of us have been in this state at one time. I'll give a personal example.

My 14 year old son is in TFS when he does something he's passionate about, which is animation and drawing. There of course are subjects in school that he's not too keen on which he struggles to have any connection with. He has told us that it's not necessarily the subject material itself, but more the teacher and hi?? attitude.

However, when he is in TFS, I look at how he does it:

• He doesn't want us to come into his room or disturb him (no break in productivity).
• He forgets about eating and drinking (well, we're working on that).
• He comes out occasionally, giving himself a break, to tell us some great image he's had in his head about this or the other (he is accessing his medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain linked to language and creativity).
• His product is highly detailed and highly original.
• If there isn't a limitation, say, submitting to an art prize, he is happy about what he came up with.
• And critically, most of the time, he sees no issue with being in the flow state (that is, he is not judging that he wasted his time or wasn't productive).

If he was interrupted constantly, he would be like those who "each time flow state is disrupted it takes 15 minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all. And programmers who work in the top quartile of proper (ie uninterrupted) work environments are several times more productive than those who don’t. Ideally programmers and other knowledge workers can spend 30-50% of their day in uninterrupted concentration."3

HOW NOT BEING IN THE FLOW STATE AFFECTS BUSINESSES FINANCIALLY

• These interruptions that move us out of TFS increase R&D cycle times and costs dramatically.3
• Without flow, there’s no creativity.4 When there is no creativity, then market share is harder to hold (others who culturally embrace creativity are developing their IP with little resistance)
• “[Flow] manifests itself in focused, on-time, on-spec products,”4 leading to greater productivity and a clearer development of products and services.

'Flow' is one ideal outcome of Gallup’s consulting work.4

At Patagonia, CEO Michael Crooke seized upon the ideas in Flow earlier than most. He read [Csikszentmihalyi's] book 10 years ago and credits it with explaining to him exactly why he thrived as a Navy Seal. “When you get a high-powered team together and you really get into a zone, you’ll synchronize,” he says.

WHAT ABOUT THE FISH?

I mentioned fishmongers earlier. When the Pike Fish Place (Fishmarkets) in Seattle were on the verge of bankruptcy, they took a different tack to salvaget the business and keep their jobs. Change how they go about their work and choose their attitude. The FISH Philosophy has come about because of it. There are four key planks:

1?? Make work play

2?? Make the customers' day

3?? Be there with the customer

4?? Choose your attitude

The day flies when they are in this space, and from the videos, say that they enjoy waking up in the morning to come to work. They can choose to be miserable that they have the job they do.5

Csikszentmihalyi believes that flow is most powerful when achieved in service of a goal that will better society.

???? THANKS FOR READING THIS FAR

Part 2 next week will cover how to get into TFS. One hint: shift your culture to decreasing the dominance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Please share this article with your Linkedin and professional network, as each article will build on each other to present a coherent template to help change HR, your culture, and your organisation.

REFERENCES

1 Lieselotte Nooyen, '7 Reasons Creative Leaders Should Play More Games', Thnk', https://www.thnk.org/blog/7-reasons-creative-leaders-should-play-more-games/

2 Susie Cranston and Scott Keller (1/1/2013), 'Increasing the ‘meaning quotient’ of work', McKinsey and Company', https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/increasing-the-meaning-quotient-of-work

3 Adam Wallitt (13/12/2011), 'Five New Management Metrics You Need To Know', Forbes', https://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/12/13/five-new-management-metrics-you-need-to-know/?sh=17a8a5f1717d

4 Ann Marsh (1/8/2005), 'The Art of Work', Fast Company', https://www.fastcompany.com/53713/art-work

5 Robert Dziedzic (27/9/2022), 'Fish Philosophy', Robert Dziedzic', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSRl-TxjGxQ