Focusing on Flow and Joy

We add to the HumanDebt? when we don’t build in times to think and create and learn. That’s not news to anyone with enough common sense, but mitigating against forgetting it in favour of operational needs and burning fires is far from easy in the face of ever-increasing backlogs and ever less patient stakeholders. 

Learning and creating needs protected spaces not accidental ones such as new projects, new team members or external pressure but failing that, any of these occasions can double as a time to sneak in some focused time for thinking, designing or just bonding. We can all use any team re-launch and any retro - to sneak in a “huddle time” ticket for an open-ended meeting set up just to think and it can never steer any team wrong irrespective of industry or mandate. We know it’s hard, we’re a start-up that does nothing but obsesses with the people work and still find it difficult to justify the thinking times but we also know the discipline to create these spaces and protect them, will carry us far and make us sustainable and we have yet to say “well then, those two hours were a waste of time, we created/thought of/debated/understood/dreamt up nothing new”.

The next big thing on our backlog now that the Playbook and this new UI are done (yes, this is shameless bragging, we can’t help but love our new baby’s face) that we’re likely going to occupy the next few sprints with, is the Aristotle Questions Pack. Measuring for perceived Clarity, Structure, Impact, Dependability and Meaning in addition to how we measure Psychological Safety will allow us to see how any team stacks up against the findings of the biggest study in team productivity there ever was- Google’s Project Aristotle and its findings of what makes teams successful. 

Right after it -or perhaps ahead of it, we’re thankfully still nimble enough not to be married to big tickets prioritisation in our features’ backlog- a bigger piece still - “Measuring and Increasing Flow” - the Holy Grail of work satisfaction. 

For anyone reading this, who read Project Unicorn -and those who haven’t, should- this will ring familiar but Gene Kim’s “2nd Ideal” mentioned in the book amongst the 5 that will allow for high performance, is “Focus, Flow and Joy”. 

What is “Flow”? We all experience it in some shape or form in our work lives -or we would have long quit-. Programmers and artists often describe being “in the zone” and can’t stop raving about how good it feels. It mostly happens when there is focused, individual work for short bursts of time that has a creative, challenging element to it and that produces results which can be evaluated in short feedback loops. It’s characterised by a loss of spatial and temporary awareness (people experiencing flow “lose track of time” and often ignore physiological needs in favour of remaining task bound) and it is addictively enjoyable. In short, it is a state of productive, highly performant, pleasant to experience, altered state of consciousness where we do our best work and that makes us the happiest. 

So obviously, we should find ways to get more of it and even find ways to experience it as a team. 

I’m presuming Gene and his co-authors had read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s many books on the topic starting with his research in the 90s all the way to Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which it’s the chief piece to inform our pre-design research in the topic alongside some studies mentioned in Steven Kotler’s Stealing Fire and The Rise of Superman and Martin Seligman’s Flourish and his invaluable work in the application of character strengths at work. Nonetheless, these are all academical and the divorce between them and the day-to-day reality of soundbites on engagement and satisfaction is staggeringly clear. 

This is why people specialists and tech specialists alike should embrace it. The word “flow” in itself takes the discourse from a sterile one to an actionable one. It’s a measurable state of consciousness not lip-service to the importance of being satisfied at work. It is something to learn to recognise and acquire more of not a theoretical debate. It’s a shortcut to achieving that elusive happiness alongside having purpose and impact and working in a team where there’s the magic of Psychological Safety. If we have enough time spent in flow then we have joy so it stands to reason we ought to create more of the conditions to allow that. 

At PeopleNotTech we sometimes struggle with Gene’s “5th Ideal - Customer Focus” - “[…] where we ruthlessly question if something really matters to the customer and if they are willing to pay for it”. We simply can not be as ruthless in that questioning as Project Unicorn demands.

Here’s why - the Aristotle Pack we mentioned above is clear - a “How Google am I?” score is something our customers resonate with and have outright asked for. The best way to build a feature is when you already have demand for it, then you don’t need to wonder or worry. 

But at the same time, by virtue of what we do, of how we are at the intersection of science and technology and at the cutting edge of people work with no precedent to go by, there’s a hefty amount of demand generation connected uncomfortability we have to allow for, because our customers can’t know they need a thing they never even knew could exist before, so much of what we build, has to be based on believing new studies, dissecting a need or analysing a signal that our customers give us through the data and finding a new way to deal with it that had never existed before. 

No one asked us for the “Flow Features” but we know they need them. We know that intentionally constructing joy will better the dynamic of the team and will be a welcomed aid for reinforcing Psychological Safety in that bubble. 

I personally hate that we struggle with the 5th Ideal because being people obsessed, the biggest Agile manifesto imperative, has always meant to me that one has to be obsessive about both types of people - our own that make the thing and our customers that use the thing- so I’m constantly hunting for ways to create tasters, morsels, mini-MVPs of anything we think of before we start getting it on the Features backlog. In the case of the “Flow Features”, in the Yale “Science of Wellbeing” course I’ve recently completed, there were multiple examples of studies mentioned to describe flow and its direct correlation to happiness and those serve as a good indication of the need. 

Where I envision the strongest barrier is not in creating something that will make our teams’ lives better through flow, but in convincing them it’s ok, it’s desirable and it’s needed that they have any joy at work. 

Unfortunately, with the exception of the hippest and trendiest of places where there have been enough organisational permission slips handed -be they pizzas over a hackathon, having a DOJO or sufficient barista Wednesdays- most other shops have done nothing in convincing their employees that they are genuinely invested in their happiness beyond the employee engagement empty rhetorics they parade in shareholder meetings and annual surveys, so why should they believe that they want them to be eternally in flow and have joy? 

Incidentally, I believe Psychological Safety already contains the notion of flow at a team level. The same way that it contains the definition of trust and that of goodwill and that it outlines the impact and human closeness. All baked into this notion of flying high and making magic together as a unit. 

So it will be tough to overcome the years of low-key emotional abuse that the HumanDebt? brings but it will be worth it, not only because our people deserve the joy of having flow often but because it pays off when they perform their best because of it. 

May the rest of your week be filled with flow and loads of joy!

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