Doing Business with Flow — Part 1
Thoughts on “Good Business. Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. — Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.”
Part 1 of the Series. Jump to Part 2 here.
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly — (a good friend & magnificent mentor himself introduced me to his thoughts and taught me the pronunciation: “Me-High Chick-Sent-Me-High”) — published “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” in 1990. Since then, his groundbreaking concept of Flow inspired millions of people, including highly influential leaders from politics, news and sports.
Cziksentmihalyi’s subject is happiness. In years of research and writing, he found that getting the optimal experience of “flow” is a condition to reach long holding and profound happiness. According to him:
“(…) happiness is not something that happens, that money or power can command. Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person. It is only by controlling our inner experience that we can become happy. Happiness cannot be reached by consciously searching for it.”
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow — The Psychology of optimal experience. Harper, 1990
Flow is the state of concentration and engagement that can be achieved when completing a task that challenges one’s skills.
Flow and Business
As today’s businesses face new challenges, there is a new paradigm for companies on the horizon: the focus shifts from CEOs that make tons of money, no matter the cost, towards visionary leaders, that put the company’s goal towards a broader sense, that not only benefits themselves but also others, inside and outside of the business.
That appeals not only customers and business partners to get more attracted to the company, but also employees that are willing to go the extra mile for the goal. Work and business are more and more replacing traditional concepts of religion and politics as the thriving forces in our lives and within that their norms and values that set the frames of our acting, thinking and feeling. Csikszentmihaly shows with this book that finding Flow can emerge with this change and help leaders as well as employees to find a way to happiness and contribute to a better, more just and sustainable society.
We will see that the solution for that is:
trust, the commitment towards the personal growth of employees, and the dedication to create something that helps mankind.
My purpose in reading this book was not ultimately to change the goals of the beautiful company I’m working at, as I believe we already have proficient ones, and we continuously challenge them. I read this book to
- get inspiration on how to get more into longer phases of Flow myself,
- to create perfect conditions for my team members to experience Flow as often as possible to live and work with happiness
- and to use that knowledge to strengthen my own understanding of the purpose of life and work, so that I can inspire others to do that as well.
Flow is the key to happiness.
Disenchantment nr. 1: more money won’t make you or your team happier.
(…) research suggests that we each have an inherited “set point” for happiness, which is more or less unaffected by external events.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This “set point”, is depending on healthy relationships, belonging to a community, being optimistic, doing something you like, and, of course, having money to be able to make a “good living”. But once that reaches a specific point, it’s not: the more money, the happier.
That’s why it won’t help in leadership to only work with “more salary” and bonuses as a strategy to make your team happier. It can only be used as a part of a gratification strategy. To provide fairness, market competition or acknowledgment. But never should we put that in the middle of our focus when we talk about “happiness” in our team.
Instead, we should put the focus on Flow and create conditions that people can experience that state as often and as long as possible. The research of Csikszentmihaly and his colleagues found out that “a person’s consciousness when he or she is genuinely enjoying the moment — that is, having a flow experience — can be described in terms of eight conditions”:
Eight Conditions for Flow
1. Clear goals.
It’s essential to know which tasks must be accomplished, step by step and moment by moment, move by move. It does not help to put a high goal in the end without concrete steps on how to achieve it. The mountain climber has her ultimate goal in reaching the top, but they can only arrive it step by step, by making the next move without falling.
2. Immediate feedback.
“The sense of total involvement of the flow experience derives in large part from knowing that what one does matters, that it has consequences. Feedback may come from colleagues or supervisors who comment on performance. Still, preferably it is the activity itself that will provide this information.” — I would even go a step further: ultimately, we should not need others to judge how we perform towards the goal, but be able to give objective feedback to ourselves and trust our own judgement, based on professional experience.
I’m struggling hard with that myself by the way — along with most leaders born in the 80ies and later, according to high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais, whose clients are Olympians, musicians and Fortune 100 CEO. So at least I’m not alone with my FOPO ;-)
3. Balance between opportunity and capacity.
This one was an eye-opener for me: “Flow occurs when both challenges and skills are high and equal to each other.” Over time, the skills of all team member will grow (one of our principles which I highly value). The key is: the challenges need to grow along with the skills, and precisely at the same pace. If the challenge grows too fast, there is demotivation, disappointment and sense of inadequacy. If it grows too slow, there is stagnation and boredom — both killer for Flow.
Here’s another nice twist: Csikszentmihaly states, that one of the most precious human talents, it’s the “ability to discern opportunities around oneself, when others do not”.
4. Deep concentration.
Once the three upper conditions are given, it’s easy to fall deeply into our action, regardless of the current importance of it. “We no longer have to think about what to do, but act spontaneously, almost automatically”. This is what gives the perfect precondition to finding ourselves in a state of concentration, where we forget the world around us, like in a state of meditation, high focussed sports or having an in-depth conversation with a good friend and a glass of wine. Our mind focusses on that narrow stimulus field, and we forget the world around us.
5. Only the present matters.
Once we are in such a moment of deep concentration, we clearly see the next step of action in this very situation. Our attention is with us in the here and now and not driven away by anything in the past or the future, like planning the day our having thoughts about the last unpleasant business meeting.
The human mind is programmed to turn to threats, to unfinished business, to failures and unfulfilled desires when it has nothing else more urgent to do, when attention is left free to wander. Without a task to focus our attention, most of us find ourselves getting progressively depressed.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 50). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Csikszentmihalyi compares that to an escape-mechanism, like drugs or alcohol, — but just the other way around: Flow involves facing challenges and developing skills and therefore leads to growth which is a forward escape mechanism.
6. Sensing Control.
In comparison to everyday life situations, where we clearly have to face the fact that we are surrounded by things we cannot control (being stuck in traffic, the grumpy person at the supermarket checkout, the business market being in a recession), Flow gives a sense for being in control of our own performance, rather than the world around us. Not a forced form of control, but a light, natural feeling of being a partner with the own action so closely, that total control of what happens during the activity comes naturally. Taken the example of sales activity, a good saleswoman has no need to search for control. Viewing it from a state of Flow,
Then one needs no longer be in control of a deal, a budget, or a board meeting, for what matters is doing one’s best for the sake of the task at hand, and having confidence that the best will be enough to prevail.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 52). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Once you are in Flow, you can have full confidence: the best is enough.
7. Altering time.
The invention of clocks has destroyed trillions of concepts of time and replaced it with a one-for-all solution. The upside of catching the train on time now comes with a loss of other concepts of times, which are not following the linear mode of seconds and minutes.
We all know the moment when we look at the time and see: wow, that last hour has just passed in a minute. As well as we know the opposite. Those are the moments where we follow our own inner perception of “time”.
The speed at which time passes depends on “absorption,” that is, on how focused the mind is. The reason we assume that all time intervals are the same is that we have invented clocks that measure time as if that were the case — sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour. But in reality we experience time far more subjectively, so that at various times it seems to speed up, slow down, or stand still. In flow, the sense of time adapts itself to the action at hand.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 54). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
When we are in Flow, time can pass a hundred times faster, like in a dream state where a second can unfold a whole lifetime. Time is not relevant anymore in a state of Flow. Time just seems to “happen” unconsciously without having to constantly check the clock.
8. Loss of Ego
Being completely immersed in a state of action, we not only tend to forget time and surrounding, but also our very self. We do not need to put awareness to ourself in contrast to others, as we are entirely within ourselves actions, we do not need to care about our actions of yesterday or of our fears of tomorrow. Csikszentmihalyi compares that to eastern cultures, where the feeling to belong to an entity greater than oneself, the being part of a community, is more vital than the western cultural pattern, which emphasizes individuality and the separation of the self from others. True happiness does not come out from having an enormous ego and pretending to be the most significant and most successful person alive. Happiness is an unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
Now that we know the stages of Flow, how can we bring it in business life? What prevents Flow from happening on the job of our team members and how do we build Flow in organisations and everyday life?
Read on in the next part of the summary, published in part 2.
