Flow

You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

 Flow

• is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best;
• is a transformation available to anyone, anywhere, provided that certain initial conditions are met;
• might be the most desirable state on earth;
• is also the most elusive state
• has seekers of flow spent centuries trying, yet no one has found a reliable way to reproduce the experience…
  • let alone with enough consistency to radically accelerate performance;
  • …except action and adventure sports athletes;
• is also known as the zone—quite simply, the zone is the only reason these athletes are surviving the big mountains, big waves, and big rivers.

When you are pushing the limits of ultimate human performance, the choice is stark: it is flow or die.

17 Flow Triggers

Psychological Triggers

Psychological Triggers are internal strategies that drive attention into the now.

1. Intensely Focused Attention

   Producing flow requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration. Deep focus. This means multi-tasking is out. Open office plans as well. Flow demands singular tasks and it demands solitude.

2. Clear Goals

   Know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it—that’s the point.

   When goals are clear, the mind doesn’t wonder what it has to do next, it already knows. Our focus can stay pinned to the present moment and the present action.

3. Immediate Feedback

   As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is something of an extension of clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we’re doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better.

   If we know how to improve performance in real time, the mind doesn’t go off in search of clues for betterment, we can keep ourselves fully present and fully focused and thus much more likely to be in flow.

4. The Challenge/Skills Ratio

   Flow exists near (but not on) the midline between boredom and anxiety.

   • If the task is too dull, attention disengages and action and awareness cannot merge.
   • If the task is too hard, fear starts to spike, and we begin looking for ways to extricate ourselves from the situation.

   In other words, the challenge needs to be slightly greater than the skills we bring to the table. If you can keep yourself in this sweet spot, then you can drive attention into the now and maximize the amount of flow in your life.

Environmental Triggers

Environmental triggers are qualities in the environment that drive people deeper into the zone.

1. High Consequences

   When there’s danger lurking in the environment, we don’t need to concentrate extra hard to drive focus, the elevated risk levels do the job for us. Since survival is fundamental to any organism, our brain’s first priority is to scour all incoming information for any sign of a threat and focus intently upon it.

   A big wave surfer may need to ride Jaws to pull this trigger, but an ordinary shy guy needs only to cross a room to talk to a pretty gal to do the same.

2. Rich Environment

   A rich environment means an environment with lots of novelty, unpredictability and complexity—three things that catch and focus our attention much like risk.

   If we don’t know what happens next, we pay more attention to the next. Complexity, meanwhile, when there’s lots of information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

3. Deep Embodiment

   A rich environment means an environment with lots of novelty, unpredictability and complexity—three things that catch and focus our attention much like risk.

Social Triggers

Social trigger are ways to alter social conditions to produce more group flow.

1. Serious Concentration

   In sports, complete concentration is required because games move past. You need to be aware of your teammates and opponents. If they lose focus and start thinking about what is for dinner, or other things, they’ll quickly be overrun.

   To create similar flow in social settings, it can help to ensure everyone has their maximum attention to the here and now and blocked off from other distractions.

2. Shared, Clear Goals

   Groups need to be clear about what their collective goal is in order for flow to happen.

   The key to group flow is a balancing act: creating a goal that provides enough focus so the team members can tell when they are close to a solution, but one that is open enough for creativity to exist.

3. Good Communication

   Constant communication is necessary for group flow. Even while deep listening, the conversation must move forward. This follows the most important rule of improv: “Yes, and...”

   Listen closely on what is being said, accept it, and build upon it. Nothing blocks flow more than ignoring or negating a group member.

4. Familiarity

   The group has a common language, a shared knowledge base and a communication style based on unspoken understandings. It means everybody is always on the same page, and, when novel insights arise, momentum is not lost due to the need for lengthy explanation.

5. Equal Participation and Skill Level

   Flow is most likely to happen in a group setting when all participants have an equal role in the project. For this reason, all members should have similar skill levels.

   Think of professional athletes playing with amateurs. The professionals will be bored and the amateurs frustrated (unless the pros teach the ams in a master apprentice setting.

6. Risk

   The potential for failure. Innovation and frequent failure go hand in hand. There’s no creativity without failure, and there’s no group flow without the risk of failure.

   Mental, physical, creative, whatever—the group has to have some skin in the game to produce group flow.

7. Sense Of Control

   Combines aligned autonomy—being free to do what you want—and competence—being good at what you do. Like Dan Pink’s autonomy mastery purpose.

   It’s about getting to choose your own challenges and having the necessary skills to surmount them.

8. Close Listening

   We’re fully engaged in the here and now.

   In conversation, this isn’t about thinking about what witty thing to say next, or what cutting sarcasm came last. Rather, it’s generating real time, unplanned responses to the dialogue as it unfolds.

   Innovation is blocked when one or more participants already has a preconceived idea of what the person is going to say, or how to get to a goal. Doing so keeps them from listening to what is really said and working from there.

9. Always Say Yes

   This means interactions should be additive more than argumentative. The goal is the momentum, togetherness, and innovation that comes from amplifying each other’s ideas and actions.

   It’s a trigger based on the first rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with, “Hey, there’s a blue elephant in the bathroom;” then, “No, there’s not,” is the wrong response. With the denial, the scene goes nowhere. But if the reply is affirmative instead: “Yeah, sorry, there was no more space in the cereal cupboard”—well then that story goes someplace interesting.

Creativity Triggers

1. Creativity

   If you look under the hood of creativity, what you see is:

   • Pattern recognition—the brain's ability to link new ideas together, and
   • Risk-taking—the courage to bring those new ideas into the world.

   Both are flow triggers. Creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity.

See also

• kanban

Sources

• Think Different » Bob Marshall » Ten Benefits of Flow
• The New York Times » Mike Dewar » Streamtools: A Graphical Tool For Working With Streams Of Data
• HBR » Steven Kotler » Create a Work Environment That Fosters Flow
• SlideShare » Steven Kotler » 17 Flow Triggers
• Think Different » Bob Marshall » Seven Changes To Improve Flow In Your Software Development Process