Go with the flow baby

Following on from my previous two posts, I had a great conversation with a colleague today about happiness and flow experience. This colleague has recently graduated from university with a psychology degree, so it was refreshing to discuss matters like this with someone who actually knows and understands what I'm talking about. It was also refreshing to realise that I wasn't talking bullshit, and we could properly converse in the topics which are of interest to me. Despite acknowledging that I'm untrained in the field, I still like to be able to think that I can pick up on concepts quickly.

Anyhow, when we were discussing flow experience, I got to thinking about how this applies to me and wanted to examine this in more detail. As is usually the case, I refer to wikipedia as a first step. Here, flow is described as a mental state of operation where the person is fully engaged in what they are doing. The components of flow are as follows;

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time - one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975. p.72).

Reading through the list, I am reminded how often when I'm having a busy work day - time absolutely flies. Not tooooo often, but certainly one really strong occurrence every fortnight or so. So is this when I'm happiest? Yes!

So does this mean, for the purposes of application, if I were to design work systems for my teams should I be aiming to enable employees to experience flow? How might I do that exactly. I am in the process of re-organising the nature of work in my teams right now. Perhaps I should take these flow components into account when considering people for specific roles. To do that however I would need to know what every one's signature strengths are. The nature of my workplace dictates that I cannot simply get everyone to take the test. Perhaps some, but not many. I'll have to take a punt and guess the rest.

What do you think? Any flow-meisters out there care to comment?

I think I'd better do some more reading. Time is of the essence. Csikszentmihalyi - Bring it!