Here is a great talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Ted about flow.
Its a great thing to remeber just how important it is to get people to work in an area which is challenging and where they have expert knowledge.
It is really clear that when people have been developing skills for some time (10 years is a common number) and have developed an expertise and then they are presented with a real challenge this is when they can go into that hyper productive and creative state called "flow".
This tells us a lot about recruiting for projects or organizations:
Its a great thing to remeber just how important it is to get people to work in an area which is challenging and where they have expert knowledge.
It is really clear that when people have been developing skills for some time (10 years is a common number) and have developed an expertise and then they are presented with a real challenge this is when they can go into that hyper productive and creative state called "flow".
This tells us a lot about recruiting for projects or organizations:
- Experts are valuable when we can give them challenging work
- If you are training people you need to keep them focused on getting to the expert level and then retain them.
- Dont disturb flow by moving experts into roles where they are not focused or challenged ie. upwards in the functional divisions.
From my experience most organizations probably have less than 3% of flow going on. Imagine just doubling that to 6%.
2 comments:
Cool. Just this morning blogged about this very thing. You should leave a comment with your link cos you have some good ideas that I think my readers would find valuable.
Hi Rorschach,
Just checked out your posting and enjoyed it. You focus on the pressure element as a mechanism to increase your ability to enter flow but I am not so convinced about this. A sense of urgency can be created by flow itself and getting into flow is the key. What urgency has the ability to do is remove the other competing tasks that disrupt flow. But once you have eliminated them from you mental state you probably no longer need the urgency since you are producing at 100% capacity.
Thanks for you Comments!!
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