Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow: Can we double the Flow Rate?

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:

• 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%.

Combining Risks that Occur in parallel or in series

One of the benfits of doing integrated risk management is that by pooling risk we can normally shorten a projects ciritical path. The reason for this is that risks can be treated in parallel. This is the case when the issues can be solved by seperate organizations or individuals in parallel as would normally be the case for risks in specific work packages. We don´t need to sum the durations but actually we should use the formula for parallel availability.



For example for a risk which have a 50% risk we find as the number increase the probabilty of having to extend the project to the entire period of those risks is:



On the other hand for risks in series we find that as the number of risks increases the distribution goes towards a binomial or normal distribution.

Don’t expect things to happen - plan and visualize them

There is quite a bit of material from mental health and improvement material which implies that one should have “expectations of achieving a goal low and our motivation for working to achieve it high”.

About expectation

Another way to view this is that expectation is another way of saying that we expect something to happen without planning. If we have planned it, are checking the results and above all identified the risks we are managing our expectations or those of our client.

As an example some people might go through the day with the expectation that their spouse will bring them a martini when they come in the door. To expect a bonus a the end of the year but not to have planned to get it and executed the steps nor analyzed the results is pretty silly. Have they considered the milestones to see if they are on track to reach that goal and carried out risk mitigating plans?

The answer is probably not, since if they had done that they wouldn´t have expectation, rather they would have a reasonable idea of their chance of getting to their goal.

Phrases like “Plan for success” come to mind. Basically what it comes down to is that expectation is an emotional response without substantial analytical planning and analysis.

About Visualization

But isn’t expectation the same as positive thinking. After all there is a very strong movement in psychology to get people to believe that they will achieve results, to think positive if you will.

They are not exactly the same. Consider the following phrases:

A) Expectation: I expect that my project team will deliver the results on time and budget.
B) Positive Thinking: I am visualizing my project team delivering the results on time and budget.

What is clear from the expectation phrase is that expectation is kind of resigned state and that the positive thinking phrase is an active exploration of how these events might occur. By visualizing you are exploring the path in your mind before and after and it helps you create a plan.

If you want something to happen you can’t simply expect it and shut down your mind and wait for it to happen. You have to plan it, execute your plan, measure the results and reflect on your plan (PDCA) while including a good share of risk planning.

Risk Seminar at TecnoEbro

Yesterday I was in Zarragoza presenting our Integrated Risk Management methodology at a TecnoEbro Project Management Workshop. There was a lot of interest in how we are combining Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) with risk contingency planning to reduce schedules and make projects more efficent.
I presented one implementation of the methodology we are using in the CINeSPACE project for our semi-automatic annotation tool. The diagram above shows the schedule. Some of the key features are:

• Ask for estimations without any risk included
• Take best case (Positive Risk as baseline) (CCPM)
• Include risk negative risk register
• Identify risks as discrete or continuous
• Identify risk dependencies serial or parallel with other tasks
• Late Start (CCPM)

I dedicated a fair amount of time show the importance of the statistical combination of risks in the contingency buffer and I will cover this in the next few blog entries.