Tag Archives: flow

Doing Good

Tim Stahmer’s post about Apple choosing to do good over making profits reminded me of my recent reading of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. I loved the book for lots of reasons and have been stumbling over real world connections right and left since I finished it. Tim’s post makes one of those connections.

Pink discusses the seemingly anti-capitalistic idea that businesses can make money AND do good at the same time. He highlights Tom’s Shoes whose business model includes donating a pair of shoes for every pair they sell.

Another connection related to Pink’s description of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow was one of my favorite reads in graduate school. Turns out it is one of Pink’s favorite books about work:

Flow is the mental state when the challenge before us is so exquisitely matched to our abilities that we lose our sense of time and forget ourselves in a function. Csikszentmihalyi’s contemporary classic reveals that we’re more likely to find flow at work than in leisure.

As part of his work, Csikszenmihalyi (Chicksa-ma-hi).researched happiness using a somewhat unique method that took advantage of the technology at the time. According to Pink:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did more than discover the concept of “flow.” He also introduced an ingenious new technique to measure it. Csikszentmihalyi and his University of Chicago team equipped participants in their research studies with electronic pagers. Then they paged people at random intervals (approximately eight times a day) for a week, asking them to describe their mental state at that moment. Compared with previous methods, these real-time reports proved far more honest and revealing.

I think Flow is a relatively well-known concept so I was a little surprised when a recent report on National Public Radio described “new” ways to research happiness using an app that pings you several times a day and asks you to complete a survey failed to mention the connection with this earlier work. The researcher’s findings are similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s:

KILLINGSWORTH: So when I look across all the different activities that people engage in, they are universally happier when they’re fully engaged in that activity and not mind wandering, no matter what they’re doing.

The last, and perhaps most interesting, connection I made with Pink related to a comment he makes about contemporary businesses. They are, according to Pink, living in the past, and not even the recent past:

Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.

This accusation is usually flung at schools: they would be familiar to people from earlier generations. And, ironically, that accusation often comes from businesses who are, according to Pink, themselves outdated and who are not always successful at adopting new technologies. Pink describes the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) adopted by companies including Best Buy. The focus is on the work rather than the seat time (hmm….again sounds familiar). But, as Best Buy began to struggle, the new CEO disbanded the practice, returning to a more standard top down management, 40 hour work week model. This, along with Yahoo’s decision to end telecommuting, is seen as a step back for flexible work arrangements despite evidence that it can boost worker satisfaction and productivity.

 

I’ve Been Meaning to Write This Post But

I got stuck on Level 17 (2.7) in Roads to Rome and just had to beat the expert time.  The game lets you move even without making expert time, but somehow I just needed to see the next little bit of the statue revealed and that only happens when you finish all the tasks before expert time runs out.  Plus, each time I played the level, I got a little bit better and could tell that if I just started building the road a little earlier, I would make it.

Now, I know there are a few of you who are rolling your eyes and thinking that this just proves that games are time killers.  After all, I could have been doing something productive and creative like writing a blog post.  But since I knew this post would be about gaming, I’m going to call it research.  And, part of my brain was writing the post even as I learned how to beat the level in expert time.  I was thinking about how I applied what I learned each time to eek just a little bit more speed out of my workers.  A few times I restarted when I realized I had not applied the lessons which meant workers were idling away in camp while I waited for resources to regenerate.  It has been the toughest level so far in the game, and when the last patch of road appeared with the time bar still in the green, I experienced what, in Reality is BrokenJane McGonigal calls “fiero”: an Italian word that basically means “proud” in the sense of “yeah! I finally did it!”  As I played the game, I experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” that sense of being completely absorbed in the moment.  Two pretty good feelings to achieve on a late Tuesday afternoon.

Last evening, I found flow and fiero in Second Life as well.  The crew on VSTE Island had arranged a wonderful July 4th party with lots of activities from kayaking to skydiving.  I particularly enjoyed kayaking.  I kayak in my first life and found that I could apply my knowledge to the virtual version in order to make my way through the wonderful streams and rivers that are part of VSTE Island. And, in what might seem a strange way, it was relaxing. I think it was the concentration and then the success–flow and fiero–that helped create that sense of calm.

I am not completely sold on all McGonigal’s tenets in her book.  Parts of it seem overwritten and undersupported.  But as I continue to play games, I find that some of what she writes resonates with my own experience so I am not willing to completely deride her.