Flow: Parenting & Leadership

Today's blogpost is dedicated to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Many of us might have heard the term 'flow'. He was the one who recognized and named the psychological concept of 'flow', a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. It is a mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. 

There are seven known conditions, when met puts you in the state of 'flow':

• Knowing what to do
• Knowing how to do it
• Knowing how well one is doing
• Knowing where to go
• High perceived challenges
• High perceived skills
• Freedom from distractions

Parenting

As much as the concept of 'flow' applies to yourself, it applies for our kids too. One way to evaluate ourselves as a parent is to ask ourselves this question: How much 'flow' is my child experiencing on a daily basis? How much of what she/he does is motivated by rewards & punishments (coerced or forced) compared to doing something where the act in itself is its own reward?

For example: Why are kids so hooked on gaming? Don't worry! Video games are actually very good for your kids. I'm not talking about them imparting a better physical skill like "hand-eye coordination" but a more fundamental mental skill - understanding a complex and autonomous world. More about that here (note: this might be a long detour and I highly encourage you to learn more about the 'Taking Children Seriously' philosophy in the process).

Going back to 'flow'... Think about the games that you loved as a kid or even now as an adult - they all tried their best to keep you in a state of flow. What that means is avoiding apathy, anxiety & boredom. Apathy is characterized by trivial challenges and low-skill level requirements - leaves one with "lack of interest". Anxiety occurs when challenges are high enough to exceed perceived skill level, causing distress and uneasiness. Boredom occurs when challenges are few, but one's skill level exceeds those challenges. Good games are challenging just enough to keep you engaged and at the same time allow you learn new skills, level up and keep going.

Productivity and learning happens best when you are in a state of flow. Most schools focus on "teaching" instead of 'learning'. And a lot of teaching today is just telling. Our kids are forced to chase memorization instead of gaining understanding. Grades are a form of "rewards & punishment" imposed on our kids - do your best to shield them from that social pressure. We all seek simplicity - schools are good at reducing something as complex as a human child to a mere number (grades or IQ). That's just a bad form of reductionism. Simplicity is overrated and misleading - we all must learn to embrace complexity. More on that in a future blogpost.

Next time when you "ask" your kid to do something (that you think is important), ask yourself this question: Does this lead her/him to a state of 'flow'? If not, see how you can make it interesting. More importantly, give them a wide variety of experiences. Encourage and support them to pursue what interests them. Find ways to increase the time they spend in a state of 'flow' on a daily basis. I'll end this section with a quote from Stafford Beer, the father of Management Cybernetics:

“Every pupil is a high-variety organism, and the process of education essentially constrains variety."

Leadership

The reason I discussed about parenting first is because the context of 'flow' at an individual level can't be ignored when we are trying to improve the 'flow' of our organizations. Why is it that successful corporations, as they get bigger & bigger, become slower and slower over time? Innovation drops or disappears, quality and security takes a beating, it gets frustratingly hard to get anything done, there is always too much coordination headwind and so on. How do we maintain and improve the pace of innovation while the organization grows & along with it its internal and external complexity?

It is well-known in software circles that as your codebase grows, there are two key principles you have to adhere to improve maintainability: Low Coupling and High Cohesion. One way of improving the 'flow' of your organization is to create separable single-threaded teams that interact with each other via APIs instead of manual coordination. As many of you already know, Amazon popularized this concept. Netflix took the approach of "highly aligned, loosely coupled" teams in their culture document.

Corporations are complex socio-technical systems. Learning about systems and their properties will give you the insight that,

Performance of the whole system is never the sum of the performance of the parts taken separately, but it's the product of their interactions.

Focussing on 'interactions' gives you the best bang for the buck. Therefore, good leaders focus on the interactions of the system in which people are a part of instead of just blaming people or "culture" (which is an emergent phenomenon) for their collective failures. When we assemble a cross-functional team that is focussed on solving a common problem, work happens much more rapidly than we’d expect - that's because there are no complex interdependencies across team boundaries and all the necessary skillsets are self-contained within the team and/or are encouraged to be developed organically. This approach enables us to take a counter-intuitive position that "no coordination is BETTER than better coordination" and avoid the trap of "coordination headwind" which is under-appreciated/unrecognized by many leaders.

Note that people are not mere cogs in the wheel - they are autonomous agents with their own purpose. They are purposeful. We humans are certainly goal seeking creatures. But, the real challenge is that we don’t necessarily want someone else to set the goal for us. Collective goals have to emerge from the bottoms-up and be constructed by the teams themselves. Leaders have to understand this deeply when designing or re-designing organizations. In a way, leadership is paradoxical when you look at it from the lens of "designing freedom".

When the priorities & details of what needs to be done emerges bottoms-up based on the "why", then the team on the ground has much better intrinsic motivation to get it done (they are not being commanded what to do - but, they are given a problem space to solve for instead). This takes leading with context instead of control. It means making decisions "with" your teams instead of "for" your teams. It means allowing mistakes to happen and guiding the team to learn from them and gently steering the ship forward. Very much like encouraging a toddler to take risks, fall down a hundred times before it can learn how to walk properly without falling. That takes long-term thinking, especially about people. Listen to Steve Jobs explain this in his own words:

What about that "Rock Star" performer then? Do you think that doing thousands of heart surgeries would make you better at them? As it turns out, that may not be true. Here is an excerpt from the book, 'Give and Take' by Adam Grant:

"When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐥, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧’𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐲𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐬. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐧𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬, 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐭𝐡𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐡𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞𝐬. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it didn’t carry over to other hospitals. 𝐓𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬."

There are many reasons for separable single-threaded teams to fail in the real-world - here is what I've encountered many times: Well-defined & rigid role types (e.g. developer, SRE, security analyst, solution architect, domain architect, etc.), specializations and well-articulated growth path expectations in each of those roles actually get in the way - in a BIG way. Think again - why is it that startups are able to move faster? There is no task beneath anyone - everyone thinks beyond their role boundary and are expected to wear multiple hats. Problems are disciplinary in nature. Let’s learn to think interdisciplinary & go beyond traditional organizational boundaries. As Richard Feynman put it,

“If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it!”

How can teams be agile & learn continuously, if they are unable to self-organize, error correct & overcome obstacles by themselves? They must be a team of members that support each other, challenge each other and also learn from each other. They must have common goals and a shared vision. They must fail and succeed together. More importantly, they must act out of intrinsic motivation and not because of external rewards & punishments (e.g. promotion, pay hike, bonus, getting fired, etc.)? More on that later...

But, for now, I'll leave you with wise words of Gareth Morgan,

"Mechanistically structured organizations have great difficulty adapting to changing circumstances because they are designed to achieve predetermined goals; they are not designed for innovation. This should come as no surprise, for machines are usually single-purpose."

and my drone video of a traffic circle (which are known not only to improve the flow of traffic but also make it much more safer when compared to traditional intersections):

Velocity & Security don't have to be zero-sum games! It is possible to improve them both together - we just have to think differently and construct new “systems”.