The Psychological Flow of TameFlow

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PSYCHOLOGICAL FLOW - How happy are our people? The PSYCHOLOGICAL FLOW is the fourth of TameFlow's four flows. It is about: - Happiness and Harmony - Unity of Purpose - Community of Trust - Inspired Leadership - Attitudes, Mindset and Culture

Psychological Flow is primarily based on the ideas of the late American-Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his works on positive psychology. Other important elements come from organizational design patterns, especially team-level patterns.

Yet another key element comes from the Theory of Constraints, and in particular: - The Thinking Processes - The Evaporating Cloud conflict resolution techniques - The Layers of Resistance And finally there are elements of Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication.

But how do we start working with PSYCHOLOGICAL FLOW? Typically we start in a very modest and unassuming way: by telling stories, actually metaphors. The objective of the metaphors is to start building a common understanding of people's reality, reflected through the story.

All metaphors contain elements which the listener can relate to. They will clearly see their own personal real-life experiences reflected in the stories. They will easily identify themselves with the characters in those stories.

The "Aha!" moment comes when the listener connects the dynamics of the stories to their own daily experience at work. Thus they "rediscover" a known personal perspective - but one they never applied to their work setting. New understanding develops through familiarity.

Three powerful metaphors we use all the time are: 1. The Story of Herbie. 2. The Patient in the Hospital. 3. The Jeep, the Jungle and the Journey.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied what made people happy. A most significant discovery was about the relationship between the challenge at hand and the skill required to perform a task. When people are challenged, and yet can "barely" perform, that's optimal performance.

The challenge/skill balance is key for individual performance. In TameFlow we use it also to create psychological flow states for entire teams, not only individuals. Remember the Animated Bubble Fever chart out of Operational Flow, representing how well work is done?

Well, if we represent work as performed by a team we can draw this powerful conclusion: The Bubble Fever Chart is a reflection of team-level psychological flow states. The yellow band represents the "Flow Channel" and we should calibrate work load to keep the team therein.

We use the FLOW METRICS of our Operational Flow to calibrate the WORK LOAD of teams in such way that we the team will be in the FLOW CHANNEL. Such teams will outperform themselves in relation to conditions of being overloaded and anxious or under-burdened and bored.

Good teams need to "feel good" about themselves. To cultivate the team spirit, we employ the patterns of Jim McCarthy's CORE PROTOCOLS. I described this in Chapter 8, Creating a Shared Vision at the Team Level, of my "Hyper" book. amazon.com/Hyper-Productive-Knowledge-Work-Performance-Hyper-productivity/dp/160427106X

In the pursuit of UNITY OF PURPOSE, we are very sensitive to any kind of conflicts. Mind you, we consider conflicts as positive elements, because they contain the perspectives and interests of different people. To make people happy, we need to cater for their needs.

We abhor "consensus" based solutions, because they leave everybody at least a "little unhappy." We use conflicts to expose unexpressed assumptions and needs, and then figure out ways to satisfy the needs of the conflicting parties, with no compromises.

We do this by using the "Evaporating Cloud Diagram" out of TOC. Here you can see an example of such diagram, used on the cover of my latest book, "Standing on bits, Agile Software Engineering Management at Scale with the Theory of Constraints" (leanpub.com/standingonbits).

The conversations - maybe "difficult conversations" - that need to happen when addressing such conflicts can be conducted proficiently by techniques from Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. We want everyone to experience PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY at all times.

By systematically addressing conflicts we build up the UNITY OF PURPOSE and the COMMUNITY OF TRUST. The company can spend it's energy - even psychological energy - to work together in harmony and create the greatest products or services for their customers.

We don't waste energy in constant in-fights. We prefer to direct all energy to be winners in the market and give customers outstanding value and experiences. That's the power of PSYCHOLOGICAL FLOW.