Making Flow a part of our work

The following are my notes from an all hands talk I gave internally at Pusher recently. I explained why the concept of Flow is really important to me and how I’m trying to build it into the fabric of our company culture. I’ve left my notes in their rough form as an experiment. Hopefully it may be interesting for others too.
So it’s my turn to do an all hands again. I tend to use these opportunities to talk about something topical that I’ve been spending time on recently, or to try and flesh out more of my world view. I like to describe the context for things, rather than getting too lost in details. I believe it’s fun to talk in these terms and talk about motivation and opportunities in addition to specific solutions.
So the title of this all hands is “my favourite graph”. The graph in question is this one:

I’m going to talk a little bit more about this graph, and why it is really important for my world-view.
Does anyone know what it is? Other than people who I have recently chatted about it with.
You may even have seen a version on the whiteboard in Sega [our meeting rooms are named after consoles] (with the axes labelled incorrectly). This is because I was chatting to [A Pusherino] about it recently.
After the session with him I realised that I haven’t communicated the role of this concept widely enough. It’s a big part of what I’m trying to build in Pusher.
So, the graph is from a book called “Flow” by a Hungarian man called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I had to google how to pronounce his name (apparently “Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high”).
It’s a super-influential book. Originally published in 1990, I see it referenced all the time in psychology and business books. I’d recommend reading it for yourselves.
At its core is the graph I showed previously. This describes a flow state that you can get into. In this state, your skills match the challenge at hand, and time seems to fall away as you get completely caught up in your work (or your game or whatever you’re doing).
The axes of the graph are “skills” and “challenges”. There’s a world in the middle of this graph where you experience flow.
There are two main areas that are not in the flow state. On the top is anxiety. On the bottom is boredom.
You get anxiety when the level of challenge is above your skills. You get boredom when it is below them.
However, skills and challenges are always in flux. It’s easy to slip out of flow if you learn too much, or if the challenge falls.
The answer is NOT to try and freeze both variables: never learn anything, and never change the type of work. That would be impossible. Nor would it feel like progress. I believe the bottom left of the graph is often labelled “apathy”.
The trick is to be increasing skills and challenge constantly. This can be represented by a diagonal movement through the “flow zone”.

I try to do that in my own work, but I also try to make it a part of the company. When I speak to my direct reports, my goal is often to understand where on the graph they are, and whether there is anything I can do to help. I don’t always do this explicitly, but I have the context of this graph somewhere in my subconscious.
However, one of the problems with chasing progress in this way is that progression often involves steps rather than being a diagonal line. You might learn something new that makes your current work boring, or you might be given a new challenge that suddenly throws you out of your comfort zone. The trick is about being self-aware, and reacting positively to the opportunity that has occurred.

I also try to encourage people to adopt this idea when they are having 1–1s themselves. If we have a whole company full of people doing following similar paths as individuals, our capabilities improve massively as a whole.
When I talk about one of our north stars being about having a world leading culture, this is the kind of thing that I’m talking about. My goal is not to optimise for happiness, but rather to optimise for meaning and flow. I’m bullish on the benefits of doing this systemically.
I personally organise a lot of stuff in my life around being in flow. It’s part of the reason that I like running a company. If you’re willing to learn a lot, the challenges certainly mount up pretty quickly.
It may also be the case with parenting (though I think it’s harder to stay in flow).
As a final point to leave on, I’d advise that you think about where you might be on that graph. If you know that it’s part of my goals for Pusher that people are progressing upwards as quickly as possible, then you will know that you are permitted to discuss this openly with your manager. They should help you.
You are also empowered to make changes yourself to bring things back to Flow. Just don’t try to stay still or go backwards.
P.S. this article was brought to my attention while I was thinking of this talk. It’s also got some good points in it.
