Episode 10: The concept of Flow (also from a knowledge creation perspective)

Flow is the optimum experience … as coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cszikcentmihaly. He did very interesting work in trying to figure out what the explanation was for this experience, what the causes or drivers were. He came up with 3 key drivers of Flow. The experience itself can be looked at from different perspectives as well and I want to go into one which is often underrated: The psychological experience: it feels really good, it makes you forget everything else The performance related experience: you deliver your best possible performance/ outcome when in Flow The knowledge creation experience: (and this is the one which is often forgotten) you create the most optimum knowledge while in Flow, the very specific knowledge to keep you in Flow and making optimum progress. So Flow is also a knowledge creation process … To illustrate this we need to look at the third condition for Flow: the balance between skill and difficulty. This condition implies that Flow is something dynamical, that you can always fall out of Flow and get back into Flow during your activity. The reason being that both skill level as well as the difficulty of the task is dynamic and not static. Any activity has phases of varying difficulty … and your skill level is also dynamic: the more you do something, the better you become in that activity and therefore your skill level increases. Now if both skill and difficulty are constantly changing over time, how do you keep them balanced in order to maintain the experience of Flow ? The answer is: by continuously creating relevant knowledge Knowledge on how to increase the difficulty if you get bored Or knowledge on how to increase your skill (learn from your feedback) if you get frustrated Both types of knowledge creation are the essence of optimum learning, and as it goes with knowledge creation: it’s fallible, never right the first time, and takes a lot of error-correcting to get closer and closer to the kind of knowledge that is useful. In this case useful to maintain Flow (by either understanding how to get out of either boredom or frustration)