Get in the zone with Flow

One of the leading positive psychology proponents and founding thinker of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the greatest living psychologists of our age. This short video introduces us to the man and his idea. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjliwSJGDiU 

Wikipedia tells us that "according to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channelled, but positive, energised, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or ones emotions."

For many, this idea will have sporting analogies. For others, particularly those interested in strengths-focused approaches to individual and team performance and development, the notion and feeling of flow happens when we are using our talents on activities that turn those talents into true strengths. Strengths that are visible to others, felt by us through the ease with which we carry out a function, role or activity time and again with high quality, positive outcomes. 

We are told that we cannot force ourselves to enter a flow state. It is something that just seems to happen. The state can be entered performing any activity and most likely to occur when we are wholeheartedly performing a task or activity for intrinsic purposes. Again, from a strengths perspective, we are more likely to find activities of this nature, i.e. where we wholeheartedly engage, with some understanding of our talents and strengths and how to seek opportunities to optimise the deployment of those talents.

There are several conditions necessary to achieve the flow state:

• There must be clear goals for the activity, thus adding direction and structure to the task
• We must perceive there to be a good balance between the challenge of the task and our own perceived skills (or in Strengths terms, the task and our talents rather than learned skills) 
• We need to have confidence that we are capable of doing the task

It also helps if there is clear and immediate feedback relating to the task. This helps us to negotiate any changing demands and allows us to adjust our performance to maintain the flow state. From an appreciative perspective, the feedback sought and provided is better when it concentrates on what works well, what is progressive and what we can learn to promote doing more of something - essential in a sporting context and arguably not less important in an organisational context - rather than too often seeking evidence of where we are weak or failing.    

Good-finding not problem solving for the coming week

It's tempting with the problem/weakness paradigm being so pervasive, for us to frequently fall into the ease of concentrating on these twin imposters of learning and progress. Resist! I ask you to start this coming week by finding something in your life, in your organisation, in your team, that is working well. Find something that portrays your service as capable, caring, progressive and coping with the challenges and risks of our current economic situation, however small it is. In fact, try and find the smallest positive action that has the greatest impact. Identify the action, outcome, impact, kind word and so on that has a disproportionately positive impact on your client, customer or colleague and then celebrate it, share it, promote it.


Here's a couple of links to get you thinking about how to start a movement, from the smallest beginnings to a large crowd in just a few minutes, and also how an appreciative inquiry into cooperation made such an impact on a large French business. Enjoy!


This link is to a video of how to start a movement. It's fun with some serious learning:


http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html

Here's the link to Bernard Tollec's great little video about Phillips in France using AI:


http://vimeo.com/35208749

And to top it off, this link will provide access to a helpful blog that offers some highly practical thinking around shifting your view from problem-solving to appreciation.


http://www.organizationalinnovationideas.com/problem-solving-really/

Government suffers sixth defeat...and the Social Fund disappears

Overwhelming backing for Tory peer's amendment wrecking charging proposals for Child Support Agency

The Government's troubled Welfare Reform Bill, which has been severely mauled in the Lords, received a sixth set-back this evening over charges for people using the Child Support Agency. The scale of the revolt on this issue dwarfed any other reversal the coalition has suffered in this Parliament. To read the full story, follow the link to the Guardian's excellent Society blog, where up-to-the-minute analysis can be found.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/blog/2012/jan/25/welfare-poverty

By the way, did you know also that the Social Fund it to be abolished as well, with the rump of the funds being transferred to local authorities without a ring-fence? Having been cut by 39% by the Coalition, it has now seen fit to pass off the funds of last resort for the poorest families in the country. Where will they go for emergency loans? Just check-out day-time TV and you'll see the plethora of disgusting companies offering loans with APR's of thousands of per cent - that's where...or just maybe the burgeoning 'Big Society' of soup kitchens, food banks and 'dumpster divers' will have to help pick up the outcomes of this particular piece of socio-economic engineering. 

I can't help thinking that as the still empty rhetoric about tackling executive and bankers' pay drones on in the foreground with the added diversion of stripping knighthoods from errant bankers, looks ever more like a kind of smokescreen to cover the dismantling of the welfare state. This at a time when unemployment is at a 17-year high, the recession is now official, economic growth prospects are at a level that most accountants would call a 'soft rounding' in numbers terms, the vaunted private sector fails to provide anywhere near the number of jobs required to address the loss of 710,000 public sector jobs and so on. The diversion of attention away from these important aspects just leaves such a nasty taste in the mouth.

Change is hard...except when it's not!

The Positive Psychology website has an interesting and potentially practically helpful piece about ways to achieve personal change by identifying the resistors to change, in ourselves and in groups, and melting them away. The model quoted draws implicitly on positive psychology constructs, which in my view gives it an added benefit. 


The article quotes Kegan and Lahey's four-column model of analysis and action to reduce and overcome resistance to change (from their book Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization). The four elements are:

1	Commitment, i.e.  unable to follow through on commitments to new and beneficial behaviours
2	Doing/not doing — mindful observation rather than instant challenge and change, using curiosity and mindfulness to uncover big assumptions at work
3	Hidden competing commitments - begin identifying the hidden competing commitments that are inhibiting achievement of the commitment, using emotions as an information system
4	Big Assumptions - see how those big assumptions support who we are today, and to imagine a different set of assumptions that would allow for a bigger, more complex self that could function in accordance with our new commitment and still be safe.

The article has more about each column of the model to help us use it to achieve reduced resistance. It ends by reminding us that "change is hard when you feel it puts you at risk. Change is exhilarating when it moves you in relative safety toward a more complex and capable self. Detecting your big assumptions and making new ones make the difference."
For more on the model check out this link:


http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/dave-shearon/2010041710682

Courage and authenticity in times of change

Peter Drucker once remarked that “my greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” It was a self-deprecating quip. But it also contained a grain of truth. He also said, "“I can only ask questions. The answers have to be yours.” So it is now, whether as a facilitator, consultant, or adviser, it's the power of the questions we ask that can illuminate complex change and transformation efforts. 

Once we think about questions, we also need to consider what sort of questions, e.g. are they deficit-based, i.e. what's the problem here, or are they appreciative questions, i.e. what's the best of what we do here that we need to carry forward into the future? Whatever the focus, what we inquire into is fateful, i.e. we will find evidence and examples to answer our questions and illustrate the topic. This doesn't mean we shouldn't inquire into what makes our organisations or individual performance weak, it's more that too often we find our attention drawn all to readily to the worst of what is and not the best, e.g. what isn't working in a change effort rather than what is, what we can influence, shape and co-create. 


Balance, or re-balancing towards the appreciative and strengths-focused, provides leaders and followers with great opportunities to catch people doing things right, capture stories of positive experiences and allow for different conversations, particularly at times of uncertainty.  


It's not easy - no one says it is or has even been - but as managers and leaders we must demand of ourselves higher standards of contribution and involvement, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Not to the exclusion of all reason, but certainly necessitating courage, authenticity and energy. If it isn't us in formal leadership positions who do this, then those who follow will shift their attention to those who do and, in their absence, to those who role-model other, often inappropriate behaviours yet who nonetheless provide some form of rallying point. That way only lies deeper anxiety and uncertainty of success for our change efforts.


To read more about Peter Drucker, the Drucker Institute has just released the January/February 2012 issue of The Window, which features:

·         Great minds asking: How can management regain its legitimacy in society?

·         Peter Drucker prodding executives at a big investment bank to answer the question: “What should our business be?”

·         Thousands of university students in China learning about effectiveness, Drucker style

http://www.druckerinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Jan-Feb-12.pdf 

Integrating Health and Social Care - The Kings Fund and Nuffield Trust report

The Kings Fund and Nuffield Trust have just published their report, "A report to the Department of Health and the NHS Future Forum - Integrated care for patients and populations: Improving outcomes by working together"

http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/future_forum_report.html 

The introductory piece on the Kings Fund website says "integrated care for patients is essential to meet the needs of the ageing population, transform the way that care is provided for people with long-term conditions and enable people with complex needs to live healthy, fulfilling, independent lives. 

In a June 2011 summary report, the NHS Future Forum stated: ‘we need to move beyond arguing for integration to making it happen’.

The NHS Future Forum’s report built on the ideas that The King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust presented as part of the government’s listening exercise on the Health and Social Care Bill.

In response, the Department of Health approached The King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust for help in supporting the development of its national strategy on integrated care and to feed ideas directly into the ongoing work of the NHS Future Forum."

The latest report report examines:

1. The case for integrated care
2. What current barriers to integrated care need to be overcome and how
3. What the Department of Health can do to provide a supporting framework to enable integrated care to flourish
4. Options for practical and technical support to those implementing integrated care, including approaches to evaluating its impact.

A central assertion of the report is that "developing integrated care should assume the same priority over the next decade as reducing waiting times had during the last."

The core recommendations are:

• government policy should be founded on a clear, ambitious and measurable goal to improve the experience of patients and service users and to be delivered by a defined date
• patients with complex needs should be guaranteed an entitlement to an agreed care plan, a named case manager responsible for co-ordinating care, and access to telehealth and telecare and a personal health budget where appropriate 
• change must be implemented at scale and pace; 
• this will require work across large populations, significant reform and flexibility to take forward different approaches.

The Kings Fund says that "the report makes a constructive contribution to the debate about integrated care and will be of interest to policy-makers, health and social care commissioners, and researchers with an interest in integrated care, as well as to health and social care organisations."

Refreshed, re-invigorated and renewed

Happy New Year. Refreshed, re-invigorated and renewed (a little bit of Neil Kinnock-like alliteration there), I am ready for the fray. Up for the challenges of 2012: keen to create fresh opportunities from adversity in our fractured public sector market; enthused by a new piece of work for The Open Channel with a district Council keen to develop its leadership potential and capacity; and available to work with clients old and new who feel the need for some appreciative visions and strengths-focused support. 


I had a fine piece of news about the power of strengths work only a day or so ago. A client of mine had got so much of value from a Strengthscope profile and feedback session that she had bought the same service for two of her relatives. One of them had been trying repeatedly to gain a foothold in her chosen career without immediate success. Just a few days after receiving her Strengthscope profile and feedback session she was coincidentally called to interview for her highly preferred and much competed-for role. During that interview she was able to speak authoritatively about her strengths and talents (as well as her skills, knowledge and experience) and was offered the role. Feedback from the interview specifically highlighted the part played by  knowing and recounting her talents and strengths. A wonderful result and another example of the importance of distinguishing between what we learn, know and practise and those activities that give absorb us, provide energy and allow us to show our true potential and talents. 


We are passionate about the power of strengths work with individuals and teams and the long-term sustainable benefit of developing appreciative visions and actions. Why not make 2012 the year you leave behind problem-focused, deficit-centred approaches and make the move to the leading-edge world-view and associated methods of appreciative inquiry and strengths-focused change?   


To finish, here's a poem to sustain us through the short-daylight hours of January :


The Guest House
By Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

 
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.