Flow

You know that feeling when you lose track of time doing something that absorbs all of your attention? Mihalyi Csikszenmihalyi (pronounced, as best as I can tell, Me-high Chick-sent-me-high) calls that feeling Flow. It’s what athletes sometimes call being in the zone. It happens when your skills and abilities are matched by the challenge of what you are doing, and as your abilities increase, that challenge increases, so you are always in that optimal place. Being in the flow zone can be lots of fun, and can sometimes make you miss lunch.

Often in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops people tell me that they had no idea so much time had gone by. That always makes me happy, because they were in flow most of the workshop.

Sometimes, people can’t tell they are in the flow zone until they fall out of the flow zone. If you are feeling frustrated, insecure, or aggravated, you are probably at the orange dot on the chart above, where the challenge is greater than your skills have developed yet. In LSP workshops, I’m there to help with technical support, getting LEGO® bricks to fit together in the right way to create what you want to make. With my experience I can help get you back into the flow zone. If you are feeling bored, you are at the purple dot, where your abilities are greater than the challenge. I can’t help so much here. It’s up to the individual to re-engage with the subject, to build something more challenging, or to build another model, or to find some way to make it more relevant.

It’s actually a good thing to go in and out of the flow zone. Situations are more memorable when they have emotional content. If you go in and out of feeling frustrated or bored, and also in and out of feeling present and happy, the project you are working on will be easier to remember. (I will talk more about memory and using models to help with it in a later post.)

What gets you in the flow zone? I’d love to hear from you!

Movement In Learning Because Science

A teacher friend of mine sent me an article by Eric Jensen titled Moving  With  Brain in Mind.

I’d like to quote him here:

“The explicit system works by gathering information about the world in what (semantic) and where (episodic) pathways. The implicit system, in contrast, works by organizing our responses to the world around us. This includes the wow or knee-jerk responses – such as immediate emotions, conditioned responses, trauma, and reflexive behaviors – and the more measured how responses, which are procedural, skills-based, operational, and tactile. … Both systems work together – they take in the information about our world, then organize our responses to it. … The point is simple: We are more likely to remember implicit learning. It is robust, easy to learn, cross-cultural, efficient, and effective – regardless of our age or level of intelligence.” (He references Reber, A. Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993)

This is important for children in school, workers at desks, and any group that needs to learn and think. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® gets some of its power from this principal. Giving the content a three-dimensional aspect can help peopel use the implicit system. It makes the ideas presented more memorable, easier to understand, and more relevant.

LSP also takes advantage of emotional fluctuations. We go in and out of flow when we are involved in a project, and often it’s our emotions that give us clues to being out of flow. (More on flow later!) Moments with a strong emotional charge are easier to remember than ones with no emotional content. (How much easier is it to remember moments of great embarrassment or anger or exaltation, rather than boring moments of mundane life? I remember how I felt in middle school when a teacher fed my humiliation over crying, way more than how I felt while brushing my teeth yesterday.)

LSP is not just a bunch of adults playing with toys. It’s a methodical system based on scientific research that taps into all the ways to increase inclusion, creativity, memory, learning, and new ideas.

Coming Together

Crazy Hair Day at school

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the divisions we all face in this world. There are ways that everyone is different from everyone else. Skin color, religion, sexual orientation, interest in catching Pokemon, ability to sit still, how straight our teeth are, there are infinite ways we can find differences between ourselves and others. And it is also true that we are more alike than not. According to Bill Nye the Science Guy:

“We are one species. Each of us much, much more alike than different. We all come from Africa. We all are of the same stardust. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a pale blue dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together.”

So I want to talk about how play can bring people together. I put up a picture of Crazy Hair Day at school. When everyone does the same silly thing together, it creates a feeling of belonging, of being in on the joke together, of us all being on the same team. When people identify with sports teams, people across socioeconomic and cultural divides find themselves rooting for the same team to win. It brings us together. (It has the potential to divide us too, when we root for opposing teams. This can only be taken so far, after which we have to admit it’s just a game and not worth rioting over.)

There can be deep divisions at work. Management vs union. Developers vs marketing. Local team vs remote team. Us vs them. We don’t have to let those divisions shape us. We can find ways to reach across the aisle and find our common interests, our common humanity. Chances are, all of you want your organization to thrive. You may have different ideas of how to make that happen, but you all want it to happen.

Please, approach differences with curiosity, not animosity. ‘Why do you think that? What is your experience that makes that make sense? Can I tell you how my experience is different? How can we find a solution that works for both of us?’

Life is not a zero sum game. If one person wins, the other person doesn’t automatically have to lose. If one group is celebrated, it doesn’t mean the other groups don’t matter. Some forms of play, like in sports, mean that there is a winner and a loser. But other types of play are there for the sake of playing. There’s no winner in the crazy hair day – everyone plays equally, and enjoys each other joining in the play. And even in sports, everyone can agree that a hard fought contest is fun to watch, that the play was important just for the sake of the play, even if our favorites lost.

Work is not the opposite of play. Depression is the opposite of play. Don’t make the work place so serious that everyone sinks into depression. Let there be lightness, let there be reasons to connect across dividing lines, let there be play.

Public Displays

I sometimes tell people I painted my car because I’m never going to get a tattoo.

I like the self-expression, without the pain, or it being permanently attached to my body.

Other people have taken this to other playful places:

I love the idea of pretending we are in a space ship when we’re in a car. My son has done things like that, pretending we are blasting off into space when we are speeding up to get on the freeway, for example. But to have the whole car painted that way? How awesome!

My nephew, when he was a little boy, narrated car rides like they were horse races. One car was coming up the outside, another was being cut off and falling behind… He kept it up for a long time, using an announcer’s voice. Very entertaining way to get through traffic.

The same day I saw the USS Enterprise Mini Cooper, I saw this vehicle too:

There are so many ways people can express themselves, and I personally enjoy the playful ones. I like the ‘let’s pretend’ and the ‘how does this look?’ I like that people aren’t so concerned with the resale value of the car that they can’t see the playful or expressive value of the vehicle. Life is too short to take it seriously!

I had never thought of painting a house creatively, but over the weekend I saw this house:

I think this is so fun! I totally want to know how they decorated the interior. I bet they have a great style!

Obviously, all of these examples are of playfulness and creativity in people’s non-work lives. I think bringing that creativity into the workplace can 1) make people more excited to be at work, 2) help people bring their whole selves to the job, which 3) lets people come up with more creative solutions to problems, and 4) makes work a more fun place to be. It can even 5) help attract the specific clients you want by 6) letting the world know what you are like to work with. A successful brand lets people know if they are the target market, and also if they are not!