The Art of Work

"It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair....It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape...."

These words, written by American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee), describe the state of "flow." It's a condition of heightened focus, productivity, and happiness that we all intuitively understand and hunger for.

Csikszentmihalyi's groundbreaking book on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1990), has been lauded by such heavyweights as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Jimmy Johnson, who credited it with helping him coach the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl win in 1993. Yet although the quest for flow immediately resonated with the sporting and leisure worlds, the concept never got much traction in business, possibly because ecstasy and the workplace go together about as well as tomatoes and chocolate.

In the past few years, however, many major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia, and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling is the holy grail for any manager -- or even any individual -- seeking a more productive and satisfying work experience.

These companies are now using Csikszentmihalyi's ideas to learn how they can get the best out of their workers or create more compelling connections with their customers. Without flow, there's no creativity, says Csikszentmihalyi, and in today's innovation-centric world, creativity is a requirement, not a frill. "To stay competitive, we have to lead the world in per-person creativity," says Jim Clifton, CEO of the Gallup Organization, which provides management consulting for 300-odd companies. "People with high flow never miss a day. They never get sick. They never wreck their cars. Their lives just work better." Clifton says flow is one ideal outcome of Gallup's consulting work.

No one is more surprised about the corporate world's increasing interest in his research than Csikszentmihalyi, 71, the former head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago. Now director of the Quality of Life Research Center at the Drucker School of Management in Claremont, California, he has been studying flow for more than four decades. Csikszentmihalyi was born in Italy; his father, the Hungarian consul there, was sentenced to death in absentia for not returning to Hungary after the Soviet takeover in 1948. In 1956, at the age of 22, Csikszentmihalyi came to the United States with $1.25 in his pocket.

An avid rock climber, Csikszentmihalyi took note of the special feeling he got while inching his way up a challenging rock face, and began thinking about it in terms of his psychology studies. Why, he wondered, was the entire field of psychology focused exclusively on the study of human pathology and dysfunction? What about the positive states, the moments when human beings are at their absolute best?

Csikszentmihalyi spent hours interviewing and observing exceptionally creative people, including leading chess players, rock climbers, composers, and writers, and normal folks as well, as they did their work. He also developed a unique research tool called Experience Sampling Method, in which his study subjects carried pagers for a week at a time. Beeped randomly eight times throughout the day, they wrote down what they were doing and feeling right at that moment.

Csikszentmihalyi, who with his white hair and beard resembles a tall and reticent Santa Claus, discovered that the times when people were most happy and often most productive were not necessarily when they expected they would be. Passive leisure activities such as TV-watching consistently ranked low on participants' scales of satisfaction -- even though they often sought out these experiences. Instead, people reported the greatest sense of well-being while pursuing challenging activities, sometimes even at work, and often while immersed in a hobby.

In the flow state, Csikszentmihalyi found, people engage so completely in what they are doing that they lose track of time. Hours pass in minutes. All sense of self recedes. At the same time, they are pushing beyond their limits and developing new abilities. Indeed, the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to capacity. People emerge from each flow experience more complex, Csikszentmihalyi found. They become more self-confident, capable, and sensitive. The experience becomes "autotelic," meaning that the activity actually becomes its own reward. "To improve life, one must improve the quality of experience," he says. One of the chief advantages of flow is that it enables people to escape the state of "psychic entropy," the distraction, depression, and dispiritedness that constantly threaten them.