Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

What This Book Is About

This book provides a roadmap—a manifesto—for individuals and public service organizations who want to:

  • Align the organizational mission and purpose with those who do the work of the organization.
  • Facilitate flow experiences for themselves and their employees, improving decision making, enhancing situation awareness and critical thinking, accelerating innovation, and increasing personal, organizational, and communal well-being.

Ultimately, this framework gives you the tools to initiate and sustain a culture of safety within your organization.

In the last 20 years, there have been multiple studies in how people make decisions.5 By definition, being in the flow means that you are making the right decisions within the context of an activity.6 With the exception of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and my own doctoral work, relatively little research has been conducted on how being in a flow state actually facilitates appropriate...