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)

Triggers of Flow

My doctoral research indicated that there are a variety of triggers of flow, including awareness, size-up, and complexity of the situation. There are also physical and psychological readiness (“it feels right”) triggers, including stress factors or recognizing that the situation presented as something out of the ordinary (as indicated by words like “weird,” “odd,” “crazy,” etc.). Some firefighters consciously triggered flow and expressed confidence, even though they had never been in a situation like this before. The most common events that triggered flow were (a) a recognition that something was out of the ordinary; (b) a threat to the firefighter’s personal or team safety; and (c) child involvement, particularly when the incident began with a woman in the driveway. The preconditions of flow were in place for each of these events. The firefighter felt challenged by something new, different, and, often...