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)

1 What Flow Is

“The problem of meaning will be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.”

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What, exactly, is flow? Consider an activity you enjoy. You are working toward clear goals and receiving immediate feedback. There are many opportunities for decisive action. Action and awareness merge. You concentrate on the task at hand to the exclusion of all information except that which is necessary to the activity. You experience a sense of control. You are unaware of your own consciousness. Time has no meaning, or it is distorted. For example, it slows down, speeds up, or you experience no awareness of time passing. You do the activity for the sake of the doing.

This feeling is called flow.

The term flow came out of the rigorous research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who originally referred to the concept as “optimal experience.”9 Flow is a technical term describing those exceptional...