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)

How Flow Enhances Decision Making

At any given moment, there are an infinite number of choices to act or not act.42 The process of choice is a conscious bifurcation—or point of departure—from the conditions an individual is experiencing. This is the point at which awareness and action merge. Fragmentation within the individual arises when you make reactive choices as a result of inattention to feelings and lack of attention to actions.43 Choice is determined by the totality of significance in the moment. How we choose includes both explicit and tacit knowledge.44 The emphasis on continuous training in the firefighter culture is based on minimizing reactive choices.45

Size-up: Creative Suspension of Choice

In his book, Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World, David Peat presents a concept he calls “creative suspension,” which is a “voluntary act, on the part of an individual or organization, to suspend, if only for a moment...