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)

Conclusion

Flow-based decision making is effective if you have had repetitive, focused training. Situation awareness and the ability to make meaning of moment-to-moment feedback dictate your response to what is happening around you. When you find yourself in a situation you don’t recognize, your training enables you to focus on the unfamiliar elements of the situation. Training helps you execute those tasks that are necessary to get through the situation, while freeing up your cognitive ability to problem solve.

However, it is important to also factor in the effects of stress, your ability and willingness to act, and emotional and cognitive capacity. If you or your organization is in a constant reactive state of being, the abilities to focus on the task at hand, to be open to possibility and creativity, and to act appropriately for the situation are all compromised.

The more experiences you have, the less likely you will experience tunnel vision. While focusing on the...