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)

6 Creating Flow-Based Organizations

“Change-making happens when people fall in love with a different version of the future.”

—Seth Godin

Aflow-based organization is one that recognizes that its people are the key to its success. Leadership operates in flow, while facilitating flow for every individual in the organization. It is not necessarily a nirvana with little or no conflict. However, it is an organization that manages its conflict well, while honoring all points of view and the diversity that enables creativity and innovation. Communication is open, and people listen to one another with respect in order to facilitate dialogue. All ideas matter, even if not all can be implemented.

Building an enterprise architecture to support this requires careful, mindful design across all functional, operational, and support areas of the organization. Being such a leader and enterprise architect requires self-knowledge coupled with a selfless, compassionate. and...