I have a 19-day old daughter at home right now.  As you can imagine, I’m burping, changing, and consoling her quite a bit (and leaving the feeding to mom).

Her personality is starting to come in, and yesterday her mom noticed that baby Langdon is one curious cat.  In between feedings and naps, she opens her eyes to the point that we think she is about to puke.  She is trying to absorb every visual stimulous she can…to the point that she doesn’t even blink (she gets that from her dad).

Blinking.  It’s a natural occurance, but it is also something we postpone when we are in “the zone”.  I guess that is the best way of describing Langdon’s lack of blinking.  In the moments when she is absorbing everything around her - and is rested, changed, and burbed - she is in complete bliss. She has lost consciousness (if it even exists at this age) and is complete absorbed with her small but significant world.

After my wife mentioned that I, like Langdon, fail to blink quite often, I began to wonder if someone has done any studies to determine what is required to enter a state such as “the zone.” 

Given that my psychology classes in college never made it to the 300 level, I’m not surprised that I never came across Flow Psychology. 

I hate to copy and paste copy from Wikipedia, but they summed up the theory quite nicely:

“Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

As Csikszentmihalyi sees it, components of an experience of flow can be specifically enumerated; he presents the following:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time - one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.”

Not surprisingly, Flow theory has been used from time to time to explain business models, especially web-based communication.  Wired discovered Csikzentmihalyi way back in 1996, and they conducted a great interview with him on how Flow Theory can be applied to web design. They article started with the following:

“According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, great Web sites are not about navigating content, but staging experience. A compelling Web site transforms a random walk into an exhilarating chase. The key, says psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a finely tuned sense of rhythm, involvement, and anticipation known as flow.”

It is interesting to note how this theory about great web design remains applicable a decade- and web-version later.  In fact, as Web 2.0 becomes an accessible theory among an ever-larger audience, the concept of flow mechanics are being brought back to the table.

Just this week, Dino Dimopoulos and PSFK noted that Flow Theory is making its way back into the vernacular of web/business conferences.  Reboot 9.0, a conference that just took place in Copenhagen, held a speaker by the name of Stowe Boyd.  He gave the following presentation about flow theory.  He noted that a renewed interest in flow theory must be made to better understand the impact of Web 2.0, online community and social networks.

Specifically, he notes that in the industrial era it was considered paramount to measure personal productivity.  This was the driver for business - think people on an assembly line - and arguably the method in which we measured the value of brands.  Brands were supposed to be personal, and the value of the brand was based on an individual view: what percentage of people use our brand, like our brand, hate our brand, think our brand correlates with a stiff shot of whisky, think our brand is synonymous with plush teddy bears, etc.

But today, personal productivity is being replaced by the productivity of our connections with others.  We are taking the concept of flow - something that has always existed - and tweaking it for a new way of (Web 2.0/connective) living. 

For instance, take Czikszentmihalyi’s point 7: A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.  We are training our neurons to accept less personal control in our lives, replacing personal control with connectivity and co-ownership, and building a new sense of flow. 

In essence, point 7 could now state “A sense of balance between personal and collective control over the situation or activity.“  Or, perhaps we should remove point 7 alltogether - does it still apply?  I guess the point of this exercise is I wonder if Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow is outdated in the post-industrial era.  Many of his points will remain constant as we dive further into post-industrialization and the Information Age, but perhaps he (or someone else) needs to tweak the list of factors that must be present to experience a state of flow.  After all, the original list was constructed 1975. 

Hell, I wasn’t even born yet, and baby Langdon was still 32 years away from conception.  Coming full circle, I don’t think Langdon’s sense of flow is going to be anything like that of her father, let alone her grandfather.  She is going to get into flow with a different set of factors.  If “the zone” is necessary to make her a happy customer and/or brand advocate, companies are going to need to rebuild the ways in which they interact with her.  Her flow will not be achieved through passive media and messaging, and her flow will probably not even be achieved within the “walled gardens” so many companies are building online.  She may require complete access and levels of communal/collaborative involvement that even Millennials aren’t requesting; otherwise, she may blink.  In this instance, to blink is to turn away from one brand towards another.