1 Flow
I love flow. I know some people who think it is great to be in flow, or in the zone, for half-an-hour a day. I am a flow junkie. I go for all 24 hours counting a good sleep as good flow.
2 Crossing the Rubicon
But there is something I love more.
That is the rush when you have a crystal clear idea that you know will work and that is, in that instant, so obvious.
What is the name for that?
I know Peter Gollwitzer, the psychologist calls it “crossing the rubicon” – moving from wish to intent.
3 Corporate anthropology
This corporate anthropologist, studies the use of mobile phones by poor people and travels around the world studying the way phones are used.
My questions to you?
Why don’t we study flow a lot more than we do?
Why don’t we study people at work they way this guy studies phones?
Why aren’t we interested in why and when work is blissful and fun?
Why are aren’t we interested in making jobs as enjoyable as Nokia tries to make its phones?
I could do spend all day trying to make work fun and never get tired of it!! Could you? Do you?
Jo, those are terrific questions.
And, in fact, I do have the fascinating opportunity to study people at work the way that guy studies phones! So I am fortunate.
There are a number of organizations that do design jobs to be challenging, interesting, and, of course, results-oriented. However: jobs are usually designed by someone other than the one who has to do the job. In which case, unless there is room for refinement and re-negotiation, anyone who takes that job will be operating someone else’s idea of the job.
There’s no perfect way to make a total job re-design constant bliss in a large organization. The best experiences I’ve seen have been with managers and their groups when they sit down, look at the systemic totality of what the group needs to accomplish, and then decide to divide up the work differently.
It drives the HR admin people nuts because the job descriptions all have to be re-done; that then makes the rest of the people TWICE as happy 🙂
Agreed. The best part of being a work psychologist is hearing people talk about the work they love and do extremely well.
And the un-talked about good part of being a work psychologist is that people love you for listening. People rarely have a chance to talk about what they do, why they do it, how they do it, what they can teach you . . .
I want to go further though. Corporate anthropology is a relatively new field. So Nokia, Coke, & co, go into the field and see how their products are used.
We could go into the workplace to see ‘how our jobs are used’. I suspect this might be very revealing!
Nokia produces phones we want to have. Coke makes sure a cold coke is at arms length (even in the remotest places in third world). Talent management could be seen as having a job available to a person when they want it, where they want it, as they want it! Yep, I like this. Our mission is to provide work you want to do when you want to do it in the way you want to do it.
How’s that?