Using the Flow Channel to Measure Team Effectiveness
Turning the theory into practice
In my previous article I explored how the Flow Channel can serve as a powerful tool to ‘measure’ Team Effectiveness. But of course, as promising as this sounds, how do you put this into practice? In this article, I will share a practical approach that has worked for me.
What is the Flow Channel?
But first a quick recap. The Flow Channel is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He found that for people to achieve Flow they need clear goals, immediate feedback, and balance between their challenges and skills. He summarises this beautifully in the concept of the Flow Channel.
As long as we keep the right balance between our challenges and skills, we stay in the Flow Channel, enjoying Flow and being happy.
But as soon as we stray outside the Flow Channel we get immediate feedback in the form of anxiety if the challenges are too big for our skills, or boredom if the challenges are too small.
Inspiring goals give us the drive to accept ever-greater challenges and grow our skills to tackle them, and so we gradually progress along the Flow Channel toward the top-right.
Sensing Flow
Perhaps the biggest challenge in working with the Flow Channel is learning to sense whether people are enjoying Flow. The key here, as I mentioned in my previous article, is that being in a state of Flow correlates with a high level of enjoyment of work — happiness — and that we as a social species have evolved to be acutely sensitive to how happy people feel.
And therein lies the problem, that sensing how others feel is not a formal skill. It is not something that we actively learn at school. It is something that we mostly learn unconsciously, as we interact with others. And often we are not even aware of it.
So essential to start learning to sense Flow is learning to trust this innate skill we have.
With this in mind, the first step is to practice. Start paying attention to people’s expressions and the way they behave. Start actively guessing how people are feeling before asking them.
The Daily Scrum is an excellent opportunity for this, as it allows you to offer help while observing team dynamics. And therefore an easy way to confirm your guesses.
But really any moment where you interact with other people is great practice. And you can always ask people how they are doing to confirm your guesses, with the added bonus that this is a great way to bond with others.
As you gain confidence, the next step is to sense the nuances in those emotions. A little bit of anxiety is often fine, a natural response to a new challenge that only helps to improve our focus. What you need to develop is a feel for when people are in the Flow Channel, and for when discomfort is serious enough that it leads people outside the Flow Channel.
The Cumulative Factor
So up till now I’ve mainly been talking about people, and I’ve done that on purpose to keep things simple. However, as soon as we start looking at Flow in the context of a team then it is really important to realise that Flow is a cumulative property.
What this means is that in a team, Flow is the sum of the Flow of the different members of the team.
So for example, a team might have a high level of Flow in their Daily Scrum, perhaps because it is an event that they understand intuitively. But at the same time, they might have low Flow at the Review, simply because they have had bad experiences with stakeholders.
The same applies to their various activities. A team may be very effective during their Daily Scrum but terrible at doing their Sprint Planning. By putting all these observations together we create a model of flow in the team.
This sounds complex, and it is. But surprisingly, our brains cope with this complexity remarkably well, albeit usually unconsciously. Compare it to a huge party with friends, where you automatically know how to approach different people, what subjects to discuss, which people will go well together and who you might want to keep out of each other’s way.
The power of the Flow Channel is that it provides a structure to make this unconscious skill a conscious one.
Flow Experiments
Once you are comfortable sensing the cumulative Flow of your team in within the Flow Channel, the next step is to put this skill into practice, by trying to predict how the challenges your team is facing will affect their state of Flow. The easiest way to do this is by trying to predict how your team will react to triggers.
And again, the Flow Channel is here to help. Your prediction only needs to be accurate enough to determine whether your team falls inside the Flow Channel, and not outside.
You can do this passively by trying to predict how the team will react to say, a Sprint that didn’t go well. Or unreasonable demands made by a stakeholder. Or a conflict between people in the team. This is a great way to practice because it will also enable you to intervene before things get out of hand.
Even better though is an active approach, where you try to predict the effect of your own actions on the team. This is where you can start to effectively map the challenges you see against the skills of the team and determine whether the intersection falls in their Flow Channel.
Remember that in my previous article, I discussed how I would start with the Sprint Goal with my teams, only for me to lose them? That is why this mapping is so terribly useful, because it enables you to understand what challenges your team is ready to face.
In the diagram below you can see how I sense that the Sprint Goal is a challenge that is beyond the skills of the team, while at the same time Daily Scrums are a bit underwhelming.
It makes it clear that I need to find something in between — a middle ground.
What is also obvious looking at the diagram, is that the flow channel is an evolution of the team as it grows and develops the skills to face ever greater challenges.
Your job is to help people along the Flow Channel towards the top-right, by tailoring a curriculum of ever-increasing challenges according to the skills they have at each particular moment.
It is all about emotions
Flow becomes easier to read when emotions are involved. The more emotion, the easier it is to read the Flow.
That is why the events are so interesting to gauge flow. It is the moment the dolphin comes above water for air and is vulnerable. For teams it is the same thing, the events are moments when they come together, serious conversations take place and emotions may flash.
This offers an opportunity, as it means that if we have a trigger for emotion, then it makes it easier to read Flow. My favourite way of triggering emotion is by telling a really silly joke. You can tell a lot about Flow by how people react to a joke, especially a silly one. Do they laugh? Like they mean it? If not, what are the expressions? Does anyone get irritated?
I also enjoy suggesting outrageous solutions to problems. The kind of solution that makes sense and will get the nerds thinking, while at the same time, the first reaction is that it is too far out there. Again I’m looking for the reactions. But in this case, I’m also paying attention to the openness of the team and what happens to their creativity.
Conclusion
The Flow Channel has made me completely reevaluate what my job is really about. It has made me aware that my job is quite simple — helping people navigate the Flow Channel.
More concretely, this means that I should always leave the solving of problems to the team, so that they can develop their skills and grow.
This is a powerful realisation, because as Scrum Masters we are so often expected to focus on establishing and managing processes, that it is hard to stand up against it.
The diagram below summarises what I mean by this.
There are two key factors: who signals a problem (the challenge) and who solves it (the skills). The preference is of course for the team to do both — that happens in the green area. That is when they are in the Flow Channel.
My main focus as a Scrum Master is on the yellow areas, where challenges might overwhelm the team and drive them out of the Flow Channel. That is where your ability to ‘measure’ Flow is crucial, because it helps you to judge the level of discomfort and when you should step in.
The red area is what you should always stay away from to be an effective Scrum Master, Agile Coach or leader of any kind.
One awesome thing to remember is that you can use this Flow Channel technique for anything. I’ve used it to teach myself drumming, or when studying for an exam. Balancing the challenges against the skills.
The more you practice, the easier it becomes to perceive the Flow, and the clearer your path becomes.
In fact, I recommend you use the Flow Channel to guide your own development in using… the Flow Channel. Judge what first challenge you can handle and try that out, develop the skills for it. And so on gradually.
Patience is of the essence, take it step by step.