How to solve your most painful problems with flow

You’ve probably heard me describe flow as a state where we feel our best and perform our best.

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But do these short-term peaks help us solve real-world problems?

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That’s the question I want to tackle today.

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It brings us back to 2013 when I was involved with the Red Bull Hacking Creativity project.

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It was a joint effort involving scientists at the MIT Media Lab, a group of TED Fellows, and the namesake energy drink company.

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Conceived by Dr. Andy Walshe, Red Bull’s director of high performance, the project was the largest meta-analysis of creativity research ever conducted.

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Reviewing more than thirty thousand research papers and interviewing hundreds of other subject-matter experts, from break-dancers and circus performers to poets and rock stars.

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“It was an impossible goal” Walshe explained, “but I figured if we could crack something as hard to pin down as creativity, we could figure out almost anything after that.”

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As of late 2016, with the initial phases of the research completed, the study came to two overarching conclusions.

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First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems—the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world.

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Second, we have very little success training people to be more creative.

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And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure that you’ve likely heard me mention before:

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We’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.

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Here’s the thing…

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Conventional logic works really well for solving discrete problems with definite answers.

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But the “wicked problems” of today require more creative responses.

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These challenges defy singular stable solutions: issues as serious as war or poverty, or as banal as traffic and trends.

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Throw money, people, or time at any of these, and you may fix a symptom, but you create additional problems.

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Financial aid to the developing world, for example, often breeds corruption in addition to its intended relief.

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Adding more lanes to the highway encourages more drivers and more gridlock.

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Fighting wars to make the world safer can make it more dangerous than ever.

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Point is, that solving wicked problems requires more than a direct assault on obvious symptoms.

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Roger Martin of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management conducted a lengthy study of exceptional leaders stretching from Procter & Gamble’s then-CEO A. G. Lafley to choreographer Martha Graham and discovered that their ability to find solutions required holding conflicting perspectives and using that friction to synthesize a new idea.

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“The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas,” Martin writes in his book The Opposable Mind, “. . . is the only way to address this kind of complexity.”

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But developing Martin’s “opposable mind” isn’t easy.

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You must give up exclusively identifying with your own, singular point of view.

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If you want to train this kind of creativity and problem solving, what the research shows is that the either/or logic of normal consciousness is simply the wrong tool for the job.

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Scientists have discovered a better tool.

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The amplified information processing and perspective that non-ordinary states such as flow provide can help solve these types of complex problems, and they can often do so faster than more conventional approaches.

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Wicked problems are those without easy answers—where our rational, binary logic breaks down and our normal tools fail us.

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But the information richness of a flow state affords us perspective and allows us to make connections where none may have existed before.

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So, the next time you find yourself up against a wicked problem, do your best to drop into the flow.

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