Critical Flow

In a 1996 interview with Wired, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as a state where “[y]our whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at Claremont’s Drucker School of Management, came to this idea as a marketing perspective culled while examining how creativity works. Flow has since been applied to product and interface design, including web sites, as the ideal experience that makes people form attachments to the things they use. In his seminal book—Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)—Csikszentmihalyi conceived of flow as graph describing the pleasurable balance between the skill a person has and the challenges that person perceives. What follows is a sort of thought experiment to connect it to a concept in complex systems called criticality.

Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Diagram
The original diagram charts an individual’s perceived challenges against her set of skills. When the challenges are much too great for the skill set, anxiety results and the experience is not enjoyable. When the skills are too great for the challenges, boredom sets in. In the areas where the skills are comparable to the challenges, the person can achieve a state of flow. Change is an important part of flow. A person’s sense of challenge will lessen if it becomes predictable, and a particular skill set will need to meet a higher challenge in order to flow. Likewise, the environment might change, increasing the degree of perceived challenge. This will require the person to increase her skill set to compensate. During those transitions, boredom or anxiety arise. In this way, people are knocked in an out of flow.


Ideal Flow
One of the underlying assumptions of this challenge-skill relationship is that flow centers around a balance between these two properties. Flow, then, can be conceived as the area relative to ideal flow, the point at which one’s perceived skills and challenges are exactly balanced. Flow occurs within range of this line. Slightly more challenge produces engagement, and slightly more skill is where reflexive action occurs. These states are enjoyable because the individual is not conscious of the anxiety or boredom that is starting to permeate the experience. One of the limitations of the original diagram is its implied unidirectionality—the skills and challenges are depicted as always increasing. However, skills can atrophy from lack of use, and challenges might lessen over time or change in context. The flow state is not a static point that can be sustained. It is ephemeral and requires active adjustment to repeat.


Flow Boundaries
Another problem with Csikszentmihalyi’s diagram is its lack of boundary. It is reasonable to conceive of flow as having limits created by the individual’s perceived skills and challenges. At some point, a person achieves a practical maximum level of skill. There is no longer any motivation to continue improving one’s skill set, or perhaps some saturation level exists when the rate of increase of new knowledge becomes negligible. Similarly, at some point increasing challenges begin to lose their meaning. Very difficult problems are essentially the same as extremely difficult problems, and any distinctions are ignored by the individual. These perceived limits create a personalized region of flow that depends entirely on the dynamics of the person’s perceptions and abilities. Furthermore, the same perceived level of challenge and skill may not create the same flow experience for one individual that it does for another. Tolerance of anxiety and boredom differs from person to person. The effects of having more skills may make flow states easier to achieve, or they may require more precision in matching specific challenges. People want to be in flow, so adjustments are made to compensate for changes over time.


Criticality
Self-organizing criticality is a concept first detailed by Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld (Brookhaven) in a paper for Physical Review. Essentially, criticality is a key point in system dynamics where interesting things happen. What Bak et al discovered was that a system’s tendency to hover around this critical point is not do to some elaborate tuning of its components, but rather the relationship between the dynamics. The critical point separates ordered and disordered states. In what is referred to as a driven-dissipative system, the force that accumulates resource in the system is more slowly and steady than the force that dissipates that resource. Common examples of this dynamic are simple models for sandpile avalanches, forest fires and earthquakes. The critical point typically exhibits important, recurring properties such as power-law distributions and scale invariance.


Critical Flow
Re-orienting the flow diagram to look like a phase transition, we can envision the challenge-skill relationship as the drivers toward a critical point of flow. The regions of engagement and reflexive action that sandwich the exact point of flow depend on the individual and distinguish it from the larger regions of boredom and anxiety. Boredom and anxiety might be analogous to ordered and disordered states in self-organizing criticality. We can add a notion of impact to reflect how the individual might perceive an achieved flow experience. One question that remains, however, is which resource is being added by skill and dissipated through challenges, finding a balance around a state of flow?