This paper is about the conceptual framework of team flow and the action research project at the Hogeschool Utrecht (University of Applied Sciences) which has been launched recently.
Have you ever linked the performance of The Rolling Stones - as a long - standing successful music business - to concepts of leadership and collaboration? By doing so, you can discover critical success factors for a new quality in collaboration, called team flow.
The key elements of the team flow concept are:
Authentic communication;
Complementary qualities and habits;
Shared leadership;
Sharing a common passion;
Synergetic identity.
These elements find further ground in the U-Theory by Scharmer, the concept of team roles by Belbin, the shared leadership approach by Pearce, and others. You will probably have heard of the theory of Czíkszentmihályi, that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing (Czikszentmihalyi 1999).
For collaboration, this means highly motivated persons co-creating a state of team flow through communicating authentically, sharing leadership and a common passion. Team flow is a concept for generative collaboration, a kind of collaboration focused on innovation and co-creativity. This concept promotes entrepreneurship and fundamental change.