When reading Keith Sawyers, “Group Genius” it never occurred to me that within work and play there is a state of or feeling called the “flow.” I have certainly experienced this feeling but I never knew it was a state that could be achieved as suggested by Sawyers in his work. To achieve this flow there are four simple principles you and your environment must uphold such as; your skill must be equal to your environment or that you are free to fully concentrate on the task. However when it comes to group flow it’s suggested that there are 10 conditions that groups must follow to achieve this flow. One that practically stood out to me was the “Close Listening or Deep Listening” condition. For myself I find that listening is something I really need to work on, when working with my interviewee I often found myself to eager to ask the next question rather than listen to what she had to say, it wasn’t till I stopped myself from being so ready to talk and actually sat and listened to what she had to say I found that it was very easy to get lost in the task and what she had to say.
I feel like the ten conditions are good qualities to uphold when entering group work, however some of them seem hard to obtain through current university collaboration.
I am also curious to find out through further reading, how to deal with situations where the “creative genius” might not fit into constraints and how to work around that.