The starting point of team formation is gaining clarity of it’s collective ambition or reason for being. The Collective ambition is what instils the team with joy when engaging in work tasks for its own sake - that is, it creates a sense of intrinsic motivation to operate as a team. The teams reason for being includes members values and beliefs about how they ought to accomplish their goals, and in particularly how they celebrate each others complementary skills.

In order for team flow to arise, each member must be connected towards a common or shared goal. The common goal must be clear and meaningful to all members of the team and compatible with each members’ individual goals. More so, the shared goal must be designed in a way to equally challenge and stretch the skill level of each individual.

In order to enter flow state, individuals on a team must be able to release the self-conscious and analytical mind, individuals must receive clear and unambiguous feedback about their progress. Open communication provides this required feedback so that teammates know whether their actions are effectively contributing to achieving the goal, or if they need to adjust their course. Open communication can be assisted with stakeholder led feedback, psychometric assessments, subjective reports, and objective measures of goal progress - all of which can be presented visually to the team via a scoreboard system. The process of providing constructive feedback, and offering advice for performance improvement contributes to creating the holistic focus of the team. Weekly performance reviews enables team members to hold themselves and each other accountable for achieving the group’s goal and reinforces the interdependent nature of fulfilling the collective ambition. Moreover, open communication can strengthen relationships which is conducive to creating the team flow.

In order to achieve a team flow state, research suggests that each member of the teams personal goals must be aligned with the groups goal. Put another way, there must be equal participation. Clear, shared goals help teams to define tasks for their members, coordinate their actions, and develop efficient work procedures. This includes having each group member participate in the goal-setting process. When goals are determined as a group it may facilitate the collective results of the group being determined to be more important toeach individual than individual members’ goals.

The ‘golden-rule of flow’ is engaging in tasks in which there is a balance between high challenges and high skills. The need for high skills is common among group work as teams are typically formed in order to complete challenging goals that cannot be completed on their own. Key to this prerequisite is ensuring that each member of the team is able to bring their greatest skills and strengths to the task so that the optimal balance is struck for each team member.

In order to enter a team flow state, individuals on the team must not be worried of their safety within the tribe. An environment in which people can face challenging situations and be unafraid of failure fosters engagement. The goal with safety is not to remove the possibility of failure - in fact, it is to acknowledge the very real possibility of failure but to not fear such failure. Teams must be willing to experience failure together and agree to continue to work together. In a psychologically safe team, failure is embraced and celebrated - even seen as a good thing as it provides an opportunity for learning and growth. Ultimately, team members must feel it’s not only psychologicaly safe to speak up but that it’s absolutely necessary to a team flow state.

Flow requires full attention upon the task at hand. Deep focus emerges from designing ‘high flow contexts’ which remove the possibility of distractions. Complete concentration is characterised by full attention to ones individual goal and keeping others on task and in alignment with the team’s shared goal. Complete concentration emerges when each member of the team follows the principles and practices of team flow and does not violate these agreements. Put another way, team flow emerges when a group creates a boundary between the group’s activity and everything else. This may include, for example, developing an asynchronistic communication procedure in order to protect workers attention from distraction.

To find team flow, team members need to know eachothers values and playing styles. When teammates know each others interests, personality and goals they know how to best communicate with each other and provide the appropriate feedback to keep them engaged in the task at hand.

Team flow emerges when members of the team are paying complete attention to what is being said. It’s important for teammates to listen to understand, not to respond. Improvisers call this “deep listening,” where they don’t plan ahead what is going to be said, but rather statements are unplanned responses. As flow emerges only when we are in the present moment, team flow is blocked when participants already have a preconceived idea of how to get to the goal. For team for to emerge, its important to not “write the script in your head,” but rather allow it to unfold.

Team flow requires all participants to play an equal role in fulfilling the teams collective ambition and shared goal. This requires all team members to have equal skill level. If the team does not have compatible skill levels, advanced members may become bored and disengaged while less developed members may become anxious and frustrated. More over, team flow requires equal participation in meetings - meaning that it is blocked when some individuals dominate the meeting while others socially loaf and disengage.

Team flow emerges when people follow the first rule of improvisational acting: “Yes, and…” Each member must listen closely to what’s being said and then buildt upon it. Put another way, its fundamental that conversations are additive not combative. The intention here is to always add to the point your colleague, even if you disagree with it you want to askcnolege and build off it in some manner. This allows each member of the teams ego’s to blend together into a group flow state. In action this can look like using the a “Positive No” = Yes, No, Yes.