Beyond Innovation: Flow in Startups with Dr. Corinna Peifer and Leonie Kloep

Welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff at FRC, and joining me today are Dr. Michael Mannino, our Chief Science Officer, and two distinguished flow researchers from the University of Lübeck. It's a privilege to welcome Professor Corinna Peifer, leader of the Work and Health Lab. Her pioneering research at the intersection of organizational psychology and psychobiology focuses on flow, stress management, and workplace well-being. Dr. Peifer, a leader in positive psychology, helped found the European Flow Researchers Network, represents Germany in the European Network of Positive Psychology, and serves as vice president of the German Society for Positive Psychological Research. We also welcome Leonie Klopp, a rising star in organizational and business psychology from Ruhr University Bochum. Now part of the Work and Health Research Group at Lübeck, Leonie is advancing her PhD under Dr. Pfeiffer's guidance, exploring flow in startups and virtual team environments. This month we've been exploring the intersections of flow, leadership, and team. In today's episode, we'll uncover how founders harness flow to navigate the challenging early stages of building their companies. And we're also gonna dig a little bit deeper into how flow affects individual wellbeing, team dynamics, in startup ecosystems. A big part of our conversation is going to be Leone and Karina's paper, Founders Flow: A Qualitative Study on the Role of Flow Experience in Early Startup Stages. Leone, we know that you're the lead author on this paper. We're just curious about what motivated the study. Was it a gap in the literature? And really, what was your scientific curiosity driving the paper?

First of all, thank you very much for this nice introduction. I really feel honored to be part of this podcast and to get the chance to present our research. And yes, my motivation for this study was driven by different factors. So when I started my PhD, I wasn't part of Corinna's lab. She was my supervisor from the beginning, but I worked in an institute for innovation research. So I had a lot of contact with, yeah, innovative people, with startup founders. We looked very much on creative work processes and how do people innovate. And at the same time, I was kind of pursuing a startup idea by myself, or maybe not startup idea, but a product idea I developed during my master's thesis that was also supervised by Corinna. And yeah, I developed a positive psychological intervention and was trying to make a product out of it. And so I got in touch with all this, yeah, with the startup world and got to know many people who were working on their ideas, who were starting their own businesses. And yeah, at the same time trying to start my PhD on flow experience, I connected the two topics I was in touch with in this paper and in this study.

Nice. Awesome. So a little bit of personal, personal experience, like personal curiosity combined with scientific curiosity.

Exactly. Because startups are not very much researched from the psychological point of view.

Yeah. So that's also maybe a good question because it did fill a gap in the literature. But actually, are there, is there research on, so why startups, right? Like why startups versus like companies that are maybe already growing in growth mode or scaling or something like that? Because we do talk a lot here at the Flow Research Collective about high-flow scenarios and high-flow situations within organizations and how they're structuring it. But startups is a completely different realm with a lot of stress and everything that comes along with starting a company.

So maybe Yes, we wanted to look at startups exactly because of this kind of paradox. So on the one hand, startup founders are very motivated, have great ideas, have visions, and want to really do what they want to do. So they are really motivated. And on the other hand, they face big challenges, they face insecurities and uncertainties, And we wanted to find out how can this be combined? What is happening? How do they work to be at the same time in such risky or insecure environment and at the same time be so motivated? So we wondered if there is flow or team flow as a mechanism explaining this.

So there's, let's talk a little bit about the, what we've been calling the triggers for flow and the, or let's say the preconditions or prerequisites, let's just say for flow. Because you just mentioned risk, intrinsic motivation. We know about complete concentration and so on and novelty, things like that. You get a lot of novelty in startups. One of the biggest is obviously the challenge-skill balance and getting that balance right between the task that you're performing. Interestingly, let's say you're a first-time founder versus maybe a serial entrepreneur who's founded a bunch of companies. So you've built up a skill set and you know what you're doing. How does the challenge-skill balance play a role in achieving flow in a startup situation, but also whether you're a first-time and you don't know kind of what you're doing and you're learning on the go versus somebody who has a little bit more experience and can manage that challenge-skills balance a little bit better. Does that make sense, that question?

Yeah, it's a cool question, Michael.

Yes, I think the challenge-skill balance is very crucial to get into flow. And I think, yeah, especially for first-time founders, for people who do it for the first time, facing all the challenges, it can be very frustrating because challenges are, yeah, can get very big and can grow fast. And the skills don't grow that fast sometimes. So yeah, I can imagine that people who are doing like the second or third or even more startups, for them it's easier to get into the flow. But at the same time, my participants in my study told me that also learning experiences, they're typical flow experiences. So when they had to face a new challenge and then experience that they can really master it, these were like very often flow experiences for them.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So it seems like people who join startups as much for flow experiences, but also for the potential for success. So does your research back this sort of correlation or observation up that there's a correlation between your joining the startup for a flow experience, but the potential for success?

Yeah, I think it's always like both, because if you're joining a startup, you can never be sure if it will have success or no. So it has to be also about the experience. And especially I think about the team experience, about the team spirit startups can create and the team, also team flow experiences, of course, that can emerge.

Yeah, we've talked to Dr. JJ Vanden Hout on some of his research, and I know you both have worked with him. So yeah, maybe we can go into that now. So yeah, talk about the difference between— a couple of questions here— the difference between individual flow as a startup founder, but then building a team, and then your So if you're building a team as a startup, you're gonna have to figure out some of those prerequisites for team flow, like high skill integration, building a collective ambition, learning how to communicate openly, you know, having a mutual commitment. But that seems to, like, obviously people are gonna join your team because they're committed to sort of what you're doing. But talk about the difference between individual flow and team flow and some of the prerequisites and how they play a role in allowing the flow experience in a startup situation.

OK, you asked for the differentiation between team flow and individual flow. And let me start with first differentiation of the components of team flow and individual flow. In our paper, "The Symphony of Team Flow," which we published recently, we said, we made a differentiation out of different concepts that are published out there. Beyond them, of course, also the concept of Jeff Vanden Hout. And we said that there are some core components of individual flow which are shared between individual flow and team flow, and these are that people are absorbed in the activity that they are doing. Also, there is a challenge-skill balance, a perceived challenge-skill balance in what they are doing, and it wouldn't be flow, and also it wouldn't be team flow if people wouldn't enjoy what they are doing. So these are the 3 shared components between Team Flow and Individual Flow. And then there are some components that are exclusive for Team Flow, and these are communication and feedback, which means that people listen to each other and give feedback to each other. They have a shared goal commitment, so they all know that they are on the same page. There is equal participation, which means that everyone has the same chance to participate to the group's goals. And last but not least, they trust in each other in terms of their knowledge, skills, and attitudes. So, these are at least the exclusive components of Team Flow, which are added to the individual flow's components.

Yeah, you also, like, for example, I think in your scoping review on flow research, talk about the difference between interpersonal flow at the individual level and then interpersonal flow at the collective level, and there sort of being a distinction. So people, you know, the inflow individually, but in a collective environment, but then also the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Aspect of team flow as well. And I bet you get more of that in organizations and especially startups.

Yes. So in fact, as you probably know, the Scoping Review was written by many, many authors. So I was the lucky one being the organizer, and that was also— I was also allowed to be the first author. But exactly this part was of course written by Jeff Van Den Hout and also someone else. But of course, you're correct, or you're right. There's a difference between just being in individual flow in a social situation, which doesn't mean that it's already, we can already call it team flow, but you can be in a social situation and everybody just works still on his or her own little piece. And team flow is more because you have to interact it's interdependent tasks that you are doing. And that's, I think, what makes the difference between really team flow and individual flow in a social situation.

I found similar things in my interviews because the founders, maybe you've seen it in my results section that I mentioned as a flow conducive factor as well, working alone. And working with others. So, they were telling me like, depending on the task and the situation, they prefer to be alone to get into flow, or they need interaction, but not for team flow, but exactly what Corinna said for like having others around, like getting the motivation from others, but being in one individual task and get into individual flow. This is also possible. But yeah, for team flow, um, maybe adding also to what Corinna said about the factors and antecedents of team flow, we found, um, yeah, also similar factors as for individual flow. But also here, um, yeah, it was added like a positive team spirit as very helpful to get into team though, commitment to the team and the team's goals. And they told me like a common basis. So having similar expectations on each other or how, on how the task will be, will be solved. And yeah, similar visions, similar goals. And this goes very much in line with the recent study of, yeah, also our lab, a colleague. She looked at team processes in firefighting missions and also found that team flow goes in line with shared mental models. So if everyone in the team has the same idea of what is happening and how to solve the problem, how to, yeah, fight this fire mission, there was more team flow experience. Veronica, correct me if I'm wrong. Trying to cite Fabian's work. Very good.

Thanks.

I want to like just to pursue this point about the individual and the team, the relationship between the individual and team, especially in the startup space. So the, you know, it's imperative or it's very important, I would say, to get people doing the tasks that they're good at. In, in a startup situation. Because if you mismatch, um, you know, if— I mean, you, you have to wear a lot of hats in the startup space, right? So everybody has to learn how to do all of these things on the fly, and you have to wear a bunch of different hats and switch those hats and context switch on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, at least in the first few years. Um, but I, but I what's important for flow is, and that challenge-skill balance, is you're going to feel more frustration if you're doing a task that you're really not so good at. Maybe you could learn to do it on the fly. But maybe you're not sort of, you know, there's not a natural inclination or proclivity for that particular task. Right? Like, so if you're, if those are administrative tasks versus You know, and I've talked to a lot of startup founders and I always hear this phrase where, oh, I just wanna get back to that creative part, that innovative part where, you know, like I'm creating. So how important is it in the startup space to match the skill that the per— the task that the person is doing for that particular aspect of the startup and their skillset?

Yes, I found exactly what you're talking about. So it's very much about the match between the individual and the task, and not only about the skills, but also about the interests, the motivations. And yeah, what the great majority told me was like, administrative tasks are not the ones who lead into flow, but it's about the creative, the innovative things. Many people also mentioned like the strategic task, like business planning and like really thinking about the product, prototyping. Yeah, but it's also very individual. So it's more about a match of interests and the characteristics of a task.

Yeah, so maybe to add on that, again, not specifically for founders, but what we also see from our general flow research for organizations or for employees is that the match is what matters. So, what we— people experience flow mostly in those activities which they have experience in, which they are interested in. And of course, this also works the other way around. If you learn something for a long time, then you get experienced. So you're going to be good at that. And then you can experience flow. An example that I like to bring here is playing the piano because people, when they start playing the piano, they are not yet good at playing the piano. And even if there is a challenge-skill balance, they are playing like just, I don't know how it's in German, it's Tonleiter, and I don't know what is the English translation of it. But if you just do the easy exercises, it's not yet really flow. But once you can play a very complex piece of music fluently, then it's really flow. So it's worth to exercise. So at one day, even in activities in which you were not good in the beginning, you can have flow. And this is also the reason why we experience more often flow at work than in our other life, like the private life, because usually we are good at what we are working because we are just practicing it for many years. So there's a higher probability to experience flow at work.

Yeah. Well, I love what you say, Corinna. It's the match that matters. That's a great—

Thanks. Yeah.

Great line. It sticks.

Yeah. Corinna, I was gonna ask you in, in Leone, you know, Corinna, you pointed to in our, in our adult life, right? Oftentimes we'll find flow experiences at work, right? Because it presents us that opportunity of matching our skill set, you know, with a particular task that needs to get done. Leonie, did any of the founders that you spoke with and interviewed for this study, did they share about flow experiences outside of their companies?

Yes, they did, because I started the interview like in a very open way, introducing to the topic of flow. And many people told me that they experienced it in their free time or, yeah, when doing their hobbies, or even mentioned, well, lots of early-stage founders have a second job to earn money because the startup is not yet in the position to, yeah, to be able to survive with the money. So they told me that they experience also flow in their other jobs. And yeah, so it's not only the startup.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, we were just having the conversation about, you know, matching our skill sets to the different tasks that are required, early stage of companies and/or, you know, just companies that are in a growth and development period. But I'm curious about how critical is it to have flow experiences outside of the workplace?

Okay. So I believe that it's good to have flow experiences either at work and/or outside work. So it's, I think if you have a lot of flow at work, maybe it's not so necessary to have as many flow experiences at home and vice versa. Maybe let's also tell it from a different perspective, from the more the physiology perspective. Flow experience is a state which is quite related to stress. And the dose is what makes the poison. So if you are in flow all the time, it's all your, like, your stress level is also moderately elevated. It's not yet unhealthy, but what is important is that there are pauses and breaks and recovery from flow experiences, which means you cannot be in flow all the time. And at work you need pauses. And also if you have a full day with a lot of flow at work, maybe at home it's good to have some recovery activity which is less active. And also vice versa. If you, if you have a lot of flow in your, for example, in your, at your weekend, maybe it's also good to have a break and have some rest and recovery before you go to work the next day. Yeah, so that's something I find important also as a result from our research, that flow is somehow related to stress and you need to recover also from flow.

That is, that's amazing. Can I follow up on that one?

Yeah, please, Michael, jump in.

Karina, a lot to unpack there, I think. But two immediate questions come to mind. One is, do you sort of think about the distinction between good stress and bad stress, eustress and distress? And if we think about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, let's say that's right, like this idea of optimal performance is a Goldilocks zone of a good stress, right? You don't want to be too underwhelmed and you don't want to be too overwhelmed. And so that's one thing in terms of the relationship between flow and stress. And my second point ties this back to startups and work, but just in flow, the relationship between flow and stress alone, you know, can we physiologically distinguish different kinds of stress? I guess maybe psychologically and cognitively we can, but, and is that important? Yeah.

Yeah, so first of all, you also, talked about the distinction between eustress and distress. This is what Hans Selye also made as a distinction. And in fact, I think that eustress is more or less flow. So I think it's, I think there is different research traditions and there might be some also distinctions if you go into the details. But the idea of both constructs is very, very similar. Also, eustress as well as flow is something that occurs during an activity which is challenging, but you feel confident of coping with it. So that is in common between flow and eustress. And also from a physiological point of view, yes, both states seem to be similar, if not the same. You mentioned the U-curve, the Yerkes-Dodson law. This is also a— the U-curve is also what we found in the relationship between flow and physiological stress markers. For example, there's an inverted U-shaped relationship between cortisol, between cortisol concentrations and flow experience in terms of if there is, if you have a stressful situation, usually cortisol increases. And if cortisol increases too high, we speak of really stress and people are overwhelmed. And if cortisol increases to a moderate level, this seems to facilitate flow in our studies. So this is what we found. And this is also quite plausible because cortisol helps us to cope with stress. As many of our bodily functions, it's a hormone which is released as a reaction to stress. And it's so, it wants to be adaptive. So it wants to help us to cope with the stress reaction. We are more focused if cortisol is at least moderately elevated. It helps us to have more energy to cope for a longer time. So that's very, very adaptive. But at the same time, if there is too much cortisol, there are different receptors to which it can bind. And then this positive adaptive function just gets the opposite. So this is, I think, the differentiation between positive stress, eustress or flow, and negative stress. From a physiological point of view. This is just, of course, cortisol, which is just a little part of the whole stress reaction. But I think there we can already see there is a distinction between the states.

So that leads to my second question, which is for both of you. But first, I want to pursue this point just a tiny bit more. Is it correct? Because I'm now sort of referring to another paper that you wrote a while ago on the psychophysiology of Flow, or chapter, and I forget, it was a chapter, I believe. Would it be correct to talk about the coactivation of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems in terms of autonomic nervous system function? Is there, is that correct?

Yeah, that's what we described. So In fact, yes, it's also based on one study that we made where we found that flow— so maybe let's start more from the beginning of the story of this paper. So what we wanted to see is if flow can occur in a stressful situation. And so what we did is the Trier Social Stress Test, which is basically a job interview with the people. And in this job interview, so yeah, we stressed people a little bit and they had also to solve some math tasks and so on. And afterwards they had a computer task to fulfill during which we observed people. And in the study, we looked at the cortisol reaction and also at the autonomous nervous system reaction, which was measured using heart rate variability. And what we found is in terms of cortisol that to this stressful situation, those people who answered with a moderate increase of cortisol had the highest flow in the task after the stressor, in the, in, yeah, in the computer task. And if people answered with higher cortisol or even more increased cortisol, there was lower flow. And also for the autonomous nervous system reaction, it was very similar. What we found is that a high co-activation, as you just we called it, was associated with increased flow in this stressful situation. Yeah. And what usually, what many people or what I think or what was also the opinion of science some years ago was that a co-activation isn't possible because usually it's it's either high sympathetic or high parasympathetic activation. But in the meantime, also since some years, of course, now we know that the coactivation is possible, that you can at the same time have high sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, which means you are basically relaxed and activated.

Exactly. That's what I was going to Yeah, we describe flow as like, you're calm, but alert at the same time. You're— it's a— even in— even Tim Galloway in The Inner Game of Tennis calls it the art of relaxed concentration. And he was really talking about flow in many points. So yeah, that, that's great that sort of the science is now showing and agreeing that there's sort of, you can be in a good stressed-out state, but alert and appropriate level of physiological arousal, but also relaxed and calm. And that might be one of the causal mechanisms for optimal performance, in fact. But I wanna, so I want this, this second part of the question really is more related to the startup space and workspace. So I wanna talk, I wanna shift a little bit the conversation into this whole idea of burnout being an entrepreneur, this idea of self-care, this idea of work-life balance, you know, and how flow relates to that. So I'll start this part of the conversation off with, you know, Stephen Cutler, our co-founder of Flow Research Collective and executive director. He always emphasizes that every team member in a startup is responsible for their own self-care. Physically, mentally, emotionally, that self-care is non-negotiable. But when the consequences are high and there's so much to get done, it's often the first thing to go. So we want to talk how do wellbeing and resilience affect this idea of being in flow in a startup space? So this gets to this idea of burnout as well, Karina, and I know you're, meta-analysis that you did in 2023, I think last year, 2022 on this flow burnout model. But even the data is pretty evident that being an entrepreneur is a very stressful situation, can lead to burnout. Work in general, you can have a lot of burnout in work scenarios. Burnout's measured on different dimensions, has different causal mechanisms. But entrepreneurship can destroy lives, really. It could destroy marriages and it can really have a negative impact. And so how important is self-care? That's part of this question. How do we define work-life balance in the context of flow? And what really is the relationship between flow and burnout in general? That's sort of a 3-part question. I don't know, Leonie, if you wanna—

Hey, very interesting question. I can, try to start with one part because yes, self-care is super important. It's very crucial for like wellbeing at work, for wellbeing in the startup, and also for being able to get into flow. Because if you're not feeling well with what you're doing, if you're feeling stressed and like overloaded, overwhelmed with all the tasks, it's quite impossible to get into positive experience of flow. So resilience, yes, the first step that has to be built up to be able to pursue this startup idea in, in a positive way and to get into a flow experience also. But yeah, it's kind of complex because flow can also have consequences that are not only positive, but for example, many people told me that flow also leads to kind of perfectionism. So like to get lost in the details to, yeah, they told me that they worked more than they wanted because they were in flow and forget the time and then it got late and they started to neglect their other tasks and private life and/or their other jobs. So yeah, it's kind of a paradox. It's a complicated relationship of flow and resilience.

Perhaps that's one of the benefits of, you know, having other things where you find flow outside of work is just knowing that there is, there's an auto-actelix experience outside of your workplace that can kind of get you, yeah, get you away and out of the office or away from the desk, you know, with the confidence that you can still find flow somewhere else. Corinna, I think you were going to add something there.

Yes. So I think it's, it's always extremely interesting if we have the qualitative results at the one side, like in the study of Leonie, and also like the more general quantitative results that we find in other studies or in the systematic review that you were referring to, Michael. And in the systematic review, in fact, I'm for a long time, I'm very interested in the relationship between flow and burnout. So in the first version of the the chapter we were just talking about on the physiology of flow, I also talked a little bit on this relationship and I just checked in the second version, I didn't write it anymore. So I somehow cut it out. But at the same time we made this systematic review with Fabienne Aust as a first author. She's another doctoral student of my lab and she, but in the meantime she finished her PhD And in this study, we wanted to see if or how the relationship between flow and burnout looks like. And in fact, my hypothesis would have been that if people are too often in flow, they can be somehow addicted also, or they can get addicted. And then this could also lead into a burnout. This was somehow my hypothesis. Hypothesis there. At the same time, other studies and also if you talk to other people, they always say, well, flow is protective against burnout because if you have a lot of flow, you are resilient or resilience increases. So we made a model where we suggested that both directions could be possible. And in fact, the studies that were published until then mainly showed evidence for the negative relationship between flow and burnout, which means flow is protective against burnout, more flow, less burnout. And we didn't find evidence for the opposite. And by the way, we all, there was also not really longitudinal studies, which makes it very difficult to make any causal conclusions there. So I still think, and also what Leonie just reported from her results, still makes me think there is something that flow is a factor that can somehow also lead us to burnout. If we don't— sorry, if we don't recover enough. And this is also, I think, something we can relate to the physiology of flow we were just talking about, because burnout is also associated with hypercortisolism, which means too much cortisol in the system. And this is something which is of course, it's a stress hormone, it's associated to stress. And if flow, in flow, we have usually elevated cortisol levels, maybe this is also a mechanism that could play a role there. It's really very, very hypothetical what I'm just saying, just to let you know about the thoughts behind. And at the same time, I think that if people have, if people are so lucky to have a lot of flow in their work, the only thing that's necessary so they have really a very good work-life balance is that they keep in mind that they need to do pauses, that they need holidays, that they need to recover, and that they should do other things in their private life and free time. Yeah. And maybe one more point on that. Also, computer games are often designed along flow components or flow criteria because they want people to stay online and to play further and further. And of course, we know that computer game addiction is a real problem. So, Yeah, just to add another argument to that.

So I just saw, and forgive me for looking this up in this way, but it was an Instagram post, believe it or not, of Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio is an entrepreneur, a billionaire. His company, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are familiar with that name. He said principles, so he wrote a book called Principles. And in it, he's talking about principles for work-life balance. So this is not so much flow related. I don't want to get back to that in a second because I want to ask you about something which we're calling the flow cycle. But the idea is recognize that everyone has much to do. Other than working harder for long hours, there are 3 ways to fix the problems. Do less by prioritizing and say no. Find the right people to delegate to. Improve your output per hour of input. Number 2, prioritize. While you can have virtually anything you want, you can't have everything you want. So prioritization is important there. And 3, allow time for rest and renovation. And so we talk about the flow cycle here at the Flow Research Collective, and we are actually doing some research on the flow cycle right now in terms of neuromodulation and neurochemistry. But the idea is that there is a struggle at first, then there's a release. So, this sort of phenomenological subjective sense of letting go. In fact, a study just came out by John Koinios. He was looking at jazz improvisation and it was a neural study on flow. And he was talking about his expertise plus release model of flow, uh, and then the flow state itself, and then on the back end, recovery, right? So recovery is such an important point of, of work-life balance and flow. But, um, I'm wondering if maybe you could speak to that a little bit more. And, and going back to this idea of self-care, how critical, especially as a startup founder, is it to really double down on your ability to care for yourself and make sure you're getting enough reboot and renovation and recovery and all of those R words.

Yes, it's very, very interesting and very important, the part of recovery, because flow in the moment, it feels effortless, it feels good, but it is energy consuming. So you need to recover. From flow and from work in general, of course, to also have the energy to get into flow again.

This is also something we see in studies, like not only our own studies, but there's a study from Meike Debus, for example, and she found that only if you can recover during the evening and the night you can use your full flow potential the next day. So it's very important to recover.

Mm-hmm.

Leonie, in the founders that you interviewed, was this— was recovery a concept that they— that was really established within that they wanted to model for their— in their companies as well? Was that something that was important to them?

It was more on the side of not being recovered as a hindering factor to flow. So as I told you before, I interviewed like very early stage founders. So they were in the very first year or like before even starting the startup officially. And most of them were having like part-time jobs to manage their life somehow, or some were still in university studying and had the idea like while finishing their master's, and they had like very much responsibilities, many responsibilities at the same time. Yeah, two jobs at the same time. And it was something they mentioned very often that they're not finding time to recover, that they're like stressed and jumping from one thing to the other, getting into multitasking, which is also like not really good for flow. We cannot be in flow if we're trying to do many things at one time. So flow is about being focused on one thing and it's impossible when you try to multitask. Yeah, so it was more on the side, yes, startup founders had experience with being not really recovered. Unfortunately.

So maybe to add on that, there is research, it's not particularly flow research, but it's research on time pressure. And there is a colleague from Hamburg Medical School, Anja Bethke, who published a very, very good paper some years ago on time pressure, because what we know from time pressure is it can be motivating. So we differentiate between these challenge stressors and the more hindrance stressors. And time pressure is a stressor. We all say, okay, if we have this deadline tonight or tomorrow, we are all in a sudden, we are able to work the whole night through and we are in flow and then everything's done and it's good. So I guess that many of us know that this is possible with time pressure. At the same time, something many, many studies lack is the longitudinal perspective. Because on a very short time frame, this is true what I just said. But if you have stress or in this case time pressure over a longer time period, what Anja Bethke showed is that then it has the opposite effect. So then it's harmful. And not motivating anymore. And I think this is also something which is true for the founders and why also resting in between is so important. You can be in flow and also very close to stress, eustress, for quite a long period of time if you're highly resilient and everything's very interesting. This can maybe even last for a longer time. But there is a point where it's just too much. And then, yeah, I think then it's a hindrance factor. So then it could, in my theory, turn into burnout and maybe doesn't feel like flow anymore. Maybe this is also the thing why we don't see it in studies. Once there is this turning point, it's not flow anymore. So then it's, uh, something else like just stress or burnout. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm also, what I'm hearing is maybe throughout this conversation is that there's sort of also like a Goldilocks zone of flow. I mean, flow is contextual, obviously. Um, it really is, I think, context dependent. There's a certain part of it that is not context dependent cuz flow is flow is flow. You can, there's a bunch of different scenarios and situations you can get into it with, but it seems that there might be a very real sort of optimal amount of flow, especially in the startup situation or work that might be conducive to or facilitate well-being and joy and success and performance and all those things. But I was going to ask about your flow and burnout model. It, yeah, it's very interesting that you might think that flow actually might cause, have a causal, not just a correlational, but a causal mechanism on burnout. That's fascinating. That also leads to more future directions of research. Do you, what open questions, especially from that part of the research, but also like more the relationship between flow and entrepreneurship in general, but maybe also I want to just also think about leadership as well, what the relationship between leadership is.

Maybe to your, uh, it was many questions in one. Maybe to the first part, I want to just clarify that I, that I think yes, it can play a role in the, um, uh, development of burnout, but only if you do not recover well in between. So that's, that's important. So as long as you have enough recovery, I think flow is protective. If you don't have enough recovery, my hypothesis is that it could have a part in the development of burnout, but it's not proven at all. So this is something we could not yet see anywhere. In terms of future research questions, this is of course one because there are very, very limited longitudinal studies on this. So we are just working on one where we want at least first see the effect of burnout at time 1 on flow at time 2. And what we don't have yet, but I hope in the future is the opposite. Like, so the first study I was just describing is already in the review process. So that is written and done. But the second, the other direction, like from the protective effect of flow to burnout is something we have not data yet. So, but I hope that we will have that in the near future. Yeah. So that is the research agenda here. And maybe can you specify a little bit what your question is regarding leadership?

Well, yeah, I think even in the startup space, learning how to be a leader and the relationship between flow and leadership is interesting. I think so one of the things that we discuss here at the Flow Research Collective is that leaders in flow can then get it's better, it facilitates the team being in flow, it facilitates the rest of the organization being in flow. And there's sort of a, maybe a contagion effect, right? When, and maybe leadership is an interesting door into flow. And at least that's what we definitely think. And there's evidence for that, I believe. But maybe you could just speak to the relationship between flow and leadership in general and maybe what that, Leonie, looks like in the startup space.

Or do you know about a study that has investigated the relationship between flow or a leader in flow and the effect on the team in flow? Is there a study in the meantime?

I don't think there's a particular, at least a peer-reviewed study on that. Particular claim. I think there's a lot of anecdotal data. What we say is anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal data, enough data to where, let's say, a proper hypothesis could be attested in that space. But we, we have data at the Flow Research Collective on that. Yeah, yeah. So we have some qualitative data on that, but it's not peer-reviewed at the moment. But it's enough to look at a hypothesis testing scenario, I would say. But also, there's, I just read an article in Harvard Business Review. And so, there is some very interesting data out of HBR, Harvard Business Review, and a couple of folks, I actually can't remember the name off the top of my head, who it was just published. And the issue that was published last month was called The Leadership Mindset. And cultivating a leadership mindset. And a bunch of the issue was dedicated to the concept of flow and leaders in flow and how that affects the rest of the organization and the team. And one of the things that they were talking about there was these 5 different dimensions of how to cultivate flow as a leader. And it was, I might actually have the article right here, but yeah, so I was, there's a bunch of, I would say, you know, white paper type level research on that.

Okay, really cool. I should also check that. Maybe we can exchange the exact references later, or maybe, I don't know if you have sometimes these references also in a footnote of the podcast or something so the interested listeners can also access it. But yeah, so I just wanted to make sure you don't have something in mind that I don't know yet because in fact, this is, if I talk about flow for organizations, for example, if I have talks there, usually what I say is this is what I really want to investigate one day. And so, but there is preliminary evidence not from the context of organizations, but from the context of school, because we know that teachers in flow, there is this effect of a spillover to their crossover of flow experience to their pupils. If music teachers, for example, are very passionate for their instrument and are in flow when playing the instrument, this spills over. Also, if teachers are in flow during teaching, this spills over to their pupils. And this is what I usually reference first, and then I say, I'm quite sure this also applies to the organizational context, but no one has ever investigated that before. So, Yeah, it seems to be still true. And I still believe also in this anecdotal evidence that leaders in flow probably, yeah, there is some spillover to the team. Yeah, I'm quite sure it's like that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that's amazing. So I'll definitely put the link in the podcast to the HBR, Harvard Business Review, article so folks can look up those different dimensions that they were discussing. They were fleshing them out. But yeah, want to thank you both for such an amazing conversation. That was awesome. Really, really nice to flesh out some of the science. And I think one of the really important things is it shows why the science is so relevant. Because this science that, Leone, that you've done in your research is so applicative or has such practical application. Some of the recommendations that you were making about multitasking and having a clear vision and so on really are very conducive to application. So, it shows why the science is so important and translating the science over to application is also so important. That's one of the things that we really emphasize at the Flow Research Collective is what can we take from the science and leverage to change our lives and improve our lives, not just for basic science and scientific curiosity, although that's where we started the conversation, but it's application and understanding how to leverage the science. So, that's why research like this is so important. So, want to thank you both for your scientific curiosity and endeavors and amazing.

Thank you so much. I just had to check the, uh, the time. Um, it's already over, so we were in flow, I guess, some kind of podcast.

No doubt.

I was definitely pulled out of the flow because somebody came to my window and was knocking on the door, and I was like, wait. Um, it was not fun at the time, but, um, Yeah, great, great, great conversation.

Thank you so much. Yeah, Leonie, any, any last words for us? Um, thank you for this paper.

Thank you very much. It was a really amazing experience, and, uh, I really, uh, liked some of your questions because, uh, they make me also think about our studies in a new way. And as you said, the application— so what can we take from this for practice. Yeah, thank you.

Yes, also thank you very much.