What is the Flow Game?

A way to find clarity together

The Flow Game is a powerful tool for creating an interactive reflection, dialogue and action space for groups, teams and individuals. Working through a game is a simple way to ground, strengthen and bring clarity and flow to human beings, their life, leadership and actions.

The Flow Game is deceptively simple. Groups are always surprised at how it creates a supportive, challenging, and unique opportunity to explore the present or future in an intuitive and insightful way.

Where could the Flow Game take me?

A powerful question is a doorway into a new perspective. It stimulates you. It tickles you. It might even make you tremble. But if you have the courage to stay in the fire with it, that could change everything! Are you ready for that? The world currently has quite a low question literacy. We seem more concerned with answers than questions. But frankly, if you don’t get the question right, the answer is really not worth having. Most people focus on transactional questions, but what the world needs right now are transformational questions.

The Flow Game is simple. It’s easy to play. And that’s also why it is so powerful for the players. A potent question can be not only a gamechanger, it can be a life-changer! That’s why it’s important to be clear about the question you are asking — it really does make a difference!

So think about it… What matters to you right now. What really matters? That’s where your question can be found!

To play the Flow Game you need to have a question that matters to you. It might be something about work or life, home or community. Perhaps you want to think more deeply about your career or how you can make a contribution in the world. Maybe your question is about being in better relationship with your family or your colleagues.

The focus of the game is to enable each of the players to ask a question that matters to them and gain good counsel from the other players. For this reason, the Flow Game is hosted by a trained Flow Host and the host supports players to craft an appropriate question to bring to the game.

During a Flow Game each player states their question, rolls the dice and then picks up a card from the deck indicated. The cards contain questions, actions and pictures. Players support each other to think more deeply about what the game has offered in response to the question each player brings to the table.

A Flow Game most often is played for 4 – 6 players.

Often a Flow Game is played for three to four hours or a full day or more. Sometimes we play shorter games as part of a longer event, like a conference or team building. We also support strategy sessions, teams working on vision, mission and values and people in a wide variety of situations who want to gain a new perspective through taking a new look at the question they hold.

The FlowGame can be played between individuals as well as between teams (there are 2 different sets of cards for each). I love working with Flow Game as a tool and practice for teams that supports groups to find their way forward in the work by creating space to pause, reflect, connect and explore to find the clarity and direction they need to keep moving forward. It can also be used a Group Coaching tool.

Objectives of playing the FlowGame as a team:

1. Flow Game can be hosted for teams at any stage of their development, planning or work.

2. It is a potent way to get to the core of what is important to people and understand their values and beliefs.

3. To identify where their priorities lie in order to understand their decisions making process

3. To develop a common set of principles to guide team-work and reflective processes. 4. To align leaders and team members to a common purpose, vision or goal.

5. To become aware of, appreciate and leverage the diversity in teams.

6. To provide the safe space, opportunity and platform for leaders and team members to be vulnerable and empathize and support each other’s exploration.

7. To dove-tail into Action learning by creating a community of support and encouragement beyond the Game.

8. To broaden one's perspective to look at any situation or challenge from various angles and learn about how people dealt with similar situations in different ways. It broadens one's outlook.

There are many wonderful outcomes that have been experienced by the participants of the FlowGame:

Pause: A Flow Game can provide a resting place for people otherwise caught up in the day to day business. An opportunity to breathe and become present to themselves and each other in ways that are not possible in our day to day flurry.

Connect: The chance to connect with themselves and their teammates can be deeply restorative and re-invigorating. The Flow Game offers this by slowing down, creating space to see each other and be seen, deep listening and thoughtful exchanges around a question crafted together. This, together with some fun can bond and strengthen team to continue their quest.

Explore: A collective exploration grounded in a question and guided by a roll of the dice and drawing of cards. Flow Game invites us to delve into a question together. What sets this process apart is the element of surprise that rolling the dice offers this exploration. Inviting us to go to places of depth and breadth we could never plan for but always takes us where we need to be.

Reflect: As teams participate in a FlowGame, a collection of memories, insights, values and passions become a mirror for each individual and the collective to see themselves, their journey and what holds them in their work both alone and together.

Clarity: Clarity emerges as the group sees what comes from their responses to questions, together with themes or patterns of the cards drawn, make sense and notice insights. The learning comes from both own responses to questions and their resonance with the accounts of others. It is this collective nature of clarity that contributes to its carriage back into the work and culture of the team.

Direction: Newfound clarity offers members a way forward. To have found their direction together strengthens the relationships, commitment and motivation needed to carry this fresh iteration of the team and their work into the world.

Flow Game can be hosted for teams at any stage of their development, planning or work.

Some questions we have worked with in teams:

1. How can I invite leadership in myself, my colleagues and the young people we support to facilitate life stories of connection, inspiration and celebration?

2. What are the key principles that underpin our work so that all people experience genuine choice and control in their lives?

3. Who will we become in the emerging landscape?

4. How can we come together to more powerfully contribute to each other’s success?

5. How can we embed capacity building at the centre of our individual and collective practices in service of genuine choice and control?

6. What will it take for our hopes for 2017 to be realised?

7. What form do we need to take to ensure we will maintain our core values and approach to support?

8. How can we achieve the purpose of the organization together?

I wonder what questions will emerge in our current time and circumstances..... I would be happy to bring this experience to your team. Please visit http://www.flowgame.net for more details about the game.

-SHALAKA GUNDI

• Experienced Freelance HR Consultant

• Passionate & Intuitive OD Practitioner

• Group Process Facilitator

• FlowGame Host

• Group Coach

• Soft Skills Trainer