Veterans and Flow

Frustration often leads to insight.

I was browsing LinkedIn a few minutes ago when I came across Ian Wolfe’s article “6 Reasons SOF Veterans will Supercharge your Business in a Post-COVID World.” As it turns out, this was the insight I needed to put my own frustration into perspective.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) veterans were the main focus, but many of the points made by Ian reflect many skills which are not specific to SOF personnel:

Companies will need managers in place who can adjust on the fly to changing conditions and minimize the life-or-death risk of bringing people back into close proximity again.

My daily life as a Standardization Instructor was best described as being an expert in plate spinning. In the space of walking from my truck to the office, I would routinely speak with a half-dozen folks who each brought one or two distinctly different issues which needed resolution sooner than later. While they were not exactly “life-or-death” matters, the solutions they sought were often overlapping and contributing factors to the efficient and safe operations we conducted.

Scheduling issues, training questions, maintenance problems, interpersonal conflicts, pre-deployment concerns… all framing my own immediate training goals for the day and whatever wasn’t concretely resolved from the day prior.

By the time I actually got to my desk, I was mentally in a state which I had become accustomed to: flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spoke about this phenomenon in his 2004 TED talk on it and described it as:

…[T]his focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

I knew not just what had to be done, but why and my role in making it happen. Once the out in the aircraft, this focus shifted to a form of performance which was vital to safety, but it never really stopped; my attention adapted to different conditions and levels of criticality, but while narrowed, it never fully dissipated.

Ian went on to elaborate on his six ideas: “history of excellence,” “killer instinct,” “soft skills,” “team players,” “leadership under fire,” and “comfort with ambiguity.”

Two stand out as applicable to other non-SOF veterans: soft skills and comfort with ambiguity.

Soft Skills

Many of us appreciate the importance of relationships. I have written about my own perspectives on the appreciation of ethics and unorthodoxy, as well as my the importance of realism in training for the sake of producing more resilient and effective crewmembers; each instance offer candid reflections from my perspective, yet underscore an appreciation of soft skills when it comes to relationships and the organizational goals.

Comfort with Ambiguity

This aspect was vital. Aviation operations are never the same from mission to mission or day to day. The overall intent of the ground or aviation commander might be similar, but variables such as crew mix/disposition, resources available, weather, threat, or mechanical considerations all create their own questions as to how best to perform to reach that intent. Even the nebulous processes leading up to, during, and after short training exercises, major deployments, or organizational restructuring are associated with vague challenges which must be prioritized and attended to in an ongoing mental triage of criticality.

These two – soft skills and comfort with ambiguity – was quite often where we thrived and set us up for success with the other ideas which Ian illustrated…

…Which is where we often excel.

COVID was the curveball no one saw six months ago, and we are getting only a glimpse of what the possible future might bring. It has provided the conditions for the true colors of individuals, organizations, representatives, and societies to come into raw and unfiltered light.

Some of what we see is not pretty, much of it is disconcerting, and all of it is new…

…But this is the environment many of us are used to and we find the possibilities to implement, encourage, and contribute towards efforts for a quick and practical recovery into the “new normal” fascinating, familiar, and worthy of the experience we bring and our drive to make it happen.