Motivational Flow Versus DMCs
Originally introduced in the mid-1970s and then popularized more widely in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975, 1988, 1990) concept of ‘flow’ refers to a state of intensive involvement in a task which feels so absorbing that people often compare it to being outside of everyday reality. Flow, in its most developed form, is characterized by focused concentration in and through the enjoyment of an activity in which, as Csikszentmihalyi (2009, p. 394) describes, people lose track of time and other elements of the human experience:
Flow is a subjective state people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself. It is what one feels when reading a good novel, or playing a good game of tennis, or when having a stimulating conversation. The defining feature of flow is intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity, which can be either physical or mental.
Although the archetypical example of someone in a flow state is the artist who gets lost in his/her work, we can also observe the phenomenon in many nonartistic engagements, for example such as among people who play digital games. In fact, as Csikszentmihalyi (2009) reports, surveys show that 85–90% of the population in the US and in Europe claim to have had such an experience in their lives. This would explain why, after it was published in an accessible form (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), the notion of flow achieved New York Times bestseller status, the underlying claim that “a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does” (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 89) resonating with many, with flow believed to be responsible for this “complete absorption.” This highly positive reception is testament to the fact that most people cherish flow experiences and, having experienced one, long for more. As a consequence of this, besides establishing a permanent place in psychology, the concept of flow has also had a growing impact on popular culture, even on seemingly unrelated domains such as sports, business, and politics.
The element of total absorption characterizing both flow and DMCs would suggest that the two states are related, and to some extent this is certainly true. Flow is the mainstream motivation construct which is most similar to DMCs in that it concerns the all-encompassing personal experience of task engagement. However, while Csikszentmihalyi (1988) explains that flow states are most likely to occur in structured activities such as ritual events, games, sports, and artistic performances, DMCs involve longer periods—often weeks or months—and subsume multiple separate tasks. Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi also adds that “Occasionally, however, an entire culture, a whole way of life becomes so coherently structured that everything in it provides flow—including work and all the routine, obligatory aspects of everyday life” (p. 31). This sense of “a whole way of life” becoming, in certain circumstances, structured to an extent that “everything in it provides flow,” including all of the mundane aspects of daily existence, is indeed the very essence of DMCs, and the relationship between flow and DMC experiences is further evidenced by the accounts of several respondents in Csikszentmihalyi’s (2009) past interview studies who “used the metaphor of a stream or current that carried them along effortlessly” (p. 396).
A DMC is similar to the flow experience in some aspects (most notably the learners’ absorption in the action) but different in others (most specifically their timescales, the differing sources of positive emotionality, and the structures underpinning them).
Having said this, the actual construct which Csikszentmihalyi focuses on most in his writings under the rubric of ‘flow’ concerns a much shorter time window than a “stream or current.” Indeed, it is almost always restricted to a single activity. The conceptual difference between flow and DMCs is, in this respect, well illustrated by Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, p. 30) description of the requisite conditions which enable an individual to stay ‘in the zone:’ “To remain in flow, one must increase the complexity of the activity by developing new skills and taking on new challenges.” When this happens, an “inner dynamic of the optimal experience” arises in which an individual actively seeks out challenges that involve higher levels of complexity. It is this process of “spiraling complexity” that, he argues, “forces people to stretch themselves, to always take on another challenge, to improve on their abilities” (p. 30). What Csikszentmihalyi is saying here, in effect, is that the extension of the flow experience happens through the addition of cognitive twists or challenges to the initial activity—not unlike in digital games where the duration of a game can be extended by adding further difficulty levels, stages, locations, or rounds. The prolonged version, however, still remains in essence the same task, albeit with added variations. In this sense the concept of flow is rather different from a DMC, in that in the latter what are often diverse tasks and task components are subsumed by an overarching current, linked together by the ‘directedness’ of the process as the current moves toward an overall goal or vision. (We describe these processes and the functioning of the final goal/vision in detail in Chapter 3).
Thus, while both DMCs and flow involve a ‘peak experience’—that is, a state of heightened awareness and full involvement—the timescale of the two experiences is significantly different. This has major implications for the coherence of the structures underlying them. A flow state is held together by a task’s intrinsically rewarding nature (i.e., the pleasure derived from doing the activity itself), whereas a DMC involves a prolonged process of engagement in a series of tasks which are not necessarily enjoyable in and of themselves—although of course some may be—but are rewarding chiefly because they transport an individual toward a highly valued end. This difference in the source of satisfaction is well illustrated by Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975/2000) recollection of how painters experience flow:
The tasks which make up a DMC pathway will inevitably consist of activities which both would and would not be perceived as enjoyable in their own right; however, regardless of their inherent ‘enjoyability’ in normal circumstances,
all tasks along a DMC pathway are perceived as enjoyable because they
transport an individual toward a highly valued end-goal.
as I watched and photographed painters at their easels, one of the things that struck me most vividly was the almost trancelike state they entered when the work was going well. Once the painting started to take shape, the artist became completely enthralled. The motivation to go on painting was so intense that fatigue, hunger, or discomfort ceased to matter. Why were these people so taken with what they were doing? The answers that the main motivational theories could give were not persuasive. For example, the reigning behaviorist explanation suggested that artists are so motivated to paint because they want a reward—the finished painting—and it is this goal that motivates their behavior. But I noticed that the artists I was observing almost immediately lost interest in the canvas they had just painted. Typically they turned the finished canvas around and stacked it against a wall. Nor were they particularly eager to show it off, or very hopeful about selling it. They could hardly wait to start on a new one.
(p. xiv)
This archetypical description of the flow experience depicts the participant’s behavior as fully autotelic, that is, as having an end or purpose in itself rather than pointing toward a larger goal. This “autotelic experience” is at the very heart of the notion of flow, and in fact, this was the original term Csikszentmihalyi and his lab team originally introduced to describe the phenomenon they were studying (1975/2000, p. xviii). In contrast to this, within a DMC everything is centered on approaching a desired long-term target or vision. As we have mentioned, the current may include several constituent tasks or stages which are not perceived as pleasurable in themselves—which is contrary to the flow principle—and significantly, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, in a DMC even these tedious and mechanical steps along the way, such as working with foreign language grammar, are perceived and experienced in a positive emotional light. This is because enjoyment is projected onto them from the overall emotional loading of the target goal. It is as if, in a fractal manner, each step along the way reproduces some of the joy linked to the overall journey, regardless of the inherent ‘enjoyability’ (or otherwise) of any particular activity if viewed in isolation.
