Working with famous scholar Mike Csikszentmihályi on FLIGBY
This is the story of a world-famous American scholar of Hungarian origin, Mihály Csikszentmihályi (1934-2021), or “Mike” for short. It explains Mike’s “Flow” concept and his innovative research approaches on it that made him globally celebrated. The gist of this essay, however, is the adventurous ways in which I –together with two colleagues in Hungary – got involved with Mike and how us foursome collaboratively created a Flow-based management game, called FLIGBY.
Let’s begin this true story in the middle of it, then move backward and forward.
A former student of mine, who later became a friend, Zsadány (Zad) Vécsey, was working with his father Zoltán’s management consulting firm. Right after the political system change in CEE in the early 1990s, I also worked with Zoltán on several projects.
After Zoltan’s son, Zad, completed his education at (today’s) Corvinus University in Budapest and at the London Business School (LBS), Zad worked for two years at the global management consulting firm, Coopers and Lybrand (1996-97), to gain practical experience. He joined his father’s management consulting firm and gradually reoriented its profile toward management gaming, both because he liked to create such games and because he thought that the firm’s future would be more lucrative that way.
In 2005, Zad created a management game, whose story was that the protagonist had to put together a qualified team, with complementary skills, to climb Mount Everest. The management challenge was to put together an effective team that would likely to be successful. The game, “Project Management”, won an international award.
Zad was looking for a new game idea when he came across a description of Mike’s Flow concept. All Zad knew was that Mike had Hungarian background and was an internationally famous professor in a USA. Zad sent emails to Mike to make contact. And although he did not receive replies, Zad decided to try to meet Mike F2F in the USA. He found Mike at Claremont University in California, managed to see him, and proposed that he would gamify Mike’s well-known concept of Flow. Mike was not interested, said that computer games were for his grandchildren. Zad prevailed upon Mike to agree to view his award-winning Mount Everest management game. It so happened that in his youth, Mike was a mountain climber, so he was quite taken with the game. S much so that he invested $100,000 of his personal funds in a business plan that encompassed the use of the rights to gamify his Flow theory in the management and leadership context.
Zad needed help in gamifying Flow and decided, at the same time, to write a book about the Flow concept, applying it to business situations. A colleague of mine at the CEU Business School, Zoltán Buzády, became strongly interested and the three of us formed a smoothly-working triumvirate to work, simultaneously, on our two parallel projects. One was gamifying Flow; the other, to prepare a co-authored book about the business applications of the concept for managers.
We worked on both projects for several years (2014-2016), made a trip to Claremont to consult with Mike in person, invited the famous professor to the CEU Business School in 2015 to speak on the occasion of the release of our book, Missing Link Discovered: Integrating Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory into Management and Leadership Practice, by using FLIGBY – the Official Flow-Leadership Game.
The first photo shows the assembled project team. The Prof. and the three authors are wearing identical, blue neck-scarves, designed by Angela (sitting in front of Mike).
The second photo shows the participants of the dinner we gave to the Prof and his wife and to our closest collaborators on the FLIGBY project. From left to right: yours truly, Zoltán Vécsey, Angela, Bánk Vécsey, Mrs. and Prof. Csíkszentmihályi, Zoltán Buzády, and Zad Vécsey.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934- 2021): career and accomplishment
Born into a Hungarian family in the then city of Fiume that then belonged to Italy. at age ten his family moved to Venice. Ever since as a youngster, he dreamed about understanding the lives of human being, so he emigrated to the USA to study psychology, eventually moving to the U of Chicago. During his studies he discovered that painters and other professionals, like mountain climbers and chess-players, were often as if in a trans status while engaging in their favorite activities. The experience of creativity appears when doing something not for material gain but purely for the pleasure of creation, making possible the complete absorption in the experience. It is to that experience that he captured in what eventually became his famous Flow concept.
Mike was 60 years old when he became internationally successful with a book published on Flow. In the book he raised the perennial questions of human existence: what is happiness, how can we become happy, and so on? He used his own experiences and his scientific studies of happiness-related issues to give the Flow concept a scientific status. In 1999, Mike resigned his University of Chicago professorship to relocate to Claremont College in California – a much better climate than cold and windy Chicago — where he continued his path-breaking research. Mike won many global awards globally. We mention here only the prizes he received in his native Hungary: The Sechenyi Award (2011); the grand cross of the Hungarian State; and the large cash award, called the Prima Primissa Prize.
Essential facts about FLOW and FLIGBY (as of 2019)
I continued to be engaged for several years nearly full-time, with the colleagues mentioned, on creating and polishing the FLIGBY game and on co-publishing various shorter and longer essays on Mike, on Flow, and its application to management.
In 2017, I decided to refocus my energies on my singly-authored trilogy, called Episodes from My Life – In Historical Context, passing the torch on research on Flow and on FLIGBY to my co-author colleagues. I asked both to update what I wrote above and to state what each reader of this website, and others, could gain by registering with one or with both of you, free of charge, to learn more about Flow and about the practical applications of FLIGBY around the world.
Here I plan to include the contributions of Zad Vecsey and Zoltan Buzady, asking them not to repeat what I wrote above but to focus on recent developments and on the benefits of registering with them to be kept up to date on FLOW and FLIGBY.
Here I plan to include the contributions of Zad Vecsey and Zoltan Buzady, asking them not to repeat what I wrote above but to focus on recent developments and on the benefits of registering with them to be kept up to date on FLOW and FLIGBY.