The Future Is Flow: Cultivating Social Soil & Strength
When Life Feels Aligned
At Canon Collaborative, the heart of our work is grounded in the truth that humans are not separate from nature — we are a manifestation of it. The Constructal Law shows us that all living systems evolve to increase access to what flows through them, which is nature’s way of building or constructing.
In our context, what flows are natural strengths instinctively desire freedom within our experience and hold distinct power to create. Kindred to many species of life on this planet, strength is naturally embedded within our existence.
For humans, this flow often feels like those moments when life aligns — when creativity moves easily and challenge energizes rather than drains. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called these flow states. At Canon, we understand them as signals of coherent strength in motion.
Nature gifts humanity an abundance of strategies to support our growth and evolution. All living systems hold an inherent function — a purpose that drives them toward life. While human goals vary greatly, most of us share a simple desire to feel content and to move through life with a sense of satisfaction and joy.
Navigating Resistance
Every living system encounters resistance — stress along the path that becomes a key indicator the system is in fact alive. Our wellbeing as humans depends on how much freedom we have to adapt and shape the structures of our lives so we can keep moving with purpose. In our lived experience, these structures show up as our roles, responsibilities, and daily activities, where we may experience freedom to access and engage our strengths or not.
The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi became curious about the conditions that create happiness after great tragedy — shaped by his own suffering and direct experience of World War II. He shared that his work was “filtered through [his] own unique place in the cosmos” in trying to “make sense” of the destruction of life and beauty that surrounded him. That search led to his discovery of what we now call flow states — optimal experiences where attention narrows, time shifts, and life feels meaningful. Because the human nervous system can only “make sense” out of so much information at once, learning to retrieve the essential threads allows order, creativity, and joy to arise.
When attention can’t make sense of the flood of information around us, stress builds and disorder takes hold. Energy that might fuel creativity or joy instead gets trapped in confusion — leaving us anxious, depressed, or burned out. The good news is that this disorder isn’t fixed. By noticing how our strengths are flowing — and where they meet resistance — we can develop highly personal strategies to adapt, align, and restore order.
When a system is under stress, it reaches moments of instability where the way forward is uncertain. In other words, the system is meeting the edge of its previously known order, and what lies beyond is not yet clear. Ilya Prigogine described these times as “far from equilibrium,” where “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Flow states offer us those personal islands. Even fleeting experiences of clarity and harmony become anchors in the midst of disruption. What matters is how we build upon them. With tools to recognize and create these states, we can turn moments of order into pathways of transformation — fueling resilience, creativity, and the flow of life itself.
Designing Flow
In nature, we observe the way a plant probes its environment — instinctively shaping itself toward light, water, and carbon to fuel its function and flow. The same is true for us. With greater awareness of what fuels our unique strengths, we can design roles, activities, and experiences that enact our flow and purpose — bringing power to the flow of life within our lived experience.
Through personal experimentation, we create a dialogue between the nature “in here” and “out there,” building upon each pocket of coherence. As Ilya Prigogine reminds us, “Being and Becoming are not to be opposed one to the other: they express two related aspects of reality.” Lived experience built upon lived experience, we are empowered to discover greater freedom and access to our strength.
Cultivating Presence
To support personal innovation, it is important to cultivate a deep understanding of the feeling of freedom in our bodies and lived experience. “We need a quality of knowing” that allows us to connect more deeply with the worlds we co-shape and co-enact moment to moment. In their research, Scharmer & Pomeroy (2024) describe self-transcending knowledge as tacit knowing that emerges before it becomes visible in day-to-day practice. It is the capacity to sense and presence what is coming into being, to notice opportunities not yet empirically evident but alive in the field of possibility.
At Canon Collaborative, we believe that access to self-transcending knowledge can be nurtured through Strength Grounding — examining and understanding patterns of perceived successes and failures through the lens of our strengths and lived experience. Claiming this one-of-a-kind embodied knowledge empowers us to bring forth creations and innovations that could only manifest through our knowing. “The more the capacity for deep sensing and presencing is developed and cultivated, the more easily skilled change makers, leaders, and other developmental professionals will be able to tune into latent developmental possibilities that are neither empirically evident (yet) nor merely a subjective fiction in the eye of the beholder” (Scharmer & Pomeroy, 2024).
When we fully see and honor our strengths, we expand our capacity to greet the unknown. We are invited to embrace our distinct power to create — meeting the future with confidence, courage, and creativity.
By leaning into the edges of what we know — that threshold between being and becoming — we step into our power to co-create with the life that surrounds us. As Csikszentmihalyi reminds us, the essence of flow is our ability to transform challenge into possibility.
“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
