SAN DIEGO—Similar to runner's high, being in the zone or being in the pocket, flow is a state of rapt attention and total absorption that can raise productivity 500%, author Steven Kotler told attendees at PCBC here Thursday. The keynote speaker, a former journalist who has spent four years investigating the leading edges of harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges that can help individuals and organizations outperform the competition, has also written the New York Times best-selling book Stealing Fire, a provocative examination of what's actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to upgrade their life radically. He is the co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project.

Kotler spoke of technology as advancing along an exponential growth curve, saying that seven years from now, laptops will have the same computing capacity as the human brain. Biotech is doubling in power every four months, and today, 50% of the human body is replaceable by bionics. 3D printing is also advancing quickly, and through it, we have the ability to build a five-story apartment building in an afternoon. Artificial intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds, and we will eventually have a diagnostic supercomputer in the cloud. “AI can now identify construction problems months before they occur.”

Kotler predicted that smart construction will be an annual market of $400 billion by 2020; smart technology is already poking into construction, since what used to take weeks and months is now taking only days to accomplish. Also by 2020, 40% of today's service jobs will be replaced by robotics, and synthetic biologics is growing.

“Creativity has topped the list of 21^st-Century skills,” said Kotler, adding that leveraging assets—as Airbnb, Uber and Lyft have, since they don't own any of the assets they use—is the bigger story of crowdfunding. He spoke of Loco Motors, a crowdsourced car-design company that uses 3D printers to build cars. There's now a lot more competition among tech companies, but we must also upgrade our mental hardware, Kotler said.

He then introduced the concept of flow, which he calls the source code of ultimate human performance. Flow, the most addictive state on earth, is definable, measurable, universal and on a spectrum. It's also “flowy” in nature, producing near-perfect high-speed decision making. Executives are 500 times as productive when in flow, according to global management consulting group McKinsey, he said. When in flow, anxiety and self-consciousness decrease, productivity increases and one's self-critic is silenced, while risk taking increases.

Flow is important to companies because it allows learning faster than the competition and is the key to longevity. For more information on flow and how you and your company can access it, visit www.flowgenomeproject.com.