Here is an excerpt from an interview of Ellen Langer, a pioneer in mindfulness research, who says that companies can promote innovation and their own rejuvenation by setting the right context. The interview was conducted by Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine, published by PwC Strategy&, formerly Booz &Company. To read the complete interview, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Suppose you’re confined to a nursing home. You’re elderly, you’ve lost much of your mobility, and your faculties are deteriorating. Along comes a Harvard University social psychology professor named Ellen Langer who takes you away on a retreat, where everything is transformed into the way it looked and felt when you were 25. Radios with vacuum tubes play rockabilly and Perry Como, a hardcover copy of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger sits on a Danish modern coffee table (the movie won’t be released for several years yet), the clothing is au courant for 1959, and the conversation covers recent events like Fidel Castro’s invasion of Havana. The staff treat you like you’re in the prime of physical health, making you carry your own suitcases upstairs even if you haven’t recently lifted anything nearly that heavy. You know, at some level, that this is all a fictional recreation. But as it comes alive around you, you find yourself paying attention to your environment in ways you haven’t done in years.

You wouldn’t expect five days in a retreat like this to have much effect. But in the “counterclockwise” study, which Langer conducted in 1981 and named after the way it seemed to reverse the effects of time, the results were remarkable. At the end of the retreat, members of the group showed demonstrable improvement, on average, in objective tests of memory, height, weight gain, posture, vision, and hearing. They even looked noticeably younger.

Harvard University social psychology professor Ellen Langer says organizations can make better decisions by setting the right context.

To Langer, most people are much more capable than they think they are. The way they think holds back their capabilities. But when a context forces people out of their ingrained, self-imposed limits (“I am old”), it makes them mindful. They have to approach the world freshly, with a beginner’s mind, in a way that has an enormous positive effect. Langer, who is 67 and the first woman to gain tenure in Harvard’s psychology department, has conducted dozens of studies of changed context—involving such diverse situations as aging, recovery from disease, individual creativity, organizational innovation, the management of disabilities, and addiction. And they all share a theme: Cultivated mindfulness can change your life.

As many business leaders know, mindfulness is gathering momentum as a management practice. Conferences such as Wisdom 2.0, and companies such as Google, are making a clear case that more deliberate awareness leads to stronger performance and better decision making. Often, this improvement is linked to meditation practice. But other forms of mindfulness are also prominent in the business world today, including the simple concept of “being here now”—holding an open frame of mind, avoiding the complacent arrogance that comes from the “illusion of certainty,” as Langer calls it. In his October 2014 profile of Langer for the New York Times Magazine, writer Bruce Grierson described her form of mindfulness as “noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms.”

This approach runs counter, of course, to the highly focused, take-no-prisoners approach to leadership prevalent in many companies today. The executive’s attention is supposed to be streamlined and free of distractions so that he or she can pay attention only to what is important. But in practice, that means tackling most problems as rapidly and mindlessly as possible, just to get them out of the way. Langer argues that distractions, when approached with the right frame of mind, are sources of opportunity.

Langer recently spoke with strategy+business in her office in Cambridge, Mass., about the theory and practice of mindfulness in business. The occasion was the new 25th-anniversary edition of her first book on the subject: Mindfulness (Da Capo Press, 2014). In both her classroom and her consultations, Langer is known for her cheerfully blunt insistence on two basic premises: First, inattention is the source of most (or all) problems faced by the world’s leaders today. Second, an organization that provides a context that enables people to be mindful on the job will reap the benefits of innovation and effectiveness.

The counterclockwise study is a remarkable story. But that anachronistic world lasted for only a week. Then they all returned to the real world. What is this story really telling us?

The purpose of that experiment was not to set up an artificial environment and show how it influenced behavior. The major point is the power of possibility. The people in the experiment cured themselves; we just provided a placebo, a catalyst for change. In other words, all the limits that people assume to be real—limits on vitality, creativity, innovation, and even health—are often of our own making. Through mindful interventions, they can be reversed.

One of the basic principles of social psychology is that behavior is context-dependent. This runs counter to the personality theory that people associate with psychology, which says that everything you do is a function of who you are inside, and if you change your personality, you can change your life. In social psychology, you’re not the master of your fate. The context is the master.

So if you want to gain real control over your life, the first step is to ask who controls the context. Then find ways to generate the kind of context that will help you do the things you want to do. By being aware of the context, and making more mindful choices about it, you can become the master of your fate even in a context-dependent world.

In the counterclockwise study, we improved memory and strength. That was good. But the most exciting aspect was that we improved people’s vision and hearing. If you ask most people, “Can eyesight improve?” they say no. When you show them it can, their minds open up to other possibilities.

We’ve done other studies of eyesight improvement. In one study we reversed the Snellen eye chart. This is the familiar eye chart in every optometrist’s office, where the letters get smaller as you look down. But we made the letters get progressively larger. This sent the message that “you will find it easier to see as you go along.” People could see what they couldn’t see before. By changing people’s expectations of what they would see, we improved their vision.

Does it help to draw the patient’s attention to the fact that you reversed the type sizes?

Yes, it does. The essence of being mindful is noticing change. The Snellen eye chart is supposed to provide an absolute measurement of your vision—a number like 20/40. But you’re in an artificial, high-stress environment, looking at a card with tiny type. It’s bizarre to think that number would be the same the next morning, when you’re driving around hungry looking for a restaurant. If you’re aware of these differences, your vision can improve.

We see the same thing in recovery from illness. When people are told they have a chronic illness, they assume the diagnosis is absolute. They stop paying attention to their own symptoms. If they were conditioned to pay attention, they’d notice that the symptoms vary. Sometimes they’re greater, sometimes they’re less, sometimes they don’t even exist. Then they could start to ask, “Why are these differences occurring?” Even if you don’t find the answer, the research we’ve done on mindfulness over the years shows that just paying attention to variability is good for your health.

My life’s work is to make the link between the way you pay attention and your vitality more obvious. You don’t need a pill to improve; you can improve by changing the way you view your circumstances. For instance, we have studied the relationship between people’s stereotypes of themselves and their performance. In one experiment, we tested a group of Asian women in math. The research consistently shows that if they are primed for their gender—given cues that remind them that they’re women—they don’t do as well as when the experiment draws their attention to the fact that they’re Asian. The test itself is the same. There are similar findings for every race, even for stereotypes that they consciously and rightfully reject. Black men score much higher on the same test when they are told it’s a test of athletic ability than when they’re told it’s a test of intellect. All of us are mindlessly prone to believe stereotypes of ourselves unless we question them.

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Here is a direct link to the complete interview.

To learn more about Ellen Langer and her brilliant work, please click here.