Here’s a brief excerpt from an article written by Art Kleiner for strategy+business magazine, published by Booz & Company. In it, he shares his thoughts about the relevance of mindfulness to workplace performance. To read the complete article, check out other resources. learn more about the firm, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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The idea of using mindfulness as a guide to better business practices has taken on such currency as a management fad lately that it already has a detractor: The New Republic’s Silicon Valley curmudgeon, Evgeny Morozov. Known for his skepticism about Internet-fueled democracy, Morozov has penned a new article called “The Mindfulness Racket,” in which he claims that workplace meditation—the leading edge of the fad—is a weak substitute for the substantial change that businesses really need.
He doesn’t try to argue that mindfulness is ineffective in itself (though he does diminish it as mere “unplugging”). He can’t claim ineffectiveness because the evidence is clear that it helps business people become more aware of their own thinking, especially in the high-pressure atmosphere of a mainstream corporate workplace. For example, a group of INSEAD professors recently found that meditation before a major decision leads to better outcomes. That’s why leadership experts like Tony Schwartz and Daniel Goleman continue to write about mindfulness as a powerful and constructive technique.
I began to associate mindfulness with workplace effectiveness in the early 2000s when I began attending the Authentic Leadership in Action (ALIA) Institute Summer Leadership Intensive sessions, which take place each June. (I co-teach a class on Catalyzing Organizational Change with David Sable, a researcher of contemplative practice.) ALIA’s sessions, inspired by Tibetan Buddhism and a great deal of real-world business and social change experience, are based in part on the idea that mindfulness is a collective game.
Organizations can be designed, in fact, to foster contemplative awareness in every aspect of their processes and practices. For example, imagine a mindful approach to email. Mindfulness, as David Rock and neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz eloquently pointed out in strategy+business, is a technique for managing attention density: using the focus of your concentration to influence your habitual neural patterns to shift in constructive ways. Anything that consistently helps you distinguish constructive from destructive thoughts has a beneficial effect, which often ripples out to a larger group.
But email does the opposite. An email client program treats every incoming message the same. Even the smartest filtering system cannot rank the incoming messages by their constructive value. If you’re like me, working your way down the queue is an ongoing battle between the drive to pay attention to each message—and what it will demand from you—and the drive to process it quickly with as little attention as possible. Half the task is deciding what value each message has. The steady drip, drip, drip of email becomes almost like background noise—an inescapable burden of daily life—and retaining mindfulness while making decisions in that context can be challenging.
All the petty organizational structures—the use of email for making decisions, the bureaucratic systems that inhibit experimentation, the dozens of legacy IT systems that don’t quite work together, and so on—are the true enemy of mindfulness in the workplace. Trying to manage these systems is to recognize the truth of the ` Mindfulness can help ameliorate this state of affairs, but only if it’s managed at the group or collective level.
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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.
Art Kleiner is Editor-in-Chief of strategy+business magazine and author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (Sec ond Edition), published by Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2008).