Integrating Mindfulness in Project and Program Management

Revision as of 21:36, 16 September 2016

This article intends to draw upon the growing number of theories and scientific evidence of the benefits of mindfulness from three perspectives: collective, organisations and individuals. This will be done by building on the latest research on the topic and linking it to an existing approach from Mindfulness in High Reliability Organizations (HRO) by professors Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. The article also suggests potential particular areas for integration with the ISO 31000 standard of risk management in projects.

Context

Historical definition of Mindfulness

The earlier account of the meaning of the world mindfulness comes from the sanskrit word "sati", simply means a state of non forgetfulness, bearing in mind the object of attention. (source: B. Alan Wallace, "The Attention Revolution") In several contemplative traditions mindfulness is viewed as mental factor that acts as a pre-requisite to developed attention skills, developing empathy, altruism and also developing cognitive balance. The latter can be generally understood as the self-awareness and degree of freedom an individual possesses towards his own cognitive biases, projections and impulses.(source: B. Alan Wallace, "The four applications of Mindfulness")

Recent research

Recently, with the explosion of the idea of mindfulness, several researchers have put forward new definitions:

Individual Mindfulness

Benefits of Individual Mindfulness

Different research on mindfulness has proved its varied impacts on health, performance and emotional regulation. Some of the key findings presented include:

• enhanced psychological and physical well-being (e.g. Brown et al. 2007)
• slow aging (Epel et al. 2009)
• improve standardised test performance (Mrazek et al. 2013).

More relevant to our point, organisational research indicates that individual mindfulness is positively related to employee outcomes such as work engagement (Leroy et al. 2013) and job performance (Dane & Brummel 2014), suggesting the mindfulness contributes to an organisation's bottom line.

Collective Mindfulness

Collective mindfulness was originally developed to explain how high-reliability organizations (HROs) avoid catastrophe and perform in a nearly error-free manner under trying conditions. Over time, the focus has expanded to include "organizations that pay close attention to what is going on around them, refusing to function on ‘auto-pilot’”. Collective mindfulness is a means of engaging in the everyday social processes of organizing that sustains attention on detailed comprehension of one’s context and on factors that interfere with such comprehension (Vogus & Sutcliffe 2012; Weick et al. 1999; Weick & Sutcliffe 2001, 2006, 2007).

Some of the most common definitions of Collective Mindfulness highly influenced by Weick et al work are the following:

Benefits of Collective Mindfulness

Investigation on the employee and organisational consequences of collective mindfulness - defined as the collective capability to discern discriminatory detail about emerging issues and to act swiftly in response to these details (Weick et al. 1999, 2000; Vogus & Sutcliffe 2012) - and, in doing so, have found an array of benefits. For employees,

• mindful organising is associated with lower turnover rates (Vogus et al. 2014a).

For organisations, collective mindfulness is positively related to salutary organisational outcomes including:

• more effective resource allocation (Wilson et al. 2011);
• greater innovation (Vogus % Melbourne 2003);
• improved quality, safety and reliability (e.g., Vogus & Sutcliffe 2007a,b).

Interestingly, these effects are most commonly observed in particularly trying contexts charactered by complexity, dynamism, and error intolerance.

Why is it important?

Prospect Theory and Cognitive Biases

Nobel lareaute Daniel Kahneman developed his prospect theory to account for experimental errors he noticed in Daniel Bernoulli's traditional utility theory. According to Kahneman, he argues that "human are not the rational beings they think themselves to be" - and challenges that economic rationality of Utilitarian theory do not reflect people's actual choices, by not taking into account their cognitive biases. There are several key findings that have been widely used in Economics, Finance and business (Andrei Shleifer, 2012) and I believe they can also be extrapolated to PPP management.

Framing=

Framing is the context in which choices are presented. Experiment: subjects were asked whether they would opt for surgery if the "survival" rate is 90 percent, while others were told that the mortality rate is 10 percent. The first framing increased acceptance, even though the situation was no different.

Optimism and loss aversion

Kahneman writes of a "pervasive optimistic bias", which "may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases." This bias generates the illusion of control, that we have substantial control of our lives. A natural experiment reveals the prevalence of one kind of unwarranted optimism. The planning fallacy is the tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, impelling people to take on risky projects. In 2002, American kitchen remodeling was expected on average to cost $18,658, but actually cost $38,769 (Holt, Jim (27 November 2011).

To explain overconfidence, Kahneman introduces the concept he labels What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). This theory states that when the mind makes decisions, it deals primarily with Known Knowns, phenomena it has already observed. It rarely considers Known Unknowns, phenomena that it knows to be relevant but about which it has no information. Finally it appears oblivious to the possibility of Unknown Unknowns, unknown phenomena of unknown relevance.

He explains that humans fail to take into account complexity and that their understanding of the world consists of a small and necessarily un-representative set of observations. Furthermore, the mind generally does not account for the role of chance and therefore falsely assumes that a future event will mirror a past event.

Sunk Cost

Rather than consider the odds that an incremental investment would produce a positive return, people tend to "throw good money after bad" and continue investing in projects with poor prospects that have already consumed significant resources. In part this is to avoid feelings of regret. Roger Lowenstein (October 28, 2011)

Stress and emotional exhaustion

• Research has demosntrated that meditative training programs reduce work-related stress (e.g., Bazarko et al. 2013, Wolever et al. 2012).
• Hulsheger et al. (2013) found through a field experiment with working professionals that mindfulness reduced emotional exhaustion and increased job satisfaction.

Overall Performance

Through recent research, scholars have connected mindfulness to global measures of behavior and performance in the workplace. In a study of nuclear power plant operations, Zhang et al. (2013) found that trait mindfulness was positively related to job performance for operators who held jobs high in task complexity (see also Zhang & Wu 2014, for relationships between trait mindfulness and safety performance in the same industry). Dane & Brummel (2014) found a positive relationship between workplace mindfulness and job performance among those working in a dynamic performance environment (the restaurant service industry) that remained significant when controlling for three dimensions of work engagement.

Further, Reb et al. (2015) found positive relationships between work-related mindfulness and task performance and organizational citizenship behavior, respectively, within their survey of working adults. Also relevant to overall performance, Eisenbeiss & van Knippenberg (2015) found that employees high in trait mindfulness responded more strongly to ethical leadership in terms of the effort and helping behaviors they put forth. This suggests that, in the presence of an ethical leader, individuals high in trait mindfulness are more likely to perceive and embrace the values and behaviors they perceive in ethical leaders and to perform accordingly. Mirroring this finding, through a pair of cross-industry, survey-based studies, Reb et al. (2014) found that the trait mindfulness of supervisors is positively related to the well-being and performance of their employees. This finding suggests that the mindfulness of one person in an organization can influence the well-being and performance of others.

Example of Applications

Lessons from High Resilience Organizations (HRO)

Weick and Sutcliffe^[1] have developed five principles that harness the key characteristics in mindfulness. These guidelines/principles apply upward to divisions and organizations as well as downward to teams, crews and team leaders. The principles can be adopted by anyone. Each principle is given an example from different HRO’s.

The case for Mindfulness in Project and Program Management

Mindfulness managing Projects

Mindfulness managing programs

Conclusion and final remarks

Projects never go according to plan. Too many cases could be drawn to support this statement. That is why it is fundamental for project managers to be able to navigate in changing environments - making the best decisions not only as a way to accomplish the initial plans but also to seize the opportunities that manifest along the way.