Integrating Mindfulness in Project and Program Management

Revision as of 09:14, 24 September 2016

Mindfulness is a state of consciousness in which attention is focused on present-moment phenomena occurring both externally and internally (Dane 2011 p.1000). This present-moment phenomena can also include creative imagination about the future, problem solving in the present or analysis of the past - as well as a discerning capacity of observing the present situation and context without falling into habitual tendencies or routines. This targets a number of challenges for Project and Program managers, in where due to time pressure, uncertainty and personal cognitive biases, sub-optimal decisions are often made impacting the projects deadlines extensively.

This article intends to build upon the growing number of theories and evidences of the benefits of mindfulness, from two perspectives: individual and collective. It will draw from the latest research on the topic and link it to the existing framework for Mindfulness in High Reliability Organizations (HRO), developed by professors Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Finally, the article will finish by suggesting potential tools and areas of integration for Project and Program Managers practice.

Context

Historical definition of Mindfulness

The earlier account of the meaning of the world mindfulness comes from the Pali-term sati, which simply means a state of non forgetfulness, bearing in mind an object of attention. (source: B. Alan Wallace, "The Attention Revolution") In several contemplative traditions mindfulness this mental factor is viewed as a pre-requisite to: 1) Develop attention/concentration skills 2) Develop empathy and altruism; and 3) Developing cognitive balance. The latter can be generally understood as the self-awareness of our own internal mental processes, cognitive biases and tendencies, and the degree of freedom to which an individual can refrain from acting on them. (source: B. Alan Wallace, "The four applications of Mindfulness")

Recent research

Recently, with the explosion of the idea of mindfulness in the West, 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.

Lessons from High Resilience Organizations (HRO)

Weick and Sutcliffe 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.

Whenever people change the way they perceive the world they essentially rework the way they label and categorize what they see. This change in perception can be described with the following process:

1. Re-examine discarded information
2. Monitor how categories affect expectations and,
3. Remove out-dated distinctions

Firstly, to rework one’s categories mindfully implies to evaluate how much information is discarded with a categorization of an instance with similar characteristics. Generally categorization help gaining control in a fast pace world. Categories can predict what will happen and plan one’s own actions. Without categories, any person or situation would be unique and therefore conserve scarce mental resources of attention and thinking. One category cannot describe all facets of a person and the professor must be aware of the discarded information within each category.

Secondly, mindful reworking of categories also mean that one pay close attention to their effect on the expectations. Categories and expectations are closely related. E.g., a person categorized as an expert is expected to know the answers within his/her field of expertise. These expectations constantly have to be revised and evaluated. It may be necessary to differentiate the expectations, replace them, supplement them, or discard the whole category.

Third, mindful reworking means a check whether the categories remain plausible. Outdated categorization with implausible distinctions of expectations ensure trouble. This is the basic misreading in HRO’s. The trouble starts when you fail to notice that you only look for whatever confirms your categories and expectations. “Believing is seeing. You see what you expect to see. You see what you have the labels to see. You see what you have the skills to manage.” (Weick, K. E. and Sutcliffe, K. M. 2001.) People who have a critical approach towards their categories by refining them, updating or replacing them notice more and catch unexpected events earlier in their development.

The case for Mindfulness in Project and Program Management

Mindfulness managing Projects

Taking the example a recent interview with the Bispebjerg hospital Executive VP, he states: when managing a project with such a long life cycle (10y) there must be a continuous capacity to adapt because of the of the oportunities that manifest along the way. "What was a the best technology in the beginning of the project might be mediocre by the end of it" - this leads to the idea that if we firmly grasp onto our old existing ways of viewing as the right one, refusing to absorb new information and reconstruct our way of thinking, we become blind to new opportunities of our context.

While we cannot completely dissolve our cognitive limitations, we can discipline our minds by becoming aware of our “irrationalities” and inspiring ourselves to act in a mindful manner. Our behaviour will become more like we thought it was anyway—rational and fact-based. (2015 J. Oehmen, C. Thuesen, P. Parraguez, and J. Geraldi) These are key qualities for a successful project manager

to be continued...

Mindfulness managing programs

As Valorinta states, Collective mindfulness refers to processes that keep organizations sensitive to their environment, open and curious to new information, and able to effectively contain and manage unexpected events in a prompt and flexible fashion. This sounds incredibly similar to the job description for a Program Manager! Taking London Olympics 2012 as an example, part of the success of the program management was due to a heightened awareness of the potential synergies to be drawn amongst the several individual projects - and how could these mutually reinforce one another in reaching the ODA's priority goals.

to be continued...

Conclusion and final remarks

Projects never go according to plan. Far 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.

Besides all the objective metrics and targets used to project and program improved delivery; the human aspect, ranging from work satisfaction, social relations and individual well-being is also a key factor that should be accounted for when we consider the benefits of integrating mindfulness in PPPM. Therefore, even though there are clear positive outcomes in terms of organizational performance and output delivery, a key point is that the benefits of having such environment and approach will overflow and the benefit for each individual will never be captured in its entirety.

to be continued...

It is your call to decide which stance would you like you and organisation to hold on this topic. Would you rather wait for all the data come in before embracing a Mindful culture in your oganisation; or given what is already out there are you willing to try it out and see how well your Project and Program Management can improve. How are you going to manage this risk?