Integrating Mindfulness in Project and Program Management

This article intends to draw upon the growing number of theories and scientific evidence of the benefits of mindfulness from two perspectives: individual and collective. 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 project and program management 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 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 in the West, several researchers have put forward new definitions:

Individual Mindfulness

Definitions	Source
A state of consciousness in which attention is focused on present-moment phenomena occurring both externally and internally	Dane (2011, p.1000)
A meta-cognitive ability defined as "a state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the present" and involves conscious perception and processing of external stimuli (in contrast to automatic tendencies)	Eisenbeiss & van Knippenberg (2015)
A state of consciousness in which individuals pay attention to the present moment with an accepting and nonjudgemental attitude	Brown et al. 2007, Kabat-Zinn 1994
An active state of mind characterised by a novel distinction-drawing that results in being (a) situated in the present, (b) sensitive to context and perspective, and (c) guided (but not governed) by rules and routines	Langer (2014, p. 11)

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:

Definitions	Source
To stay mindful, despite hazardous environments, frontline employees consider constantly five principles: tracking small failures, resisting oversimplification, remaining sensitive to operations, maintaining capabilities for resilience, and taking advantage of shifting locations of expertise	Ausserhofer et al. (2013, p. 157)
Actively and continuously question assumptions; promote orderly challenge of operating routines and practices so successful lessons of the past do not become routine to the point of safety degradation; “outside view” actively solicited or created through active multidisciplinary review of the routine and debriefing of the unusual to prevent normalization of deviance	Knox et al. (1999, p. 26)
The combination of ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations based on newer experiences, willingness, and capacity to invent new expectations based on newer experiences, willingness and capacity to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context to improve foresight and current functioning	from Weick & Sutcliffe 2001, p. 42)
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	Valorinta (2009, p. 964)

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.

Principle	Description
Preoccupation with failure	A preoccupation with failure focuses the organization to convert small errors and failures into organizational learnings and improvements.
Reluctance to simplify	Simplify mindfully and reluctantly. Have in mind that simplification can become too simple resulting in useless, unprecise simplifications e.g. explanations and categories. Problems faced in complex projects typically offer several options and a nuanced picture to fully understand the best solution.
Sensitivity to operations	An organization must have an integrated overall and aligned picture of operation. Sensitivity to operations is closely related to sensitivity to relationships. Meaning a clear and unprejudiced communication between operation and management is crucial to understand the big picture.
Commitment to resilience	Accommodate unexpected events and react to them quickly as they arise.
Deference to expertise (Collective mindfulness)	Deference to expertise is about involving experts in the decision-making. The experts actively involved in the projects are more capable to give articulate solutions to problems. Rigid hierarchies have their own special vulnerability to error where errors at high levels tend to pick up and combine errors at low levels. HRO’s push decision making down where decision is made on the front line. The authority migrate to the people with the most expertise, regardless of their rank. Collective mindfulness is associated with cultures and structures that promote open discussions of errors, mistakes and awareness.

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.

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.