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 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

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

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.

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.