The Power of a Mindful Approach to Life and Leadership and Everything Else
It’s hard to overestimate the power of mindfulness – for life, leadership, and any other endeavor worth the pursuit.
Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe are early pioneers in the role of mindfulness in organizational leadership and effectiveness. Among their many works is a journal article that contains a most powerful quote about mindfulness. Here it is:
Mindfulness, therefore, is as much about the reversal of normalizing as it is about encoding and matching situations with routines. Mindfulness is important because it weakens the tendency to simplify events into familiar events and strengthens the tendency to differentiate events into unfamiliar events. Therefore, less-mindful practice normalizes, more-mindful practice anomalizes. By anomalize we mean that mindfulness captures unique particulars, i.e., differences, nuances, discrepancies, and outliers that slow the speed with which details are normalized.
Weick and Sutcliffe (2004). Mindfulness and the Quality of Organizational Attention. (p. 518). SEE FULL ARTICLE ATTACHED BELOW.
Mindfulness_and_the_Quality_of_Organizational_Attention Click to Download Full Article
The Combination that Makes the Difference
In the quote above, Weick and Sutcliffe highlight that the combination of best practice routines and present moment awareness in those routines leads to effectiveness in everything we do. Routines are only as good as we are present to them in mindful ways. When we lose attention or presence in the routines, we open the door for complacency and mistakes of all kinds
Behavioral Foresight – Developing Mindfulness in Routines and Important Moments
There are ways to develop mindfulness – both as an individual and as teams. The Ingenuity Lab has developed a process we call, Behavioral Foresight. Click the link below to learn more about the process and download a tool that will help you develop greater foresight and mindfulness.
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