Four mindfulness case studies

“Mindful leadership is about using mindful processes in a mindful culture to see, name, and work with uncertainty.”

This is an interesting article from Ellen Langer on the impact that mindfulness can have when employed by the leaders of organisations.

The article identifies three key ways in which mindful leaders approach uncertainty differently, which directly impacts the quality of strategic decisions that they make, leading to a better quality of outcomes for that organisation. These are: recognizing new categories, responding to the emergence of new categories and processing new information.

The article also identifies a number of organisational practices that can be employed to achieve these ends, namely Peter Senge’s inquiry process, the framework of multiple stakeholders, scenario planning, double loop learning, story busting, and effective scorecard design.

What the article doesn’t explicitly explore is whether there is any connection between MBSR (Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction) type programmes, and the level of (strategic) mindfulness that leaders display. It would be interesting to explore whether there is a connection here. It may well be that one or both of the authors has explored this connection already, so I will be digging a little bit deeper to see if this is the case. If anyone out there already knows of such studies or articles, it would be great to hear from you.