Have you ever driven to a familiar destination and then wondered how you got there? This automatic behavior is a common feature of our everyday lives. People habitually do what they have always done, without stopping to challenge their routine. Can you describe any of the door handles you used today? We go through myriads of doors every day, we in effect stop noticing. Objects like door handles become transparent (Heidegger, 1962). You are biased Common biases: • Overconfidence’ (tendency of

decision-makers to overestimate their abilities to consistently make effective decisions)

• ‘Confirmation’ (tendency to seek out or put more weight on information that supports an initial opinion)

• ‘Anchoring’ (being closely ‘wed’ to an initial thought and reluctant to adjust sufficiently away from it)

• ‘Availability’ (tendency to consider information that is easily retrievable from memory as ‘more likely, more relevant, or more important’ for making the judgement)

• ‘Hindsight’ (seeing events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place)

Judgment traps: • Rush to solve’ (a tendency to strive

toward quick compromise and early consensus, often to avoid conflict);

• ‘Groupthink’ (suppression of divergent views and/or acceptance of dominant team members’ views expressed early on); and

• ‘Solving the wrong problem’ (often by not carefully/precisely defining the problem)

Bounded awareness: • Inattentional blindness* (failing to

notice an unexpected stimulus that is in one's field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks are being performed.

• Change blindness (failing to see changes in one’s environment)

A matter of life and death Research has shown that mindlessness is a major contributor to serious untoward incidents and disasters in organisations of all types.

Mindlessness prevents people from developing situational awareness (Klein, 1989), noticing and attending to new signals (Langer, 1989), Research also shows that some organizations are remarkably adept at avoiding serious incidents, and at managing them quickly and effectively when they do occur. They are known as high reliability organizations (HROs).

Mindfulness and mindful organising: a matter of life and death Prof. David Denyer, Cranfield School of Management

“Managing is firstly and fundamentally the task of becoming aware, attending to, sorting out, and prioritizing an inherently messy, fluxing, chaotic world of competing demands that are placed on a manager’s attention” (Chia, 2005). This requires mindfulness – “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context” (Langer, 2000, p. 220). Who or what is a mindful person? Langer (1989) suggests their qualities will include: •the ability to create new categories; •openness to new information; •awareness of more than one perspective.

A great benefit of being mindful is your ability to exploit the power of uncertainty rather than being afraid of it (Langer, 1989) and ability to make informed decisions by avoiding biases, judgement traps, and bounded awareness

Mindfulness

Under conditions of intense stress or high hazard operations, HROs exhibit elevated levels of collaboration and collegiality. Groups exhibit ‘heedful interrelating’ and ‘collective mindfulness’ (Weick and Roberts, 1993). The five principles of mindful organising (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006): 1.Preoccupation with failure: Spending time identifying what could go wrong

2.Reluctance to simplify interpretations: Discussing alternatives as to how to go about everyday activities

3.Sensitivity to operations: Developing an understanding of who knows what and what is going on at the ‘front line’

4.Commitment to resilience: Talking about mistakes and ways to learn from them

5.Deference to expertise: Taking advantage of the unique skills of one’s colleagues (even if the person is of lower status in the organization).

Mindful organizing

For more information, email david.denyer@cranfield.ac.uk *This has been confirmed in the lab, a particularly striking example being the "Invisible Gorilla” where the task of counting basketball passes causes most people to miss a person dressed in a gorilla costume crossing the screen (Simons and Chabris, 1999)