This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Mindfulness for Organizations: Advanced Strategies for Emerging Leaders, with Rasmus Hougaard, Managing Director, The Potential Project
We’re living in a very fragmented world. Everything is changing by the day and one of the most important things for our employees to be happy at work and thereby do a good work is to feel that we as leaders are actually present.
Beginner’s Mind
One of the key factors of mindfulness is to have a beginner’s mind. A beginner’s mind is the opposite of what is called, from a scientific point of view, cognitive rigidity. Cognitive rigidity is when we see things the way we saw the last time we saw them. Cognitive rigidity is when we impose our image of the reality as it was yesterday on today. A great example of massive cognitive rigidity that led to a huge failure is Nokia. Back in 2011, they had the biggest market share. They had about 70 percent of the world market on cell phones. Then the iPhone came up and the CIO announced publicly that the cell phone, that the iPhone would be nothing but a niche product. Two years later, Nokia had three percent of the world market. Now the way he failed was not having a beginner’s mind. He looked at the success that Nokia had had and believed that that would be the course to success in the future.
A beginner’s mind would have told him that the world had changed. New technology made it possible to be online constantly and that there would be something to look for also for Nokia. So in general terms, a beginner’s mind is really the ability to see reality as it is. Not as it used to be or as we would like it to be but as it is right now. And seeing reality as it is is certainly a foundation for seeing the business reality in a constantly changing world. If we don’t manage that as leaders we will fail by making the wrong decisions and take our organizations in the wrong directions.
Balance
One of the fundamentals qualities of mindfulness is the ability to have a mind that is balanced. Balanced by not being attached to things or rejecting things. Now one of the most basic schemes of the mind is that everything we encounter in life we have a reaction to it. Either we like it and we want more of that, attachment is created. Or we dislike it and we try to get away from it, aversion is created. Those are very, very basic and it happens all the time. We are attached to having good weather. We’re attached to our colleagues praising us. We’re attached to good food in the canteen. And when things get not our way you have rejection to that. So the more we can find a balance where we are neutral to things as they happen, the more we are able to see reality clearly. We are more able to make the right decisions and get our organizations in the right direction.
Acceptance
Acceptance, in short, is the ability not to make bad things worse. I’ll give a real example. We work with a huge retail chain and one of the workshops I came in and the whole marketing department were sitting there and they were just furious. They were so caught up because one of their sister chains had announced a huge marketing campaign on the same day as what they had planned for. Basically undercutting a half year’s work. Now that is a real nuisance but acceptance as we talked about in that specific session again was the ability not to make a bad situation worse. Acceptance is the ability to notice when you can’t do anything about a situation. You’ve tried everything possible, nothing is possible. Then you let go. There’s nothing you can do. And when we allow ourselves or when we manage to accept a tough situation, what happens is that we free up the mind from being bound to what could have been, to what can be in the future. So acceptance is an amazing strategy not just for wellbeing but also for being able to focus on reality as it is and do the right things right now.
Dealing with Change
The only constant in organizations nowadays is change. Human beings are by definition by nature a little bit conservative. We don’t necessarily like when things change. So we have resistance. Now mindfulness is the ability to notice what’s going on in our mind and getting one second ahead of our natural reactions to things.
So really practically when change happens in the organization as it does all the time let’s imagine in your organization restructuring or maybe even layoffs. What happens is the mind has a natural resistance to that experience and just step by step what mindfulness will help you to do is as soon as you notice that you’re not fully on board with any change, whatever it is, you have that pause in the mind to start noticing there’s resistance going on here. And then just step back. And before you go into action, before you start to talk about it, to step back and notice the change, reframe how it could be positive for you. And then go out and act on the change, whatever it is. Instead of going in and actually still having the resistance which will prevent you from being a really strong change agent.