The word "mindfulness" is thrown around a lot these days. I have both personally used and have come across this term in my own research in a couple of different contexts, most recently referring to the epidemic of burnout in health care workers, with "mindfulness" being one recommended strategy to mitigate burnout. Here in this context, the word generally refers to a number of different techniques, including meditation, relaxation, deep breathing, and stress reduction, all with the goal of reducing stress, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion.
"Mindfulness" has also been used in the context of organizational safety. Mindfulness, in this context, is an important attribute of what the organizational psychologist Karl Weick and many others call high reliabilty organizations (HROs). I generally prefer the term "situation awareness", a concept from the human factors literature first popularized by the industrial engineer Mica Endsley. "Mindfulness" and "situation awareness" essentially describe the same concept.
Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "mindfulness" as "the quality or state of being mindful" or "the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis." On a side note, don't you just love how dictionary's define words using other words that you have to look up too! "Mindful" here means "awareness." Today, I want to focus on the former Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, which seems to refer to the Karl Weick / Mica Endsley version, as opposed to the latter definition, which seems to refer to the burnout version.
Keith Grint (see also his work on "wicked problems" and my post, "What style of leadership works best?" for more about Grint's work on leadership and management) and his colleagues, Amy Fraher and Layla Jane Branicki recently examined the role of mindfulness in high reliability organizations in a study involving United States Navy SEALs, an elite commando unit whose main function is conducting small-unit special operation missions in a variety of different environments. The selection and training of U.S. Navy SEALs continues to be a subject of interest for investigators in psychology, leadership, and organizational behavior (see, for example, studies on resilience, mindsets, and combat stress and the so-called "fog of war"). Given the level of high performance exhibited by Navy SEALs in their day-to-day operations, it's easy to understand why there is so much interest in learning from this prototypical high reliability organization.
Pertinent to the topic of discussion, most high reliability organizations (aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and air traffic control towers) are usually highly regulated through the use of rules and regulations, standardized processes, and checklists. However, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe have shown that the reliable performance of these organizations is more often due to "mindfulness", which they define as the capacity to detect and correct errors (awareness) and the ability to adapt to unexpected events before small events turn into catastrophic failures (resilience). They describe five hallmarks of "mindfulness" in their classic book, Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty:
Grint and his colleagues extend Weick and Sutcliffe's findings further, adding a sixth hallmark of high reliability organizations - Comfort with uncertainty and chaos. As Weick and Sutcliffe explain, "ugly surprises are most likely to show up." I am sure you've heard of Murphy's Law - "If anything can go wrong, it will." The world is filled with uncertainty, and high reliability organizations not only understand this, but they also are comfortable with it.
They conducted their study in three phases. During the first phase, the research team conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve active or retired Navy SEALs, focusing specifically on how these SEAL teams work in such a high-risk field and make sense of unusual and escalating crisis situations. Two broad themes emerged from this initial phase - "comfort with uncertainty and chaos" and "a positive orientation toward failure."
Were these common characteristics of all Navy SEALs? If so, were these characteristics identified in individuals who were selected as SEAL candidates, or did SEALs develop these characteristics during the rigorous training program? In order to answer these questions, the team collected over 600 pages of research documents from governmental studies involved SEAL recruitment, selection, and training processes during the second phase of the study. Notably, while several SEAL candidate screening tests had been developed over time, none of them identified or screened for attitudes towards uncertainty, chaos, failure, or even the other HRO characteristics listed above.
During the third and final phase of the study, the research team reviewed and analyzed over 6 hours of video footage from a number of documentaries and government-sponsored recruiting videos that were in the public domain (see the Discovery television mini-series, Navy SEALs: BUDS Class 234, as one example (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, or BUD/S is a 24-week selection and training course for all Navy SEALs, with a completion rate of less than 25%). Three broad areas emerged for further categorization and analysis - physical failure, mental failure, and team failure.
Importantly, the researchers found that Navy SEALs were indeed preoccupied with failure, one of the defining characteristics of a high reliability organization. However, what they didn't expect to find was that the SEALs were more focused on adjusting to failure. They had accepted that failure is not only likely, but it is also highly probable. All the SEALs acknowledged that it was most important not to quit after failing, but to use that failure as a learning opportunity and moving on. The researchers stated that "learning from failure implies a willingness to take risks and embrace unconventional thinking." Key to this "learning from failure" was the acceptance and comfort with uncertainty and chaos, which "allows them [the Navy SEALs] to innovate, experiment, and even fail as long as they prepared as much as possible, gave their best effort, and learned from the experience."
Building upon the HRO research performed to date, the research team developed a concept they called "mindfulness in action" to explain their observations, which consists of attributes of both individual mindfulness (comfort with uncertainty and chaos) and collective (group) mindfulness (freedom to fail - a positive orientation towards failure). In so doing, they added "comfort with uncertainty and chaos" as the sixth characteristic of high reliability organizations.
Before I end this post, I would like to return to the definitions of mindfulness that I mentioned in the first few paragraphs. As I think about both the "burnout version" of the definition (think meditation and deep breathing) and the "HRO version" of the definition (think "situation awareness"), it seems that they are maybe not as different as I originally stated. Let me explain. You can't begin to (1) pay attention to discriminatory detail, (2) engage in the present, (3) be flexible to opportunities, and (4) be open to emerging realities (to use the oft cited definition of mindfulness by Ellen Langer, known as the "Mother of Mindfulness", i.e. the "HRO version") unless you have first opened your mind and placed yourself in a different state (as in the "burnout version" of mindfulness)! As it turns out, Karl Weick thought so too (see "Organizing for Mindfulness: Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge").
I believe there is a lot we can learn from high reliability organizations. But then, if you've been reading my post over the years, you already know how I feel! Grint and his team ended their research paper with a very powerful statement, and so I will end with it as well. "If we can manage to maintain high levels of safety, reliabilitym and success in HRO environments such as nuclear safety, aviation, and in this case, Navy SEALs, it is likely that equivalent levels of high performance are achievable within a wide range of reliability-seeking organizations in less risky contexts." In other words, there's hope for us!
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