The elephant in the (mindful) room

Is mindfulness just a panacea that actually works against system change, keeping organisations stuck in the status quo structures, interpersonal dynamics and ways of working? 

In our mindful leadership programs, we address the elephants in the room upfront, surfacing usually hidden tensions that might make it difficult for participants to fully engage.

Exploring this, mindfulness can seen as a neo-liberal strategy peddled by organisations to avoid structural responsibilities, placating staff and forcing them to take individual responsibility for what should be organisational issues. This really hits at the question of where responsibility for change lies in a system, and our agency and responsibilities at both an individual and organisational level.

Rather than using workplace resilience programs to prop up a broken system, why don’t organisations examine how their policies, procedures, internal culture, and wider societal systems are creating the conditions that lead to low levels engagement, stress and burnout in the workplace? The argument is that organisations should focus on the contextual factors, not push responsibility on to the individual.

It is of course a false binary to see individual and organisational responsibility as separate polarities. The individual is part of the organisation, and the organisation includes the individual. Neither can be considered without the other. Wellbeing of the organisation, and the individuals within it, are inextricably linked.

As Rudyard Kipling famously wrote,

the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

To put this relationship another way,

the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet,

as Adrienne Maree Brown writes in Emergent Strategy.

The answer doesn’t lie in one or the other, but both - and the relationships between.

Leadership and change are as much in the space between us, how we relate to each other and the world, as they are in the parts or the whole. 

You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and,”

the great systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote.

Reflecting this relationality, Nora Bateson writes about ‘liminal leadership,’ as focused on the mutually alert care and attention to the wellbeing of all people and the ecological systems. A kind of leadership that is found between people, organisations and institutions; rather than in them.

This layering and mirroring - from the individual to the whole and the relationships between - is reflected in the mindful leadership programs James Donald and I run.  We focus on leadership at all levels, and in the relationships between. We build not just individual tools, capacities and resilience, but consider what a mindful culture and inter-relationships look like, and how this is shaped. What makes a mindful organisation? What are our values? What is our relationship to purpose? How do we bring more authenticity and alignment with our values and purpose into our work, our organisational culture, and the world? We work with senior leaders to build capacities and support these deeper shifts.

Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally; to borrow the definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn, often considered the godfather of modern mindfulness movement.

This capacity to be present, and pay attention in different ways, is at the heart of leading system change methodology. As Otto Scharmer, cofounder of the Presencing Institute at MIT, writes:

the future that is being born requires us to tap into our deeper levels of humanity, who we really are and who we want to be in society. It is a future we can sense, feel and actualise by shifting the inner place from which we operate.

The mechanistic and Newtonian worldviews of the past are not able to respond to the complexity of the challenges we are facing. In complexity, there is no linear or ‘right’ answer; rather interdependence and relationality. We need to bring these deeper levels of humanity - the full complexity of our human experience - to meet the complexity of the challenges we face.

It requires us to recognise the place from which we are observing and operating, and to hold possibility for multiple ways of seeing, knowing and sense making. It is this capacity to hold multiple perspectives and creative tension - at an individual, organisational and systemic level - that allows for unprecedented possibilities to emerge.

Too often, the space for creative tension and multiple perspectives collapses prematurely, as we default to our well-worn biases, lenses, patterns, filters and judgements. Social media echo-chambers and the increasing polarities we see in the world make this capacity even more crucial now.

The stepping back, mindfully retreating from our usual habitual responses and ways of seeing the world, allows for new opportunities to emerge.

Otto Scharmer describes this shift from ‘ego-system awareness’ to ‘eco-system awareness,’ as we move our focus from a fixed mindset - learning by reflecting on the past; to sensing the whole, the parts, and the interconnected relationships - and learning from the future as it emerges.  

We are both individuals with our own thinking, values, beliefs and relationships; and part of – influencing and influenced by - a wider whole. To see mindfulness only through the lens of individual wellbeing misses the opportunity to harness presence and awareness as powerful tools to support shifts at all levels – with individuals, organisations and systems.

How do you see this in your life and work? I would love to continue this conversation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch; or you can check out our mindful leadership offerings here http://www.themindfulleader.com.au/our-programs and find out more about my work here https://www.clairemckendrick.com