Mindfulness Can Improve Strategy, Too 10/12/16, 1:29 PM

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STRATEGIC THINKING

Mindfulness Can Improve

Strategy, Too
by Justin Talbot-Zorn and Frieda Edgette
MAY 02, 2016
Over the course of a couple of decades, meditation has migrated from Himalayan
hilltops
and Japanese Zendos to corporate boardrooms and corridors of power,
including Google, Apple, Aetna, the Pentagon, and the U.S. House of Representatives.
On a personal level, leaders are taking note of empirical research documenting
meditation’s
potential for reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and improving emotional
regulation.
Mindfulness meditation — the practice of cultivating deliberate focused attention on
the
present moment – has caught on as a way to bring focus, authenticity, and intention to
the
practice of leadership. Harvard Business Review contributors Daniel Goleman and Bill
George have described mindfulness as a means to listen more deeply and guide actions
through clear intention rather than emotional whims or reactive patterns.
In an age in which corporations and public organizations are increasingly under attack
for short-term thinking, a dearth of vision, and perfunctory reactions to quick
stimuli, it’s worth posing the question: Can mindfulness help organizations — not just
Mindfulness Can Improve Strategy, Too 10/12/16, 1:29 PM
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FERIDUN AKGÜNGÖR
individual leaders — behave more
intentionally? Practically speaking, can
organizational leaders
integrate mindfulness practices
into strategic planning processes?
Seventy years ago, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian
psychiatrist who had just emerged from years
as a prisoner at Auschwitz, shed some light on
the question with a now-classic teaching.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a
space,” he wrote in 1946. “In that space is our
power to choose our response. In our
response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Mindfulness — the practice of watching one’s
breath and noticing thoughts and sensations
— is, at its core, a practice of cultivating this
kind of space. It’s about becoming aware of
how the diverse internal and external stimuli
we face can provoke automatic, immediate,
unthinking responses in our thoughts, emotions, and actions. As the University of
Virginia’s
Timothy Wilson has argued, our brains are not equipped to handle the 11-plus million
bits
of information arriving at any given moment. For the sake of efficiency, we tend to make
new decisions based upon old frames, memories, or associations. Through mindfulness
practice, a person is able to notice how the mind reacts to thoughts, sensations, and
information, seeing past the old storylines and habitual patterns that unconsciously
guide
behavior. This creates space to deliberately choose how to speak and act.
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Organizations, like individuals, need this kind of space.

As UCLA’s Richard Rumelt, a leading expert on strategic planning, writes in his book
Good
Strategy, Bad Strategy, one of the quintessential components of good strategy is the
ability
to take a step out of the internal storyline and shift viewpoints. “An insightful reframing
of a
competitive situation” he writes, “can create whole new patterns of advantage and
weakness. The most powerful strategies arise from such game-changing insights.”
To craft strategy on the basis of what Harvard’s Richard Chait and other scholars have
called generative thinking, it’s not only necessary to identify a coherent set of policies or
actions in response to a problem or opportunity, it’s also necessary to elucidate the full
range of values, assumptions, and external factors at play in a decision-making situation.
It’s essential to step back and ask not only whether the team has identified the right
plans or
solutions but whether they have identified the right questions and problems in the first
place. All this requires space between stimulus and response.
So how can organizations bring more space to strategic planning? Is the answer to
simply
recruit leaders and board members who engage in contemplative practices?
It can’t hurt. Steve Jobs, a regular meditator, made use of mindfulness practice to
challenge
operating assumptions at Apple and to enhance creative insight in planning. Ray Dalio of
Bridgewater Capital has likewise used mindfulness not only as a tool for increasing
productivity but also enhancing situational awareness as a strategist.
But it’s also possible to build mindfulness directly into planning exercises.
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One of us recently had the opportunity to test the concept of mindful strategy with a
group
of middle managers and senior executives from the legal, advertising, finance, and
nonprofit
sectors in the Bay Area. The experience gave us a clearer practical understanding of
what works when it comes to integrating mindfulness practice into strategy retreats.
1. Take mindful moments: One simple approach is to integrate straightforward
mindfulness
activities into meetings and retreats. By punctuating planning exercises with deliberate
time for those present to simply connect with their breath and recognize unnecessary
distractions, organizers can create the conditions for intuition to arise. As Rasmus
Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter wrote in HBR in March, it’s possible to integrate simple
practices of focus and awareness throughout a workday. Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, has
developed dozens of such workplace meditation modules that could fit neatly into
planning retreats.
2. Explore alternative scenarios: It’s also possible to inject an element of mindfulness
without meditating at all. Scenario planning exercises, for example, open
decisionmakers
to numerous, plausible alternative “stories of the future” that inherently
challenge assumptions and mindsets. Corporations including Shell and governments
including Singapore have used such practices — first and foremost for their heuristic
value — with considerable success for decades. Much like meditation, the practice
of nonjudgmentally assessing different plausible futures is a practical way of shining
light
on old unexamined thought patterns and making room for new ideas.
3. Visualize positive outcomes: As Daniel Goleman argues, positivity is part and parcel of
focused attention. “Pessimism narrows our focus,” he writes, “whereas positive
emotions
widen our attention and our receptiveness to the new and unexpected.” Organizational
leaders can benefit from imagining organizational “end-states” during strategy sessions.
This can be as simple as posing a variant of the question Goleman suggests— “if
everything works out perfectly for our organization, what would we be doing in ten
years?”—and taking time to contemplate.
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Mindfulness practices like these can help leaders — and their organizations — identify
which
ideas and aspirations are important and which assumptions limit their growth. They’re
useful not only for attaining enlightenment but also for making sense of a changing
world.
Justin Talbot-Zorn is a Truman National Security Fellow and public policy
consultant. He has been a
regular meditation teacher on Capitol Hill, where he also served as Legislative Director
for three Members of
Congress.
Frieda Edgette is founder and principal at Novos, a civic-minded organizational
strategy consultancy that
serves public, private, and nonprofit clients. She is also founder of Courage to Run, an
initiative dedicated to
developing women leaders committed to public service.
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