What is mindfulness and how is relevant for workplaces?

By Dr Jutta Tobias, Lecturer, Innovation and Process Management

At least 33 definitions of mindfulness have been published in the scientific literature.[1]

At Cranfield, we teach and research mindfulness. For example, we teach mindfulness to about 300 senior government officials each year as part of Cranfield’s flagship Project Leadership Programme (PLP) commissioned by the Cabinet Office, and to hundreds of students on graduate programmes. And we often explain mindfulness by describing its opposite: mindlessness. Managers everywhere understand instantly that being mindless is bad for business, and it is bad for all stakeholders involved in making an organisation work.

So if mindlessness is about operating on autopilot, without awareness of what is going on right here and right now, then mindfulness is about paying attention to the here and now with an attitude of curiosity and open-mindedness, with an intention to learn and become aware of new and different perspectives or interpretations of reality. In short, mindfulness is a state of conscious awareness of present-moment experience.

Decision-makers across business, education, public policy, professional sports, as well as leaders in physical and mental health settings are increasingly interested in mindfulness and how it might bring benefits to their particular situation. Why? Because a substantial body of research is linking mindfulness with better physical and mental health, and with improved relationships, at home and at work.[2] And because mindfulness is not a trait that some have (and others don’t). Instead, it is a practice that individuals and teams can do in the work place on a day-to-day basis. This is important and particularly helpful if you are interested in improving wellbeing, relationships, and performance in your workplace – all these factors are reportedly consequences of mindfulness practice.[3]  Essentially, mindfulness can be made available to anyone open to learning and practicing mindfulness.

However, mindfulness practice should not be confused meditation practice. At Cranfield, we are very careful to separate mindfulness from meditation, for at least two reasons: First, because leading mindfulness scholars have long argued that becoming mindful does not necessitate meditative practice.[4] We often teach mindfulness using the expansive scientific evidence base accumulated by Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer who has researched and taught mindfulness for over 25 years using non-meditative methods.[5] Second, increasingly researchers find that comparing meditation-focused mindfulness practice to other activities that lower stress result in similar outcomes.[6] Leading management thinkers are even starting to call for an end to “the meditation madness”[7] – while we might not go that far, we certainly impress on our Cranfield students that mindfulness should not be equated to meditation.

We also teach and research mindfulness for teams and for organisations as a whole. This is because when mindfulness becomes a shared social practice in an organisation, and when mindfulness permeates the organisation’s routines, processes and practices between people and across teams, then the whole business becomes more resilient and performs more sustainably.[1]

Finally, we are also careful at Cranfield not to link mindfulness exclusively to Buddhist thinking, as this would be an incorrect and unhelpful connection to make (many of our executive clients agree). Instead, our work contributes to a substantive and growing scientific evidence base on mindfulness as a multi-level concept, associated with benefits for individual employees as well as for the organisation as a whole. As we tell our students, mindfulness can be trained through meditation and contemplation as well as other personal, relational and social practices.[2]  In this approach we agree with mindfulness thought leaders who have recently reminded the public that “mindfulness, as Jon Kabat-Zinn has suggested, is Buddhist in the same way that gravity is Newtonian”.[3]

About Cranfield University

Cranfield University is a specialist postgraduate university that is a global leader for education and transformational research in technology and management.