Mindfulness at Work

It's no overstatement to say that the absence of mindfulness in the workplace is one of the biggest reason for project over run, over spend and ultimately goal failure. Mindfulness has become a popular hippy buzzword in the last 5 years. We see it in Pilates and Yoga more than in business, but it's an actual thing, and it's important. I'm not talking about befriending your inner child or communing with Gaia mother earth, I am talking about remaining holistically, professionally aware of the purpose of your company, project or product.

Perhaps a more familiar phrase is "Keep your eyes on the prize". Mindfulness, in it's most basic business form, is remembering why we're all here. Why the business was set up. What the business is supposed to be achieving. What your work is supposed to be contributing towards. And remembering it in everything you do. Are your actions contributing toward that goal or are they just the mindless repetitions of a prescribed, and ultimately ineffective task that lets you tick a box but has little to do with your mission statement.

Senior management don't think you need to be reminded to be mindful and some simply don't care if you are reminded, because you're there to do your job and you get paid to do it. What else is there to say? What more motivation do you need to do a good job? To do a great job? Surely that will automatically contribute to the purpose, the goal of the business? How could the two not be linked?

You need job satisfaction as well. It keeps you motivated to do the best job, to think outside the box. When I've been in senior roles I have often recommended to the board that they give stock options to all employees who have been there over a year and allow them to purchase more. This financial tie to the company means that the better the work you do, the more you are rewarded. A highly motivational incentive and beneficial to not only the employee but obviously to the company. Sounds like it should work all the time every time, but it doesn't. Many employees loose their mindful awareness of the link between the company's goals and their work and instead carry out micro tasks that reflect well on them or their department, but not the business or it's goals. They loose their holistic mindfulness of their contribution to the purpose of the business or the goal of a project.

Analogy

Business goal: We make guns. We spend a lot of money on packaging and whilst we cannot compromise the quality of the guns we must save money on the packaging so that we can be more competitive. And we need this done by next week.

Mindful solution: Find out if this can be done in a week without compromising the quality of the guns. If not, report back on the options before commencing. Make the packaging out of recycled or reclaimed, cheaper material, find a more competitive supplier, redesign the packaging to be minimal, but secure and better fitted to the gun. With every choice and decision keeping in mind the purpose of our business and product.

Non mindful solution: Redesign the gun quickly to fit into a smaller package, whilst keeping the quality - exactly as instructed.

Example

I recently worked on a project who's primary goal was: to deliver a user experience that eclipsed all of their competitors, set the bar for the industry, reduced support and maintenance costs, improved brand perception and increased profits. We set about doing the research to find out what that looked like. Everyone was on board with this single vision: they were mindful of it in every decision they made...at first.

After a few months of very insightful research (not excessive for this particular project) practice heads started to feel that they should be doing more. Not sitting around waiting for research to be completed. Their bosses started to ask old fashioned questions like "Why can't we see something yet? It's been months". They started to silo their own work mentally, then physically, into what their boss would like to see. They wanted to get on and do the best damn job their departments could and keep management happy that 'work was being done'. It didn't matter if this conflicted with the purpose of the project. They'd forgotten the purpose of the project in the face of these simplistic management demands. They lost their mindfulness, they forgot why we were all there. It was't a race, it wasn't to say "Well my team delivered on time". It was to deliver the best user experience in the industry to make us market leaders, improve the brand perception, improve advocacy, make our customer's lives easier, better and make significantly more profit as a result. No remarkable achievement ever got done by working faster and planning less. Even when reminded of the purpose of the project, there was a marked lack of integrity to be the one to pursue it. At these times it is important to stand up and remind your bosses and their bosses why we are doing this.

The Product Owner got 'tired of waiting for the research to be done' and started to secretly design pages for the app, based on no research, just UI design and his own opinions, in the belief that they were delivering the project goal by being proactive, quicker and thus saving deliver cost money. When confronted he said that this didn't need UX, it was obvious what the users wanted. I challenged this at a project lead level and was told that we had to think about delivering now as the budget could get cut otherwise. One of many convenient lies to further their loss of mindfulness and support their cognitive dissonance. This happens a lot more than you might like to believe.

Then a Director told the project leaders that a Minimum Viable Product version of the project needed to be delivered within 2 months. Instead of remaining mindful of the purpose of the project and challenging whether this was possible without compromising it, they all now only saw a deadline looming. They did not remind the Director of the original goal of the project, they just saw a short term goal of the deadline and worried how it would effect their own career if they failed to deliver to this time within budget. Worse, they felt that delivering anything, by any means, using any manipulation would reflect on them positively in the end because they would be able to say "We delivered the MVP on time and within budget".

I took another shot at persuading the project lead. I said "If you do this, your stakeholders will be happy with you for about 2 minutes. Then they will have to live with a product that is unable to compete and substandard to the expectations of your customers. This isn't a win. Delivering an MVP like this is not a measurement of success and it's an Minimum Product with no Value to your customers and the stakeholders will see that. They'll ask why you didn't push back.

The reason we are all here. The reason this project and these experts have been brought together in one team is that the solution you currently have was delivered too quickly, poorly thought out, had no UX, was designed by committee and is embarrassingly incapable of competing in the market place. It is costing you a huge amount to support and maintain and updates are very costly because the architecture was built before the requirement was established.

Do you really think someone at the top of the business stood up in a board meeting and said 'lets do the same thing again'? No, they said 'lets do it right this time' but you've all stopped being mindful of that goal because you're looking at the small picture of this unrealistic deadline that a Director plucked out of thin air"

His answers were the usual mixture of self denial and panic "We will loose the budget. We have to deliver something. It will be better than what we currently have. We will go back and fix the issues once it goes live, we need to deliver something to keep up with our competitors". He failed to be mindful, or perhaps he was afraid to be mindful as it meant being the one to stand up to the directors and say 'no, it is not possible to deliver what you want in the time you want'.

In the end, when they ran out of corners to cut, they started just cutting out critical components to fit the product within the timeline. They created a solution that utterly failed to deliver any real competitive advantage, acceptable user experience and little value.

They got to market quickly, but they damaged the brand perception and pissed off their customers. The company saw little take up of the app and the support costs soared as they tried to respond to users calling because the experience was poor, disconnected and confusing in many parts. Users were fooled for about 2 minutes, then they were disappointed. During the post mortem all of the project heads, including the POs said that to their credit, they had delivered on time and to budget. The board was unimpressed and frustrated by their inability to deliver their stated goal. The department heads were frustrated and felt unappreciated for their hard work.

Conclusion

Be mindful of the purpose of your company, product or project in everything you do at work. Mindfulness requires integrity and open communication to be effective, and integrity, in the wrong company (or the company of the wrong people), can seriously hamper your career. When the goals are compromised by short sightedness you must stand up and say something. Everyone must stand up and say something. It's not about seniority, it's about staying true to the plan, the goal, the purpose.

Mindfulness needs to be supported from the top, enacted from the bottom and we need constant reminders through out the day. It makes for a successful, wealthy, rewarding company and career, but we all need to be mindful about the reason we're there every day, when we make any professional decision, because in the cut and thrust of getting ahead we become micro-task focussed and we all forget.

Links

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/leadership-mindfulness-essential-steven-m-windmill-td-mba-/