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Mindfulness: Seeing the Constellations of Innovation

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Revealing what’s behind the light

In a world filled with increasing number of signals and lots of noise, it can be difficult to achieve focus and determine what to pay attention to. In this third piece in a series, Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage, we look at one of the bedrocks of sustainable innovation that is the best representation of something shockingly simple, enormously powerful, but not easy: mindfulness.

Before embarking on an introduction to mindfulness for innovation, let’s dispel some myths about what it is not. It is not religious, spiritual, or some new-age trend, nor is it meditation. While it can and often is be affiliated with all those things, mindfulness is simply the practice of paying attention to what is around you and to yourself in the process. It is about conscious awareness of the present moment and non-judgemental attention toward the thoughts, feelings, experiences that arise from that experience. 

An Exercise in Mindfulness

To many, the idea of mindfulness seems like an odd start to the conversation about innovation and evaluation, but the closer you look at what mindfulness is all about, the more it becomes clear how important it is to what innovators and evaluators both do. 

At a recent talk on innovation and evaluation as part of Service Convention Sweden, Cameron Norman took the audience through a short exercise in mindfulness that looked like this: 

  • Close your eyes (or lower your eyelids a little). [This reduces the amount of distraction from visual stimuli]
  • Put your feet flat on the ground and keep your back straight [This also reduces the amount of ‘signal’ coming from the body by getting into a more optimal position for sitting]
  • Breathe easy and relaxed and simply pay attention to what’s going on around you and what you are thinking. [Breathing easy avoids the issues created by holding one’s breath, creating a whole realm of problematic stimuli]

There are variants of this exercise that include focusing on the breath (which is a common technique for mindfulness-based stress reduction) and emphasis on quieting the mind, yet the outcomes are similar: an increased awareness of things that were — up until that moment — unaware and that is where mindfulness comes into evaluation. 

Evaluation serves innovation best when it goes beyond the simple assessment of outputs, outcomes, and process document. Evaluation can be a mechanism for focusing attention on the work of innovation and its context. In the example above, the audience was asked: what did you notice? The answers ranged from hearing the HVAC system, noticing their breath, and realizing how much noise takes place during a talk. 

In previous workshops, participants have reported bodily sensations (e.g., getting hungry), temperature changes, physical discomfort (e.g., back getting stiff from sitting), a wandering mind, and often forms of judgement about not ‘doing it well’ (for which there is no ‘well’, but rather ‘practice’). Just like evaluation for innovation, there is only ‘useful’ and not ‘useful’, not ‘good’ and ‘bad’. 

Linking Mindfulness to Evaluation

The idea of applying mindfulness to organizations is not new and has actually been well-researched. Introducing and practicing the concept of organizational mindfulness has been shown to be strongly correlated with what high reliability in organizations, meaning that they continually produce desirable results, consistently. Innovation is difficult to do and doing it repeatedly and consistently is even more so. What organizations that have fostered mindfulness in the way they work have done is create a mechanism for paying attention that is systematized and implemented consistently. 

Mindfulness is not a one-off exercise for those who adopt it into their work, but closer to a way of being. What it does is provide the means for organizations to not only focus on what’s in front of them, but to pay attention to the subtle signals that take place around that focus. (see two articles on our sister site Censemaking that link organizational mindfulness to social innovation and to developmental evaluation)

Mindfulness also cultivates curiosity. Curiosity is what draws an innovator and evaluator to consider what additional things might be happening (which we will explore later in this series) beyond just the intended outcomes. It is what leads us to innovation in the first place. By regularly creating space for mindful reflection into the innovation space, we nurture and cultivate curiosity. 

Doing the Work

What does mindfulness practice look like for innovation? As mentioned earlier: we are dealing with something simple, not easy. A place to start is to follow some of these practices: 

  • Ask evaluative questions, which include one that focuses on paying attention. We’ve discussed three of the most useful questions for promoting evaluative thinking in a previous post. 
  • Create regular reflection space within the organization at each level (program, division, organization). This includes setting aside deliberate time regularly to reflect on what the data is telling you about what is happening, drawing on some of the questions above. This means instilling quiet, uninterrupted time for members of an organization to think and reflect. This involves unplugging from networks and thinking. It may involve tools (e.g., whiteboards, notebooks, cards) or movement (e.g., going for a walk or run), but it must be focused. Switching back and forth from email or other demands won’t work. 
  • Bring reflections together. Individual reflection is important as is the chance to discuss those insights or experiences with others. Socialize the process of reflection by establishing a sharing culture. This builds much on what Donald Schon proposed as part of his work on reflective practice. 
  • Collect the data that supports reflection. This means not only focusing on the core of the innovation (e.g., the product or service) but the area around it. This is similar to attractor mapping, by enabling innovators to determine where the action is in the face of not always knowing. This means attending to the system that an innovation is a part of. 
  • Reserve judgment and avoid labels. The rush to judge something is what kills curiosity and mindfulness. Ever notice that once something is labeled as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we cease to ask the kind of questions of it that get deeper into its core? Mindfulness is about being open and then assessing utility. 
  • Use learning as an outcome. What mindfulness does is encourage identification and insight into patterns. What comes from that identification and discussion is learning and is a genuine and important outcome for innovators. Document what is seen, heard, discussed, and concluded. 

The biggest barrier that we see in our work is time. It isn’t that this takes a long time, although it does require some investment of it, rather it is that organizations are reluctant to prioritize this work and make it a regular part of their practice. Doing it occasionally has some benefit, but making it part of the organizational culture is really what will transform everyday work into something that has potential beyond the original purpose.  

By instituting mindfulness into the work of your organization, you are more likely to see the constellations and quiet of night and not just the blue sky of the daytime. 

Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

Mindfulness in Developmental Evaluation

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A place to sit, reflect, observe and evaluate

One of the tools within the toolkit of a developmental evaluator is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a disciplined, regular, and persistent means of paying attention to what is going on. It is a terrific means of collecting data on regular activities, particularly in complex environments where it may be unclear what is worth paying attention to.

In an earlier article on Censemaking (our sister site), Cameron Norman outlines how mindfulness and developmental evaluation work together, highlighting some of the emerging scholarship in the area of organizational mindfulness as an example. As discussed in that piece:

Mindfulness is the disciplined practice of paying attention. Bishop and colleagues (2004 – PDF), working in the clinical context, developed a two-component definition of mindfulness that focuses on 1) self-regulation of attention that is maintained on the immediate experience to enable pattern recognition (enhanced metacognition) and 2) an orientation to experience that is committed to and maintains an attitude of curiosity and openness to the present moment.

It’s one thing to talk mindfulness, but what does this mean for evaluators and organizations in practice? How can we use mindfulness practice and theory to inform developmental evaluation in a practical manner?

We present some strategies we’ve employed in our client work and offer some suggests for those seeking to bring a mindfulness approach to their developmental evaluations.

1. Introduce meditative practice through demonstrations. Let’s get the most obvious link out of the way: meditation. Meditation is usually the first thing that most people think of when hearing the word mindfulness. Meditation is a practice and while it is often linked with spiritual traditions from different cultures it does not need to have a spiritual dimension included if that’s not appropriate or useful. One of the simplest exercises to do is to walk members of the evaluation team through a short mindfulness exercise involving just sitting, closing or dimming the eyes, and paying attention to the breath and the thought patterns going through their head in a non-judgemental manner. A simple one-minute exercise can alert people to the massive amount of stimuli — both inner and outer — that is going on that they either aren’t fully attuned to or wasn’t as clear to them. Developmental evaluation is very much like this: it opens up our awareness of what’s happening in a living system on the go.

2. Build a mindful culture. While meditation is useful, it’s benefits are only accrued when applied collectively as part of the evaluation. Not everyone will take to the idea of meditating (and it needs to be introduced safely), but the idea of paying attention at regular intervals, consistently is effectively at the heart of a developmental evaluation, particularly in a highly complex context. To do this, create regular check-in’s where people answer the simple question: What’s going on? It’s like the equivalent of the “how was your day?” question we might ask our spouse or child. It allows people a momentary space to reflect on what happened within a time period and pick out what was meaningful to them? A follow-up question is: “what did you notice?”

3. Practice non-judgement, at first, and often. Evaluation is about judgement as much as anything else, but in a developmental evaluation context we may not know what benefits, drawbacks, implications or opportunities are present in a situation in the present moment. Encourage participants to simply take note of what is going on, when, and on what was observed without attributing cause and effect, judgement (“good” or “bad”) right away. Attribution is something that can be made later on through a more structured process of sensemaking.

4. Make it social. Mindfulness is generally thought of as a solitary, intra-personal activity. In a developmental evaluation you’re collecting information from across an organization or program and it involves many people and many perspectives: it has to be social to work. This is where sensemaking comes in – a critical component of developmental evaluation. The meaning of any activity won’t be readily apparent without an ability to translate individual observations and reflections into a more collective understanding. Further, because developmental evaluation is used in contexts that are usually complex, the meaning of something will be best determined by having multiple perspectives on the issue — diverse perspectives on the system — brought to bear. Ensure that teams are scheduling regular sensemaking meetings alongside regular reflections.

5. Make it visual. Mindfulness yields a lot of data. In terms of social research methods, mindfulness practice is as close to yielding ‘big data‘ as you’ll get. Lots of small observations over time will produce a lot of data. Sensemaking is a means of identifying potential patterns and meanings in the data, but even then there can be times when it’s hard to make sense of things. Using visual methods such as sketching, map making, and creative visualizations can help, tool. Visualizations allow people to abstract from one concept to the next and literally allow people’s attention to get on the same page. Tools like a gigamap can map and model a problem and potential solutions. Attractor maps can also include different elements that represent certain properties, feelings, experiences, observations and other data and put them together.

The timing of all of these activities is highly dependent upon the complexity and dynamism within the program domain. For example, a 12-week program aimed at educating individuals might have a lot of dynamism in it from week-to-week, enough that weekly check-ins and tri-weekly or monthly sensemaking sessions might be required. However, if the work being done is a collective impact model looking at advocacy for a major policy change, the activities and actions might be more long term. In that case, bi-weekly checkins and maybe quarterly sensemaking sessions are needed.

Mindfulness is a very powerful tool when employed in a developmental evaluation. Creating spaces and practices that allow people to mindfully reflect on their work, capture it and organize it can be a way of collecting data on and detecting subtle, evolving patterns of activity that are the hallmark of complex systems and programs.

Good luck. Be mindful.