Mindfulness and Systemic Awareness

11.12.2017

Established by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness, the Mindfulness Initiative have described mindfulness in their report Building the Case for Mindfulness in the Workplace:

 

“[It is] a capacity that enables people to focus on what they experience in the moment, inside themselves as well as in their environment, with an attitude of openness, curiosity and care.”

 

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Much has been said about the inner dimension of mindfulness, and how it helps people to better understand themselves. We have written an earlier blog on the way it can help us to understand and empathise with others. Surprisingly, far less has been said about the benefits of mindfulness training. In essence, we gain the ability to engage with and understand the world around us, as well as being able to effectively navigate the complex network of systems we live and work in.

 

Our lives take place at the interface of an infinitely complex network of related systems: biological systems, atomic and sub-atomic systems, social systems, political systems, family systems, and ecological systems. The one which impacts many of us is the organisational system at work, where we spend much of our time.

 

If we are to thrive at work and make effective decisions, it’s crucial that we’re able to understand and respond to these systems.

Systemic awareness

To understand how such complex systems work, we require a particular kind of awareness. Systemic awareness is a new kind of skill, one which recognises that decisions have broad effects on a scale that has implications for ever widening environments. As A.S. Pensante puts it:

 

“This is a new habit, a shift of perspective: from individual technical competence and excellence, to the skill to share decisions, strategies, goals and communication with others. An effective leader is able to gather a team around a project, to create and share new models, to express an ethic, to foster a higher motivation. These too are crucial for a successful organisation.”

 

In addition, Daniel Goleman speaks of systemic awareness as a kind of ‘outer focus’:

 

“[It] has to do with how well we can sense the large forces that shape our world – whether organizational dynamics, like whose opinion matters most for a decision, or economic forces such as how a new technology will roil a market, or environmental trends like the new value placed on lower-carbon processes. Outer awareness allows a leader, for example, to formulate a winning strategy that anticipates what’s coming.”

 

As Goleman suggests, by increasing our capacity to really pay attention to what is happening around us, mindfulness training can directly increase systemic awareness.

Practicing awareness

In their forthcoming book, Mind Time, Michael Chaskalson and Megan Reitz describe how just ten minutes of mindfulness practice each day can enhance one’s capacity for AIM – Allowing, Inquiry and Meta-awareness. It is the Inquiry part of AIM, the open, engaged curiosity, that enables and develops systemic awareness. Most modern workplace systems are complex. When you take an open, lively interest in what’s going on around you and how it all works, when you’re sensitive and sensitised to how you and others are affected by events around you, then systemic awareness increases.

 

Leadership thinker Deborah Rowland speaks of the key inner capacity of ‘Tuning into the System’, in her book Still Moving: perceiving reality accurately, reading the signs of the organisational and emotional system around you.

 

Deborah Rowland’s research tells us that such systemic awareness is a vital leadership capacity. In truth, it’s needed by everyone at work these days. Mindfulness training can help to increase it.

 

To find out more about mindfulness training at work, contact michael@mindfulnessworks.com, or call (+44) 01223 750660.