While there’s plenty to say about other positive outcomes of mindfulness, this post is about business benefits for technology delivery: meeting milestones, keeping stakeholders happy, and delivering value to customers. Any incremental sanity is a bonus.

1. Mindfulness helps you identify unexamined assumptions.
2. Mindfulness helps you weather hard times better.
3. Mindfulness helps you discover a deeper sense of what’s important.
4. Mindfulness helps you relate to change in a more positive way.

Here’s why I think these benefits are anything but “soft”:

1. Mindfulness helps you identify unexamined assumptions. How many times have you discovered, too late, that what a stakeholder meant by x was different from what the dev team meant by x? How many hours, days or weeks does your team spend reworking, fixing, explaining, renegotiating because of conclusions jumped to? Go through any set of stories or requirements after launch, and the unexamined assumptions will leap out like grasshoppers on a summer stroll. Mindfulness gives you the space to see what’s going outside your own brilliant brainpan, so you can pay attention to what’s going on in someone else’s.
2. Mindfulness helps you weather hard times better. Chaos invariably shows up despite the best planning. What do you do then? Double down and work harder (aka pay less attention, accumulate more heartburn, compound bad decisions), or take step back, breathe, and get a fresh perspective? You know as well as I do that a lunchtime walk opens up possibilities, introduces curiosity, allows the brain to untangle itself and see things anew – while a lunchtime stress-fest just takes us further into dark places. And hanging out in dark places (in addition to its other undesirable aspects) takes time away from getting real work done.
3. Mindfulness helps you discover a deeper sense of what’s really important. At the heart of delivery success is building the right things for the right reasons. The surfaces of those proverbial shiny objects tell us nothing about genuine value. A deep mindful breath or two helps you let the euphoric rush of a new requirement or opportunity wash over you and settle down again so you can accurately assess what’s truly needed, what’s truly possible, what’s truly aligned with where the business wants to go. In the face of anything cool or catastrophic, you need to pay attention to what’s really going on. Otherwise you’re going to build the wrong thing, or you’re going to miss your date, or both.
4. Mindfulness helps you relate to change in a more productive way. The Lean/Agile methodology is intended to address the reality of change in the work that we do. It gives us the process we need to handle change. That’s important, but it’s not quite enough. Mindfulness gives us something else essential: the awareness we need to handle change. When we are able to pay closer attention to what is going on – not limited solely to our thoughts about what is going on, but really be able to notice the totality of what’s happening – then our ability to engage with changing circumstances gets better. We don’t have to succumb to our initial impulses to stop the change, or run away from it, or ignore it, or control it. All those things result in bad outcomes (being too slow, or failing entirely, to meet the actual need). Mindfully noticing what the change is, mindfully responding to it as it is: that gives you the best chance of doing what actually needs to be done.

The benefits above are based on Sharon Salzberg’s fine introduction to mindfulness meditation, Real Happiness. Of course all of these benefits have a “happiness” component to them, and those benefits are very important (if not most important). What strikes me, though, is that the good stuff that comes from mindfulness lines up so well with what technology delivery initiatives actually need so teams can build the right things at the right time.

In future posts I’ll look further at what it means to bring mindfulness (in some form…and there are many forms) into the practice of delivery. But it’s important to make it the case at the outset for the notion that mindfulness offers what technology delivery needs.

We’ll dive into all of this and much more at my Mindful Technology Delivery class, September 27, 2017 from 4-6pm in Pioneer Square. Learn more and register here.