Both experience and common sense tells me that being able to hold awareness beyond the incessant chatter of my own thoughts is going to make me more effective at work. But what objective evidence is there for this?

Walking as we are through a forest of dense and shifting fads, fashions, and memes, it’s worth being skeptical. A recent piece by Florida State University professor Thomas Joiner in the Washington Post on the hype surrounding mindfulness is a useful reminder that we want to walk into “McMindfulness” territory carefully and with open eyes. The enthusiasm of teachers and practitioners does mean that claims for the benefits of mindfulness can be overstated, and there is a tendency toward confirmation bias.

Nevertheless there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that mindfulness does improve human functioning, and that improved functioning does lead to improved workplace performance. The most comprehensive recent study I’ve found is “Contemplating Mindfulness at Work, an Integrative Review” (published in the Journal of Management in January 2016: full text available here). The article reviews research to date (over 4,000 scholarly articles at the time of publication; the article itself references nearly 200 studies), provides coherent definitions of “mindfulness” and related terms, and – most helpfully – provides a framework for considering the various workplace-related benefits of mindfulness based on research to date.

I won’t review the framework in detail (the article does a very good job of that), but want to make a few points about it:

• Mindfulness research to date includes a fair degree of variability: multiple means of measurement (self-report questionnaires, formal evaluation of participants in mindfulness programs). It also investigates a range of practices, from long-term meditation to mindful eating to body scanning. This makes it a bit harder, at this stage, to answer questions like “will behavior x lead to outcome y?” Research in medical contexts, around highly structured practices like Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), is more focused and definitive; in the workplace domain the picture is not yet as clear.
• Even with this variability, the authors identify a common functional benefit of mindfulness practice across many studies: improved attention. I’ve written elsewhere about how crucial attention is for technology delivery, and to my mind this is the key finding of the integrative review. If the common thread of hundreds of studies of mindfulness is that “mindfulness improves attention”, then we as practitioners of technology delivery need to take note of that.
• Improved attention leads to specific functional workplace benefits, which lead in turn to specific workplace outcomes. To simplify (sloganize?) the outcomes: what hundreds of studies show is that mindfulness helps you Think Better, Relate Better, and Feel Better.
• In my area of focus on cross-functional team technology delivery, “Relate Better” really stands out as the key. There’s no question that people who have higher cognitive function and have better health due to a mindfulness practice are going to be more effective in their work. But what makes projects succeed more than anything else is great communications among people who stay connected with each other. If mindfulness helps with that (and it’s getting harder to argue that it doesn’t), then further investigation is worthwhile.

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.