A Miss and a Hit

We’ve been reading Mindfulness by Ellen Langer for the current book discussion at The High Calling, and this week’s focus is Chapter 4 – “The Costs of Mindlessness” and Chapter 5, “The Nature of Mindfulness.” I believe Langer has a serious point to make about how mindlessness – doing things almost by rote because we’ve always done this way – can lead to bad results and negative outcomes. But her evidence for the costs of mindlessness gets a little thin.

She cites a 1975 Harvard Business Review article by Theodore Leavitt, “Marketing Myopia,” for how the railroad industry mindlessly destroyed itself by continuing to see itself as a railroad industry instead of a transportation industry. The article was rather famous for several years in the business community; I can remember my then-boss handing me and the other speechwriters a copy of the article and told it was a quotable resource for speeches. But even then we understood that it was one way to look at what happened to the rail industry – and only one way.

Some of the other evidence for mindlessness she cites includes a wife “unlearning’ how to balance her checkbook because she’s turned that activity over to her husband, an anecdote about the author’s nieces, and the example of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. There is other evidence she cites I’m more comfortable with, but these examples are more anecdotes than evidence. I suppose she might say I’m trapped in the mindlessness of not being open to new information, but Miss Havisham? I love the novel but it is a novel, no matter how much truth it might contain.

There’s also a statement she makes that I have to question, and the statement, made in an almost offhand way, is that advertisers conspire to make us mindless. That is a pretty broad generalization. Most advertisers (including the federal government, political candidates, companies and even public interest groups) are not so much focused on making us mindless as they are on us buying their product, service, belief or position. That one offhand statement made me pause and question what I was actually reading here. There are costs to mindlessness, to be sure; I’ve seen them and experienced them. But I don’t think Langer makes a compelling case here.

But I continued on to Chapter 5, “The Nature of Mindlessness,” and I found her to be back on firmer ground. She describes mindfulness, the opposite of mindlessness, as a continual creation of new categories of thinking and thought, paying attention to both the situation and the context; welcoming new information; openness to different points of view; and the importance of process rather than a slavish devotion to outcome.

My own business career has been a perpetual state of tension between outcome and process. Business people like outcomes. Outcomes are things like sales, profit and return on investment. And sometimes we forget that there’s a process that precedes every outcome, as Langer points out.

A typical conversation I’ve found myself having over the course of decades concerns this tension. The organization has something it wants or needs to announce publicly. Communications people are often told “here’s the news” and proceed to write the news release and plan other communications.

But there’s a question that needs to be asked first – what is the desired outcome? Does the organization want a lot of attention, only a little attention, or a lot of attention by a small (or large) number of people? Defining the desired outcome results in the creation of a process to achieve the outcome. Announcing the news in a traditional news release may do exactly the opposite of what’s desired, but a mindless belief in the effectiveness of news releases may actually contribute to not achieving the desired outcome, or achieving the wrong outcome.

Mindlessness and mindfulness are everyday occupations.

To read more posts on these two chapters of Mindfulness, please visit The High Calling, where our discussion is being led by Laura Boggess.  

Mindfulness

For most of my adult life, I’ve worked for large corporations. Right out of college I worked for a news paper for a time, and I worked for myself as a consultant (mostly for large companies) from 2000 to 2003. Then I spent nine months at St. Louis Public Schools, before returning to corporate life.

The corporate model of business organization has been changing for the last 30 years. The paternalistic, lifetime employment, mega-company that seemed to dominate for most of the 20^th century is largely gone, replaced by (some would say) more realistic relationships between organizations, employees, customers and other stakeholders. Some would say that, and some forget that organizations mat change while organizational mindsets linger long after.

Corporations, like all other organizations – government, academia, the NGOs or “non-governmental organizations, churches – have mindsets. People often refer to organizational culture, but it’s less cultural, I think, and more of a mindset. Mindsets can be good things – accomplishing and creating and achieving and making money, and that it what corporations are supposed to do, make money. Mindsets can also be bad things, followed so rigidly that they can take organizations right over the cliff.

The thing about mindsets – good and bad – is that they tend to be focused and relentless. They can be like the proverbial steamroller, no matter how much uncertainty and counter-information is available.

This focus – including the exclusion of ideas, issues and events that might suggest that an alternative way or means or process might be preferable – is related to what author Ellen Langer calls “mindlessness” in her book Mindfulness, which we’re discussing at The High Calling. Mindlessness doesn’t mean idiocy; it means doing things because this is the way you’ve always done them – the things you do without thinking once, much less twice – regardless of the realities confronting you. (Think of a corollary practiced almost religiously by certain governments: “Since we’re technically bankrupt, let’s keep spending money.”)

Mindlessness in any organizational setting can be destructive. As the mindset keeps crashing against change, new facts, news issues and new problems that it can’t resolve, the choice becomes either change or construct ever more complex fictions to maintain the mindset.

I’ve seen both choices made. I’ve even seen both choices being made at the same time. There have been times when I’ve been part of the mindset, and (more typically for me) times when I’ve said there’s a different reality we have to face, we don’t control what affects us, we don’t control what affects our business and we have to think and act differently.

Sometimes the organization has listened; sometimes the organization has no choice but to listen. And sometimes the organization doesn’t listen, and behaves very typically when the change or issue or event happens as predicted.

They shot the messenger.

I’ve taken my share of bullets over the years. I’ve also had the opportunity to be part of the change. I’ve learned that both kinds of experiences are, unfortunately, necessary, to understand why people and organizations behave the way they do. The home mortgage disaster is an example of  how mindlessness at all levels and across the economic spectrum – government, individuals, banks, brokerages – led to disaster.

Often the message has to be one the organization doesn’t want to hear: “We have to make ourselves vulnerable. We have to admit we don’t have all the answers. We have to respond to what people are concerned about, even if the science says the concerns are baseless.”

It is not an easy thing to convince an organization. It’s easier to ride the mindlessness flow. But truth still must be told and acted upon.

To see more posts on Ellen Langer’s book Mindfulness, please visit The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and this week we’re looking at the first three chapters.