Lessons from the Skein with Jutta Tobias Mortlock

THREE

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[00:00:00] NEXT GENERATION MINDFULNESS

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[00:00:00] Ross: Hi there, and a very warm welcome to Season five, episode three of People's Soup. It's Ross McIntosh here.

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[00:00:25] Ross: PE Soup is, this is the final part of my chat with Utah. We could have gone on for days, but I'm sure she'll be back. Dr. Jutta Tobias Mortlock is a social psychologist from City University of London, who is also the co-director of the Center for Excellence in Mindfulness research.

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[00:01:00] Ross: And of course, you'll find a link in the show notes.

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[00:01:17] Ross: We also touch upon the reputational damage to mindfulness caused by the tone deaf way. It can be introduced by some organizations. There's a heck of a lot for your listening pleasure in the next 30 minutes or so, and I've called the episode Lessons from the Skein, which is the name Who knew for a flock of wild geese or swans in flight, typically in a V-shaped formation.

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[00:02:21] Ross: I might well be referencing you two. Thanks for helping to make my. well, thanks so much to you, Clive. I'm so pleased you found it interesting and useful, and thanks to everyone who listened, rated, shared, and reviewed the episode.

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[00:02:37] Ross: But for now, get a brew on and have a listen to part three of my chat with Yuta.

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[00:03:14] Ross: And I can't for the life of me, remember where it was, but it was a military conference. And I was chatting to a guy who was very senior in the bomb squad. And he was talking to me about how they want everyone to have a voice in that bomb squad, because someone who is very junior might have spotted something that no one else has spotted.

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[00:03:53] Ross: And I know there's a paper you you've published recently about team based mindfulness. So maybe that might be a way in [00:04:00] or how can we dive deeper? Help, help me to think how we can dive

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[00:04:26] Jutta: We don't actually have surprisingly little solid evidence on this, but we know that it makes people feel better and manage stress better from the wellbeing perspective. And so combining that with the equally well researched, but less popularly known scholarship on collective mindfulness collective mindfulness is what I mentioned.

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[00:04:46] Jutta: the dude Karl Weick at the university of Michigan in the nineties, uh, in investigating what makes, Nu nuclear submarines intensive care units and nuclear power plants function in the face of unanticipated, unexpected pressure reliably. And so he was ex absolutely researching institutions and organizations like, these, bomber patrol people where.

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[00:05:41] Jutta: And what does that mean? Collectively mindful basically means, right? We say Jon Kabat ZInn's definition of individual mindfulness is paying attention on purpose nonjudgmentally so replicate that to a collective. And what you get is something that looks and sounds a bit like a flock of [00:06:00] birds flying through the sky.

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[00:06:01] Jutta: So a flock of birds, a flock of geese in the autumn flying through the sky are marked by three things. Every one of them aligns their personal direction with the overall direction of the group. So it removes a bit of ego, right? So it's, I subordinate my individual goals to the goals of the collective first characteristic, second characteristic, Each goose can initiate a change of direction, right? So everyone contributes and this is where it becomes relevant to your bomber patrols, right? So it's not just the first one at the front who sets the direction. But if the one in row seven starts to change direction, the others all pay attention to everyone else.

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[00:07:28] Brought together the literature

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[00:07:54] Jutta: and this targeting collective mindfulness is all about training groups of people [00:08:00] to become committed, to anticipate problems as a collective and to become committed, to work together, to learn how to respond to problems or stress collectively. So these it's these two big categories of fact.

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[00:08:30] Jutta: So people's vocal chords are oiled during normal operations so that when it really matters and when they say something, "I think we're going in the wrong direction, Sir, or Boss". they are actually trained. They're practiced to speak up

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[00:08:48] Ross: practiced to

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[00:08:50] Jutta: right. That's right.

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[00:09:03] Ross: assumptions

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[00:09:34] Poss intro

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[00:09:59] Jutta: You know, if you're an [00:10:00] loud person or of speaking up, if you are a quiet person in a team. The team mindfulness training is a lot about, Communicating more, not less getting to know each other on a personal basis. That means getting to know each other's stress triggers, caring, You can train anybody to care about other people in virtually every context. If you get to know the person it's very difficult to discount them. And this is what I learned in my work, working with Hutu and, and Tutsi and of course, bloody hell, post genocide contexts are hard work.

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[00:10:55] Jutta: And then when stress happens to encourage people to talk more, not less,

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[00:11:05] Ross: get tough,

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[00:11:07] Ross: cuz it's not the time when you're in the middle of battle to start practicing these

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[00:11:44] Jutta: We're doing team building. Not because we want to have higher performance, not because we want to get the, you know, millimeter gain and become the Olympic, medalist. We're not doing this because we want to turn people into high performance [00:12:00] machines. We're doing this because we're concerned about people's suffering and people's stress.

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[00:12:59] Jutta: Doesn't it. Logically.

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[00:13:21] Ross: And

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[00:13:42] Ross: And suffer

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[00:13:44] Jutta: it's very true.

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[00:13:45] Jutta: And you know, the collective mindfulness literature is, is solid. This is solid management science. This is not as popular as. relax your body through body scan that has made it into the daily mail and into the cosmopolitan magazine. And that's okay. Right. it's [00:14:00] easy to understand how a body scan can calm.

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[00:14:24] Leadership in 21st Century

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[00:15:22] Jutta: So necessarily the leader's job becomes the job of like somebody taming, reticent, animals to eek out, to get. Their subordinates to trust them, to get their subordinates, to talk to them. It's like, I can tell you something about this. I have three stepchildren to befriend somebody who may or may not have any interest in trusting or wanting to be your friend.

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[00:16:17] Jutta: So leadership is about eeking out information and getting people to trust you so that they share freely. What half baked ideas, they might have to get you competitive advantage or to get you to actually survive, let alone being competitive. Does that make sense?

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[00:16:54] Ross: top.

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[00:16:55] Ross: oh, hilarious.

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[00:17:05] Ross: yes, but there's a word that's kind of new to my vocabulary heat

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[00:17:11] Jutta: Funny. Isn't it.

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[00:17:28] Ross: I think we've lost track, or you seem to be blind to this. Maybe not using language as direct as that, but hopefully,

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[00:17:49] Ross: around it, that people are focusing on the frame and not the context of the message we're back to it.

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[00:17:55] Interdependence theory

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[00:18:24] Jutta: And so we were talking about leadership and culture, driving collective mindfulness, And so if you think about the leader of, uh, collective in mind organizations, that's a little bit like that. A go a goose in that flock of geese, you know, where my own direction is just one versions of directions that we can go to. I align my individual goals with the goals of the collective. I allow others to contribute. I exchange ideas with all sorts of individuals in the organization, and that's a different style, style of leadership, it's less ego driven, but much more relaxing because it's not the weight on my shoulders is much less.

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[00:19:04] Culture

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[00:19:25] Jutta: That's what a manager does. A leader shapes a new path and creates a new culture, creates a new normal and culture is all about the way we do things around here. Consciously or unconsciously. And what we want to do is people develop unconscious automatic habits of listening, of contributing, of aligning their own direction with the collected direction, because overall that's what makes the organization more resilient and more reliable.

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[00:20:33] Jutta: I know, like this is the way to the beach, right? Uh, to, to say the more I practice my physical muscles, the bigger they get, the more I practice this mental capacity to reflect and to check and to notice whether what I'm doing is actually what I want to be doing.

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[00:20:53] Ross: I took a lot with, with leaders about pressing

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[00:20:58] Ross: Working at such pace in organizations. And sometimes we equate pace with this is the value. This is the expectation, and we're not, we're not giving ourselves time to think or even reflect as well. We're just on what people would call the treadmill.

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[00:21:45] Jutta: unless, you know, there's a need for it. So you want to press pause when you are overworked or when you have a work habit that's not functioning. Right. That's fine. But don't, shift to, you know, just noticing, you know, the sensations in [00:22:00] your body when you're feeling stressed, unless you are actually feeling stressed or unless it's actually useful to notice something that you haven't seen before and that tends in organizations, you only really want to press the pause button when something has broken down, when something is going wrong, you don't really want people to necessarily do things slower than they normally do it.

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[00:22:41] Ross: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you.

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[00:22:56] Jutta: As what we said at the beginning. So make space for myself, carve out a bit of distance between

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[00:23:04] Ross: And I, I think, I think the pause button, sometimes you might pause at the wrong point. It's, it's kind of practicing using the pause button to

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[00:23:12] Ross: Is that useful now? Maybe not move on or pressing pause now, because I think something's just happened that I really need to reflect on or pay attention to, but I agree.

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[00:23:28] Leadership training in individual and collective mindfulness

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[00:23:46] Jutta: And so we've now over the last five, six years trained well, over 2000 senior government officials in individual and collective mindfulness, and many of them come to Cranfield on this training course as part of their project leader program leadership [00:24:00] course. And they go ha a day of mindfulness. Let's get ready for eating the raisin.

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[00:24:20] Jutta: And they say this because much mindfulness training that gets sent to organizations is a little bit like this awful story that my dear friend Mara Gullens, who writes for mind magazine, talked about. She said, she was working for an organization that was about to merge with another organization and everybody was anxious and everybody was stressed out of their mind about what would happen to their jobs, what would happen to their functions and the company thought they did a really good thing by getting a mindfulness trainer to come in and they spent a day eating raisins, mindfully and looking at the colors of the puddles in order to get ready for the merger. So they had a day of relaxation, but the stress and the suffering that was about to happen because of the merger was completely untouched. By that day of mindfulness, the pause of the relaxation did nothing to address the cause of what mindfulness was needed to manage that stress better.

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[00:25:39] Jutta: And if we don't shift mindfulness training, to address social aspects of stress. People not talking about conflicts of interest, openly

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[00:26:00] Ross: Yeah. And I think part of that reputational damage is things like that. We're having a merger, let's have a day looking at raisins and noticing puddles. It's like for the love of God,

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[00:26:17] Jutta: You've had a day of mindfulness

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[00:26:20] Ross: so frustrating. because that day could have been used to use mindfulness to, to reflect

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[00:26:27] Jutta: respond.

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[00:26:30] Takeaway

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[00:26:35] Ross: I mean, I think we've had several already. I think there's the, German phrase about you also matter,

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[00:26:42] Ross: that's it?

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[00:26:45] Ross: mind?

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[00:27:38] Jutta: when people think mindfulness, they think self

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[00:27:42] Jutta: whereas the transformative potential of mindfulness is in its power to change leadership and culture in society. And to help us see that we are much more interconnected and that we benefit from seeing ourselves as interconnected. And that's my aspiration to see mindfulness as [00:28:00] more than that thing with the breathing

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[00:28:19] Ross: thank you so much. And it's a privilege to know

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[00:28:34] Ross: That's it. P Super is the third and final part in the bag. Thanks so much to UJA for coming on the show and for being such a fascinating and inspirational guest. If you like this episode or the podcast, Please? Could you do three things? Number one, share it with one other person.

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[00:29:07] Ross: Next week I've got a fresh treat for you. It's part one of my chat with Mike Jones, the founder of Better Happy. I love to hear from you and you can get in touch at People soup dot pod gmail dot. On Twitter, you'll find us at People Soup Pod on Instagram at People dot Soup, and on Facebook at People Soup Pod.

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[00:29:45] Ross: the duck park.

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[00:29:47] Ross: But the there's also geese there and they quite often just fly over us in the V formation, making such chatting noise as it's like lads and lass.

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[00:30:01] Jutta: they're constantly exchanging information. They're constantly chatting. Hey, what's going on? Yeah, yeah. Yeah