Create and Sustain High Performance Public Organizations

Mindful Management in Government Organization

Government organizations and agencies are expected to clearly state their vision, mission, values and to approximate where they intend to be or in other words what goals and objectives that they intend to accomplish both in the long- and short-term. Mindful management is investigated in this brief study to determine the efficacy of its use in managing the governmental organization.

Reliability Themes in Mindful Management

The work of Weick and Sutcliffe (2008) reports that mindful management involves specific reliability themes, which are stated as follows:

(1) Mindful organizing lies at the heart of reliable functioning.

(2) Complexity is inherent in reliable organizing.

(3) Preoccupation with failure equals preoccupation with learning. (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

Mindful Management Techniques

Mindful management techniques involve:

(1) Tracking small failures;

(2) Resisting oversimplification

(3) Remaining sensitive to operations;

(4) Maintaining capabilities for resilience; an d

(5) Taking advantage of shifting locations of expertise. (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

III. Reliable Performance

Reliable performance is stated to be defined "relative to failure." (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008) Reliability is stated to refer to that which can be counted on to not fail while doing what it is expected to do. The role of failure in reliable performance is specified by three questions stated as follows:

(1) What do people count on?

(2) What do people expect from the things they count on?

(3) In what ways can the things people count on fail? (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

It is reported that answers to these three questions give one clues about what it is that could go wrong and what it is that one does not want to go wrong. (Weick and Sutcliffe, paraphrased) It is stated that the key words in all three questions is "what one can count on, not who. Reliable performance is a system issue, not an individual issue. Failures are connected. Small early failures steer subsequent events toward outcomes that no one expected." (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

IV. Three Specific Concerns of Managers in Regards to Failure

Managers are concerned with failure in three specific ways stated as follows:

(1) They detect small emerging failures because these might be clues to additional failures elsewhere in the system.

(2) They anticipate and specify significant mistakes that they don't want to make. In both cases, the preoccupation is warranted because the chain of events that produce failures can wind deep into the organization and be hard to spot. It takes more than attentiveness to what is going well if you want to stay on top of the complexity.

(3) A group's knowledge of a situation, environment, and the group itself is incomplete. (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

V. Examination of Resilience

Resilience is stated to be inclusive of the ability to:

(1) Absorb strain and preserve functioning despite the presence of adversity;

(2) Recover or bounce back from disruptive events -- as the system becomes better able to absorb a surprise and stretch rather than collapse, the "brutality" of an audit decreases; and (3) Learn and grow from episodes of resilient action. (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

VI. What is Mindful Management Really About?

Weick and Sutcliffe (2011) state that mindful organizing is "about listening, asking questions, and taking action to better understand a developing story. Communication among a team and asking questions as well as thinking at the same time they are acting enables a team to identify:

(1) Large threats in the making;

(2) Oversimplification,

(3) Attention that is distracted from current operations,

(4) Excess attention to anticipation at the expense of resilience, and (5) Deference to authority rather than to people with expertise. (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2008)

VII. 5 Keys for Mindful Leadership and High Reliability

The work of Gary (2011) entitled "5 Keys for Mindful Leadership and High Reliability" reports that the research on "high-reliability organizations (HROs)…spells out the concrete managerial implications of a mindful approach. Hospital emergency rooms, the flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units are examples of groups that have developed the ability to manage the unexpected better than most organizations. As Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe point out in Managing the Unexpected (2007), how mindful managers in HROs see things other managers miss; they ask questions that other managers never think of; and they make small interventions that other managers would deem a waste of time." (Gary, 2011)

Mindful managers are set apart from other managers by the following characteristics:

(1) Mindful managers track failures and especially the small ones. HROs continually ask four questions: What needs to go right? What could go wrong? How could things go wrong? What things have gone wrong? They also frame organizational goals in terms of mistakes that must not occur, and ensure that employees are keenly aware of organizational vulnerabilities. In so doing, mindful managers help create a learning culture in which employees are not afraid to admit their mistakes.

(2) Mindful managers resist oversimplification. Mindful managers encourage alternative frames of reference. They voice their doubts as a means of surfacing new information. They treat unexpected events as new information. And they constantly reassess their plans as the evidence changes.

(3) Mindful managers are sensitive to operations. HROs "reward managers who stay close contact to the operating system of the frontline activities," write Weick and Sutcliffe. And they encourage face-to-face contact with people on the frontline because this is "perhaps the richest source of discriminatory detail because of the capacity for timely feedback, the ability to convey multiple cues, the degree to which the message can be personalized, the variety of language that can be used, and the range of meaning that can be conveyed."

(4) Mindful managers maintain capabilities for resilience. HROs provide learning opportunities that enlarge employees' capability for action, so that they are able to not only identify more vulnerability, but also deal with them.

(5) Mindful managers take advantage of shifting locations of expertise. Your organization needs experts if it is to cope mindfully, but those experts must have a realistic view of the limits of their expertise. Moreover, authority does not always equate with expertise. Managers in a central position sometimes assume that if something serious were occurring, they would know about it -- and since they don't know about it, it isn't happening. (Gary, 2011)

Ronald M. Epstein (1999) states in the work entitled: "Mindful Practice" that mindful practitioners