Mindfulness Eats Culture and Strategy Before Breakfast

Peter Drucker famously said culture eats strategy for breakfast. He was right. But something eats culture first.

Sensations Run The Room

​​​​​​​Watch your team walk into the 9 AM Monday meeting.

The operations manager lowers himself into his chair slowly, shifting his weight to one side because his back has been aching for weeks. He's been sitting like that for days and it's shaping every interaction he has. He's become short-tempered, distracted. He just wants to get through this.

One of your best people, seven months pregnant, walks in differently than she did three months ago. She's good at her job. But right now she's adjusting how she moves with every step, and that constant physical discomfort is taking up mental space she'd normally give to the conversation.

And there's the guy in the corner who's a bit too quiet. A bit sluggish. You suspect he had one too many last night. He's not contributing much. He'll agree with whatever gets him out of the room fastest.

Every one of them is being moved by sensations inside their body. You can literally see it in how they sit, how they walk, and how they hold themselves.

And so are you.

Mindfulness is the ability to identify sensations within your body and how they impact mental clarity. The tightness in your chest before you open the meeting. The frustration sitting in your jaw when someone hasn't done what they said they would. The fatigue you're carrying from your own bad sleep.

When you notice what's happening inside you, you start to see it in others. But it begins with you.

If the people in that room can't notice what's happening inside their own bodies, they can't choose how they respond to those sensations. They just react. One goes quiet. One pushes too hard. One checks out.

And that creates your culture. Right there. Built in the body before the agenda is even opened.

Behaviour Makes Culture

Culture is the average of how people behave. If most of your team is showing up reactive, distracted, or checked out, that becomes the culture. No strategy survives it.

This is why organisations pour money into strategy and get stuck at execution. The strategy was fine. The people implementing it were being run by sensations they didn't know were there.

The Parole Board Problem

There's a well-known series of studies on US parole boards. Researchers tracked the decisions magistrates made across a full day of hearings. Parole denials spiked in the period just before a break, when the magistrates were hungry and fatigued, and dropped again after the break.

Trained legal professionals making life-changing decisions. And their rulings were being influenced by sensations in their body. They would have sworn they were being objective. They weren't. Nobody is.

Now think about your leadership team at 4 PM on a Thursday.

Notice, Don't Label

The key is to notice without labelling. The moment you say "I'm stressed because of the restructure" or "I'm tired because the kids kept me up," you've created a story. Now you have to deal with the story. And the story is always worse than the sensation.

I call this the Hit and the Hurt. The hit is what life does to you. The Hurt is the story you wrap around it.

I had a client with a severely injured back. Constant pain, trouble getting up stairs, dreading meetings. We worked on one thing: noticing the sensation without building the story. A week later he told me the physical pain was still there, but the emotional pain had dropped away. As he put it, the physical pain is nowhere near as bad as the emotional pain.

He didn't fix the Hit. He stopped creating the Hurt.

You Don't Need To Stop To Do This

You don't need to sit cross-legged. You don't need an app. You just need to notice. While you're packing the kids' lunches, sitting on the train, reading through emails. Just notice there's a sensation there.

When you do that, you put an ever so thin gap between you and the sensation. It doesn't drive your behaviour as much. The problem changes. You're no longer reactive.

Two Meetings

Picture a meeting where no-one is aware of what's going on inside their body. You'll see someone quiet and withdrawn. Someone boisterous. Someone trying to talk over everybody else. That's a dysfunctional team.

Now picture the same meeting where people have been trained to notice their sensations without reacting. What you get is a room full of people who can actually be present. They can hear what's being said. They can see what's in front of them without filtering it through whatever they're carrying. They don't need to force their ideas on the room.

The Chain

Sensations drive behaviour. Behaviour creates culture. Culture determines what strategy gets implemented.

That's why mindfulness eats culture and strategy before breakfast.