Mirabai Bush - Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in Organizations

A conversation with Mirabai Bush and Jeremy Hunter

Mirabai Bush : Jeremy, I thought we might begin with you talking about the course that you're teaching at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont, and how you've integrated mindfulness into Peter Drucker's understanding of management. Can you do that?

Jeremy Hunter : Well, it started eleven years ago through your help - everyone should know that Mirabai Bush is a real pioneer in this field and has been quietly working for decades to bring this sort of material into the greater public awareness. Mirabai Bush is in a large way responsible for the work that I've been able to do at the Drucker School so, I want to publicly thank her.

In the late 1990s my graduate advisor, a colleague and I moved from the University of Chicago to Claremont, to the Drucker School. The Drucker School is a school of management, not a school of business. Even though he's considered to be the founding father of management, we tend to think of it as business management, but what Drucker was really interested in primarily was how you create a functioning society. Not a utopian society, because he was well aware of human darkness and how that can manifest, but his primary interest was how to create a society that simply worked. In his writing he talked about a lot of things which are germane to mindfulness, and in a way speak the language of mindfulness without ever uttering the word mindfulness. He understood that in order to manage anything else, managers had to first manage themselves. At that time I was doing research on people who were successful professionals in the world who were also long term mindfulness practitioners. In the late Nineties finding those people was kind of a challenge, and that's where the Center For Contemplative Mind helped a great deal, unearthing these people. My research group and I had the pleasure of meeting many of them--they were Fortune 500 CEOs and world famous architects and scientists and writers and journalists and all kinds of very interesting people who use knowledge to make their living. One of the themes coming out of these conversations was the importance of meditative practice. They would say something like, My life is so complex, I'm being pulled in so many directions at once, if I didn't have something to keep me grounded and centered and present, I think I'd be dead. At some point in these conversations, I realized that mindfulness could answer the question that Drucker had posed about how managers manage themselves.

So I set about trying to craft a language of mindfulness that suited a managerial or business audience - a language that didn't sound too flakey, or, as I like to say, that wouldn't arouse the immune system of a manager. Because I think that somebody with a great deal of responsibility who has influence and power over others should be mindful of their own actions and the results those actions create. So my target client was a conservative engineer who is probably a 40 or 50 or 60 year old male, who wouldn't necessarily show up at a meditation center or an ashram, but whose life would tremendously benefit from having mindfulness skills. So I designed an experimental 7-week course called Managing Your Experience or something like that. It sounds very esoteric now, but it became a big hit, and now that one 7-week class has blossomed into 28 weeks of mindfulness training, developing organizational or executive capacity.

I should also say is that we don't focus just on doing mediation practice, but we also learn a set of very systematic practices which I call Live Fire. Live Fire is when the bullets are real, not made of rubber. The student or participant can use these practices in action in daily life. I was trained in mindfulness to be mindful in action in a very systematic way, to start to see what your mind is doing while it's doing it and either intervene or somehow shift out of that reaction. So in the class there is certainly sitting on a cushion and doing the good work of a dedicated formal mediation practice, but the bulk of the class is using the student's own life as the laboratory and then seeing what happens, so it becomes very immediate and relevant. We don't have third person case studies. We have first person case studies-- that person's life and work.

We work with four basic categories of practice: Return to Attention; Reset Attention; Direct Attention, which is mindfulness; and Transform Attention, which is learning how to expand attention to see a wider view.

Return to Attention is a basic mediation practice in which you return your mind to an object, but you can also do that in daily life. If you're in a meeting and you notice your mind starting to wander, or someone is talking to you and you start thinking about dinner, you see that your mind is wandering and you bring it back to the person speaking. One of my favorites is Reset Attention, which we could call Beginner's Mind. Not only did Peter Drucker talk about the importance of managing one's self, but he talked a great deal about the fact that as a culture, modern western societies had over-focused on training analysis and thinking and under-emphasized training perception and seeing. There is a stream of his writing that talks about how Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, but in this new context of knowledge work, we have to also say, I see therefore I am. And not only was he a lover of Zen paintings, but there's material that suggests he used those to train himself to see more clearly, and he understood that the importance of seeing clearly was essential in a changing world in which our maps of reality become outdated. We may be working from an outdated map that brings about results that we don't want. In order to deal with reality more effectively we have to cultivate the ability to see more effectively. And so there was already this intellectual context that Drucker provided.

He talked about the importance of not only developing perception but also disciplining emotion as a necessary key to making a living. So there were these sprinklings, if you interpret what he's saying, of a kind of mindfulness practice. There was a practice he called systematic abandonment, which is an organization having a regular inventory of what it's doing and why, and asking whether it is providing a good result. If it isn't, the organization needs to change, to free up resources to do something better. Well, that's mindfulness on an organizational level if you ask me. So, I think Drucker understood the importance of perception, the importance that human beings habituate to doing things and forget why they're doing them and then suddenly run into results that they don't want.

We need to shift out of that, and he laid down a framework for presenting mindfulness in such a situation. I had a very enjoyable lunch with his daughter a few weeks ago and she told me that he was not a meditator and he wasn't a Buddhist, and I think he probably thought that stress was good because it motivated you to get off the couch. But he understood the importance of seeing clearly, which I think was one of Drucker's own great traits--his ability to see oftentimes three or four decades ahead what was going to happen.