How Mindfulness Drives Better Design & Innovation
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Can mindfulness help us be more creative? Can we design better experiences and products because we are slowing down to connect in the present moment with ourselves and our stakeholders without any judgment? Can mindfulness help us imbue our artificial intelligence solutions with greater human meaning?
My personal experience of mindfulness suggested that being fully present creates a richness of creativity and impact that we are just now discovering. So when I heard of the book Mindful by Design by Caitlin Krause, I decided to sit down with her to get her perspective. Caitlin Krause is a globally recognized learning expert, author, and keynote speaker. In her Mindful by Design methodology she helps individual leaders and teams leverage mindfulness, storytelling, and design principles to connect more deeply with their audiences and communities.
H. Inam: What inspired you to write this book?
C. Krause: I was first inspired to write Mindful by Design by the desire to promote meaningful connection, internal & external. I sensed that our vital qualities of attention, innovation, clarity, focus and expression are being threatened by the pace and nature of daily life. I developed ways for leaders to overcome those obstacles, tapping into their ingenuity and motivation to make changes and take action with impact.
Each of us has an incredible amount of curiosity and imagination in us, which can transform our approach to problem-solving. Mindful by Design is a methodology for wellbeing and creativity, offering a way to effectively shift mindsets.
I work with many leaders who share they had conditioned themselves to succeed by force, jumping into this modern world that is fast-paced, demanding, and emotionally taxing and taking it by storm. They were meeting challenges head-on, absorbing anxiety, and then beginning to suffer a burnout, a sense of disconnection.
What I provide are strategies to reconnect, and to engage with the self and others in a more productive, efficient way. To focus on practices that enhance our natural creativity and sense of presence, leading us to be able to innovate.
Time has become our most precious resource, and data has been called the new oil, in this 4th industrial revolution. Both time and data tell a story, through our mindful intention. My work, for example, enables those using artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology to look at their objectives and processes, finding greater clarity, focus, and presence.
We have an invitation to recognize, and then look beyond, the trends and the hype that saturate our surroundings. While we engage in our busy and demanding days, we can’t forget how to go deeply and intuitively within, to listen, connect with ourselves, and to leave space for creativity to flourish. There’s opportunity here, and I work with individuals and teams to cultivate a sense of space, and to use it wisely. There’s a refreshing re-engagement, when they develop these practices.
I wrote Mindful by Design for many reasons, and deep down it is a book about connection and re-connection.
H. Inam: Tell me more about the designer approach to mindfulness, motivating the book’s title.
C. Krause: Mindful by Design draws its ideas from fields of neuroscience, evidence-based mindfulness practices, design and storytelling exercises, and more, in which it’s important to emphasize, with intention, that there is no one right way. I work with a variety of clients, including founders of small startups, CEOs of large multinational companies, school principals, researchers, artists, inventors and educators, guiding them to use a designer mindset. When we become the designer, we learn how to integrate meaning and context in our decisions, and we begin to recognize evidence coming from our quality of experience.
How can a leader make a wise decision when each choice has powerful consequences?
When an educator is designing a learning space, what setup gives learners the best chance to engage with the content and feel a sense of community and voice?
When looking to problem-solve, what mindset, approach, and exercises can lead to a breakthrough in the approach to the prototype?
What brings us “back to self”, even as we dive into all of these daily challenges?
Mindful by Design is a toolkit with approaches that invite you to become the agent of change and action, to involve yourself in the moment and to learn to appreciate the quality of what is unfolding when we fully connect. We all have this creative capacity to wonder and question, for example. How can we open up to that ability, using it to engage with what is unfolding around us?
Mindful by Design encourages each person to connect with their deeper sense of purpose, to trust, and to go beyond perceived boundaries and divisions, creating connection and bridges. Each individual is involved and empowered as a designer of personal and collective experience, also documenting and reflecting at each stage. This is a mindfulness saying: each moment is an invitation to learn and grow.
H. Inam: How does Mindful by Design differentiate itself from other models of design?
C. Krause: This Mindful by Design philosophy and set of practices remove blocks to our creativity and boost our connection capacity, leading us to invent more freely. It’s adaptive and uplifting, with stories that appeal to our sense of inspiration, which is the levity. And, it’s also highly practical, with evidence-based strategies and exercises you can implement right away, which brings gravity. This book extends in both directions, just like a tree itself, branches stretching up toward the sky, and roots forming a deep network in the earth. The tree is a strong metaphor.
Humans have an amazing adaptive, creative intelligence, and Mindful by Design enhances those creative skills and enables people to recognize and make the most of their chance to innovate and make impact, on their own and with teams.
Mindful by Design comes from a desire to recognize what is most remarkable about human ingenuity and allow each person, individually and collectively, to build on that. There’s both philosophical and historical background about the brain and the way we learn best, and there are individual and group exercises to practice, so there are always new ways to grow. It’s also useful for those leading trainings and workshops of their own, because it’s a toolkit groups can benefit from, to find the best ways to collaborate and for cooperative models, enhancing their resilience.
This learning applies to everyone, from students in a classroom to a group of adult learners working together in an organization. This is what builds innovative culture. Mindful by Design methodology provides so many ways to enhance creativity, even allowing us to shift our perspective and see within and beyond patterns. Our brains, naturally, like to recognize patterns, and it’s when the pattern breaks, and elements of surprise and discovery are part of the landscape, things start to get exciting. How can we invite ways to shake it up and let our creativity shine? What are our assumptions, and how can we start to reconsider them with an attitude of openness and discovery?
We also practice the prime leadership skills of presence and authenticity, so necessary in today’s society. To show up as your best self takes self-awareness, compassion, and vulnerability. It’s an act of patience and self-care when we express a commitment to show up as our best selves. We look at ways to shift our mindsets and adopt new viewpoints, reaching others and building understanding and meaning through these deeper insights. From there, we can impact our local and global world in a far-reaching way. And that’s tremendously needed right now.