Attention management, not role management

Celebrated mindfulness researcher, Ellen Langer at Harvard, talks about how roles make us more mindless than mindful because we follow scripted patterns rather than stay present to the every changing now.

Before organizations realize this, people think clarifying or reinventing roles will help. It's logical based on industrial models of organizational performance based on the mythology that success only comes to those who can manufacture a completely predictable world. This turns out to be an incredibly unfulfufillable and unrealistic mythology in a world of unprecedented complexity and an unknowable future.

Mindful presence helps. It is far more useful to talk about how people should be managing their attention than how they should be managing their roles.