Mindful Leadership Conference

Session with Prof. Kathleen Sutcliffe

Manageing the unexpected

How can organizations successfully manage their environments despite permanent change? How can the unexpected and unforeseen be managed and what organisational skills do they need? - This was the question of this year's Mindful Leadership Conference "Managing the Unexpected - Organisational Mindfulness as Basic Competence for Successful Companies".

Joint session with Prof. Kathleen Sutcliffe

For the Mindful Leadership Conference we designed and conducted a joint session with Prof. Kathleen Sutcliffe from John Hopkins University. Kathleen Sutcliffe is the author of the book "Manageing the Unexpected". Together with Karl Weick, she has shaped the approach of organizing collective mindfulness based on her research on particularly reliable risk organizations. We have been working with Kathleen for years, sharing our experiences on the practical implementation of her concepts. The first step was a virtual video session with Kathleen Sutcliffe, which highlighted the essential characteristics of organizational mindfulness and clearly distinguished it from concepts of individual mindfulness. Afterwards Annette Gebauer illustrated the cultural development process in a chemical company and how the principles were put into practice over a period of 4 years - with all ups and downs.