This past week has been incredibly tough for the Avos!.  The highlight (if you can call it that), was on Tuesday evening. After a very serious service failure, I had to call an emergency debrief including every person involved in the incident.

I decided to use the conversation as an opportunity to begin building the concept of ‘Mindfulness’ at Avo. The concept fits so appropriately in our business. The theory of ‘Mindfulness’ made me realize that Avo is a company that lives in a state of ‘constant surprise’. Seldom do we deliver anything that is simply a repeat of exactly what has come before, and so trying to get people to mindlessly respond reactively to things is not an appropriate way for us to exist as a business.

Although I have always been clear in my own head that we are in knowledge worker space, I hadn’t really connected that every singe one of us is employed to think for a living! We think our way out of trouble, and think ourselves into success.

So instead of us using the conversation to point fingers, I wanted to know how the incident had challenged our thinking, and where we had experienced mindfulness, and where we had experienced mindlessness. We used the conversation as a tool to increase our ability to approach situations in a more mindful way – and to help us think more effectively when exposed to new and challenging things.

Part of building mindfulness in a business is to have the right mechanism to grow thinking ability over time. I know our weekly Kudos and Cockup session is the ideal forum for us to take this further. So I brought the concept into the session on Friday morning. I talked the team through the concept, and then talked to them about how we need to being Kudos and Cockup back into a courageous and authentic space where the toughest things are laid on the table for the benefit of the individuals concerned.

Once Jeanette has completed her project around lifting the purpose and profile of our Blueprint DNA process (of which Kudos and Cockups plays a fundamental part), I am going to turn my energy toward making it a much more effective vehicle to build mindfulness at Avo.