Do you prefer mindful or transactional?

If we don’t pay attention, it’s easy to treat everything as a transaction: tick the box, plug the number in the excel sheet, get the work done. Do you hear yourself telling someone “just do your job!” Or does your boss tell you “can’t you just get it done?” “Just” is the sign of transactional thinking: this is just a customer, just a job, just a house, a computer, a car, a dog. “Just” means: fulfill the transaction and forget about meaning.

Mindful work is about wondering what is the meaning of each line in the checklist. Who is each customer? What is specific about them? In what unique manner can we help them achieve what they’re trying to do? Mindful means not narrowing down the transaction to get it done, but keeping in mind the full context: are we doing the right thing?

Organizations keep reverting to transactional thinking naturally – it’s their default mode. It’s easier to think that a file is just a file to go through rather than consider each file is a customer or an employee. The lean trick to think about what we do is, oddly, write standards.

Writing down how to best handle specific situations gets you thinking on:

1. What is the outcome of this job, for the customer and for my colleagues: what is good work, what is bad work? (As opposed to just get it done)
2. How can I best work to maintain the output? Is there a smarter way of doing the job so that I don’t have to backtrack and work is more fluid?
3. What are the really tricky part about doing this job well? What special knack, unique information or unusual parts should I use here?
4. Am I in good work conditions to do this right? Should prepare better doing the job before just launching into it?
5. What are the key, basic skills that will allow me to do the job well? Do I practice these skills every day, on and on again?
6. What can I change to create better outcomes for the customer in terms of safety, quality and delivery, and for the company in terms of safety, cost and flexibility?

The further up any organization you go, the more transactional things get. Contracts are written in legalese, people translate into people costs and itemized and budgetized, improvement efforts turn into roadmaps and maturity audits. This is necessary, because how can you run a larger business without clear interfaces, aggregated information and contractual relationships? But the risk is that only the transaction remains and management feels that “just do it” gets the job done. It doesn’t. It ticks the item on the list, but it won’t deliver the results.

Lean is about helping people think more deeply about how they work, for whom, with whom and how to reduce the waste work generates. Lean, by essence, is about working more mindfully and not being satisfied with “just” transactions. Executives who treat lean transactionally (“can I delegate implementing lean without having to learn all this TPS stuff with Japanese sounding words? Please? Is that too much to ask?) simply miss the point – and miss the results.

Ask yourself: Where could I have been more mindful today? What did I miss and why? What will I try different next time?