Collective mindfulness in a regenerating organization: Ethnographic evidence from Roskilde festival. (March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Vendelø, Morten Thanning; Rerup, Claus
• Is Part Of: Safety science. Volume 123(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-03
• Subjects: Collective mindfulness -- Organizational mindfulness -- Regenerating, scaling and temporary organizations -- Volunteers; Industrial accidents -- Periodicals; Accident Prevention -- Periodicals; Safety -- Periodicals; Travail -- Accidents -- Périodiques; 363.11
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2019.104537
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0925-7535

Abstract

Highlights: Collective mindfulness is a dormant infrastructure for performance improvement in all organizations, but mindfulness has mainly been empirically studied in large, well-established, structurally integrated organizations. The focus in this work has been on how professionally homogenous groups at one hierarchical level are occupied with the pursuit of mindfulness (e.g., nurses, physicians, military personnel, engineers, fire-fighters). Hence, we ask: How is collective mindfulness enacted and sustained in non-permanent organizations? We explored that question through an ethnography of the regeneration and scaling of a Crowd Safety Organization. Our findings illustrated how collective mindfulness is regenerated in a non-permanent organization. We make three contributions to the literature on organizational mindfulness. First, we showed how the Crowd Safety Organization regenerated a mindful organization consisting mainly of volunteers by establishing clear roles across the four layers of the organization and then clearly communicating and enforcing role expectations. For the bottom layer, which consisted of volunteers with limited knowledge and short-term commitment to the organization, communication of role expectations happened during training immediately before the festival, and direct instructions during the festival. In contrast, layer 2 and 3 role expectations were communicated through mentoring and participation in practice. Second, our study showed that the five subprocesses of collective mindfulness were unequally distributed across the four layers of the Crowd Safety Organization. In particular, we did not find evidence of reluctance to simplify interpretations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise at the bottom layer. To contribute to collective mindfulness the Crowd Safety Organization trained this group of people to focus on pre-occupation with failure and sensitivity to operations. Overall, we illustrated how mindfulness was accomplished across a multi-layered organization in a non-professional context. Third, collective mindfulness is often thought to be a stable phenomenon. We cast further light on the need for organizations to manage variations in collective mindfulness. In our context, variations evolved due to temporal participation by many organizational members, for some it had the consequence that they did not craft the experience needed to be mindful. Others collected experiences in similar organizations but with different practices. Further, some volunteers became reluctant to accept the authority of the formal organization, and developed their own local practices. Abstract: Collective mindfulness has mainly been empirically studied in large, well-established organizations while few researchers have looked at collective mindfulness in non-permanent organizations. We addressed that gap by conducting an ethnographic study of the regeneration of the Crowd Safety Organization at Roskilde Festival, an annual outdoor music festival. Our findings show that the Crowd Safety Organization regenerated a mindful organization consisting mainly of volunteers by establishing clear roles across four hierarchical layers of the organization and clearly communicating and enforcing role expectations. Furthermore, we found that Weick and Sutcliffe's (2015) five subprocesses of collective mindfulness were unequally distributed across the four hierarchical layers of the Crowd Safety Organization. In particular, at the bottom of the organization we found no evidence of mindfulness in three of the five subprocesses, including reluctance to simplify interpretations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise. Collective mindfulness is often conceptualized as a stable phenomenon but scholars have suggested that collective mindfulness varies over time and space. By studying collective mindfulness in a non-permanent organization, we cast further light on how organizations manage variations in collective mindfulness.