1. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0025-1747.htm
New wine into
Putting new wine into old bottles old bottles
Mindfulness as a micro-foundation of dynamic
capabilities
¨
Christian Gartner 253
Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Helmut Schmidt University,
Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
Purpose – This paper seeks to provide a critical review of the theoretical conception and practical
implications of the notion of mindfulness (introduced to organization theory by Karl Weick and
colleagues). As this concept aims at clarifying the mechanisms of knowledge creation and knowledge
re-configuration, the notion of mindfulness is used and refined to contribute to explaining some of the
micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities. Thus, the paper aims to show how putting “new wine”
(mindfulness) into “old bottles” (dynamic capabilities) can add to the clarification of the nature and
development of dynamic capabilities.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores and reviews the literature on mindfulness as
well as dynamic capabilities and engages in conceptual development based on this literature. Based on
this literature review, propositions are developed that regard mindfulness as a micro-foundation of
dynamic capabilities.
Findings – It is shown that the literature neglects opportunistic behaviour, issues of power, and
self-contradictory aspects of the principles for mindful organizing. It is argued that mindfulness
should neither be understood as an attribute of an entity nor be simply contrasted with routine, but
should rather be depicted as a medium and outcome of social practices which involves enacting power
and drawing pre-reflectively on a background that is built up by routines. Five propositions describe
how such a refined understanding of mindfulness can contribute to explaining the micro-foundations
of dynamic capabilities such as “sensing opportunities and threats”, “seizing opportunities”, and
“reconfiguring a company’s assets”.
Research limitations/implications – While there are apparent parallels between the notion of
mindfulness and the concept of dynamic capabilities, there are also some notable differences. The
discussion of dynamic capability puts more emphasis on routines that introduce instability and
ambiguity rather than coping with (externally posed) the unexpected. As a consequence, the
propositions regarding the relation between mindfulness and dynamic capabilities should be further
elaborated and validated or refuted empirically.
Originality/value – First, the paper delineates the limits of (organizing for) mindfulness which has
been applied quite uncritically by organization scholars. Second, it derives five propositions that
highlight previously neglected mechanisms of how dynamic capabilities develop, therefore adding to
one’s understanding of the micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities.
Keywords Organizational theory, Critical thinking
Paper type Conceptual paper
“Good management of the unexpected is mindful management” (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 17).
1. In search of the constantly enhancing organization
Responses to the question “How do companies in fast-moving business environments Management Decision
Vol. 49 No. 2, 2011
achieve the capacity for continuous reconfiguration?” are manifold and propose things pp. 253-269
like the implementation of “dynamic capabilities”, “a resilient organization”, “a q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0025-1747
learning organization”, or “mindful management”. Despite the differences in detail all DOI 10.1108/00251741111109142

2. MD of these concepts refer to constantly enhancing a company’s action repertoire,
49,2 especially in circumstances of unexpected change. Hence, the relevant questions for
organization research and management are: how do organizations manage to act
flexible and how do they enhance their knowledge base in order to create a sustained
competitive advantage? If the “how” is addressed, research is directed to the
micro-foundations (skills, processes, procedures, rules) that generate such qualities
254 that emerge on an organizational level (Gavetti, 2005; Teece, 2007; Ambrosini and
Bowman, 2009). Enquiries into dynamic capabilities have only recently begun to
explore the micro-foundations of a dynamic capability (Zollo and Winter, 2002; Gavetti,
2005; Teece, 2007; Hodgkinson and Healey, 2009). This paper will show what
mindfulness as a concept that discusses (managerial) cognition and its relation to
knowledge creation and organizational learning can contribute to the understanding of
how a company constantly enhances its capacity to act by developing dynamic
capabilities.
Although mindfulness has emerged as an important notion in organizational
analyses (Weick et al., 1999; Fiol and O’Connor, 2003; Levinthal and Rerup, 2006; Weick
and Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007; Valorinta, 2009; Romme et al., 2010), there are only a few hints
for exploring the linkages between mindfulness and organizational learning or
dynamic capabilities: Weick (2001) mentions that the notion of an attitude of wisdom –
which is quite similar to mindfulness – will be interesting for organizational learning
and knowledge creation. In a similar vein, Zollo and Winter (2002) suggest to explore
the link between organizational learning – in terms of the way individuals generate a
set of ideas on how to approach old problems in novel ways or to tackle new challenges
– and the mechanisms through which organizations develop dynamic capabilities.
What they call the “cyclical evolution of organizational knowledge” resembles Weick’s
ideas about how people cope with variations by making use of (in terms of an
evolutionary theory: selection) existing routines (retention). However, while Zollo and
Winter (2002, p. 343) assert that this process “may involve substantial creativity”,
Weick’s (1979, pp. 224-8) argument was and still is (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007, p.
157) that it is not so much creativity, but remaining an ambivalence regarding the
results of the retention process (knowledge in the form of retained experiences, existing
cognitive maps, etc.) that is key to continuously adapting to changing conditions.
Weick and Sutcliffe (2006) as well as Levinthal and Rerup (2006) have discussed the
contribution of mindfulness to learning in the sense of encoding ambiguous stimuli in
ways that match action repertoires with changed conditions. They sketch some of the
building blocks for a framework of organizational learning that is based on
mindfulness. However, they are rather concerned with defining mindfulness and its
demarcation from mindlessness than with developing a theory or model of
organizational learning, resilience and continuous adaption. Recently, Romme et al.
(2010) have incorporated mindfulness in their simulation model and find that it
positively effects the development of dynamic capabilities. However, they understand
mindfulness rather as a communication style than as a specific cognitive activity that
can be facilitated by certain ways of organizing.
Besides these brief references there is no elaboration of the relation between
mindfulness and dynamic capabilities. This paper aims at explicating this relation by
using a refined notion of mindfulness to explain the micro-foundations of dynamic
capabilities. In order to achieve such a description on a conceptual basis, the paper will

3. engage in exploring the literature on mindfulness and dynamic capabilities. With New wine into
reference to mindfulness the focus will be on a critical review of the use of the concept
by Weick and colleagues, because these scholars have provided seminal contributions
old bottles
to the study of mindfulness in the area of management and organization theory. With
reference to dynamic capabilities this article will draw on Teece’s (2007) framework as
it is the most comprehensive to date for analyzing the micro-foundations of capabilities
development. The paper adds a critical review of mindfulness to the existing literature. 255
The outcome of this critique is a refined conceptualization of mindfulness, an account
that does not present mindfulness as having no dependencies with issues of power or
conflicts of interests, or having no unintended consequences, or being the result of a
conscious, cognitive process only. The central message of this article is that such a
refined understanding can offer new insights into the development of dynamic
capabilities, because it clarifies mechanisms of knowledge creation and knowledge
re-configuration. As a first step, it seems to be reasonable to explore such a conceptual
claim from a theoretical perspective and base it on a review of the existing literature.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: section 2 discusses the concept of
mindfulness and its usage in organization studies. In section 3, the implications of the
concept for (thinking about) practices are outlined, followed by a discussion of the
limitations of (thinking about) mindful management and organizing in section 4.
Section 5 provides propositions that relate the notions of mindfulness and dynamic
capabilities. Section 6 indicates conclusions and directions for future research.’
2. The concept of mindfulness
The concept’s roots lie within philosophy, medicine, medical psychology, and social
psychology. Ellen Langer (1989, 1997), a psychologist, provided important
contributions to the understanding of mindfulness. She argued that mindfulness is
heterogeneous construct, yet a mindful approach to any activity includes three
characteristics:
(1) the continuous creation of new categories;
(2) openness to new information; and
(3) an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.
The notion of mindfulness has been made popular by Weick and others. They adopt
Langer’s definition of mindfulness and emphasize its usefulness for studies that
address managing and organizing in the face of uncertainty in order to enhance an
organization’s resilience and enrich its action repertoire by learning and growing from
previous episodes of resilient action (Weick et al., 1999; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006,
2007). Mindfulness is defined as the “capability to induce a rich awareness of
discriminatory detail and a capacity for action”. Mindlessness is characterized by
fewer cognitive processes, acting on “automatic pilot”, precluding attention to new
information, relying on past categories, and fixating on a single perspective (Weick
et al., 1999; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006).
It has frequently been noted that categories (or concepts) play a crucial role both in
organization theory and in the discussion of mindfulness (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006;
Weick, 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006): whereas organizing is about institutionalizing
specific behavior by providing actors a set of cognitive categories and a typology of
action options (Tsoukas, 2005, p. 124), mindfulness is about seeing the limits of a

4. MD category and of categorizing itself (Weick, 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). Seeing the
49,2 limits is achieved by the simultaneity of knowing/belief and doubt, respectively,
treating past experiences with ambivalence (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007).
Obviously, although not made explicitly, they make reference to Weick’s (1979,
pp. 224-8) previous ideas about how unforeseen vulnerabilities, unexpected leverage
points, or details that foreshadow new consequences can be seen. This aspect is crucial
256 because it specifies the relation between knowing, mindfulness, and enactment: If
knowledge is understood as a cognitive function of the mind while its content is
manifested in concepts/categories (Weick and Putnam, 2006) and if people tend to
self-fulfilling prophecies in their enactments (Weick, 1979) as well as retrospective
justifications (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007), then mindfulness is the only way to overcome
cognitive distortions or inertia and enact changed or new ways of behavior. The
quality and scope of the action repertoire is related to better and poorer concepts such
as that better concepts sweep in more inter-connected details so that people know more
fully what is happening (Weick and Putnam, 2006). Because of this capacity of
introducing new concepts to existing ones, mindfulness is like constantly “putting
some new wine into old bottles”, thereby enabling practitioners to reflect on and
change the rules of performance they are entering into and socializing in.
The above-mentioned qualities and functions are located at the level of individual
experience, ranging from understanding mindfulness as a cognitive capability, a
personality trait or cognitive style. Weick’s ontology is that organizational phenomena
emerge out of interaction between individuals. Thus, mindfulness occurs on the level of
individual cognition and action, but can be facilitated (or inhibited) by organizational
structures and practices of organizing. Organizing for mindfulness is described as a
“joint capability” of five principles that guide practice:
(1) reluctance to simplify interpretations;
(2) sensitivity to operations;
(3) commitment to resilience;
(4) under-specification of structure; and
(5) preoccupation with failure (Weick et al., 1999).
In later versions “underspecification of structure” has been replaced by “deference to
expertise” (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007).
In other words, organizing for mindfulness means that small failures have to be
noticed (5) and that their distinctiveness has to be retained rather than lost in a
category (1). If people want to notice such nuances they must remain aware of ongoing
operations (2), be able to locate pathways to recovery (3), and attend to the expertise to
implement those pathways (4) (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006).
These five principles were initially derived from an analysis of the literature on high
reliability organizations (HROs). HROs operate almost faultlessly in a fast-changing,
complex, and unforeseeable environment, where the scale of consequences precludes
learning through experimentation (Weick et al., 1999). Thus, mindfulness has been
introduced to organization studies as a concept explaining error-free, reliable
performance. It is only recently that mindfulness has been discussed in the area of
adaptive learning (Eisenberg, 2006), and has been seen as crucial to pro-actively
establishing a flexible range of behaviors (Fiol and O’Connor, 2003; Levinthal and

5. Rerup, 2006) or enhance a firm’s ability to innovate (Vogus and Welbourne, 2003). New wine into
Weick has pushed the idea in another direction by linking it with wisdom and the old bottles
ability to focus attention on present details, without being dependent on categories,
codes, or encoding processes (so called “nonconceptual mindfulness”; Weick and
Putnam, 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). Although all of these studies still focus on
how mindfulness establishes reliability, they also try to show how mindful
organizations remain open to change their existing action repertoire. However, the 257
link between mindfulness and a company’s capability to re-configure its resource base
– a definition of dynamic capabilities – has not been explicated on a conceptual level
so far. Instead, the studies make the implicit and unwarranted assumptions that
mindful individuals can directly change collective routines or that processes for
mindful organizing cause routine-changing behavior. These lines of argument
culminate in the imperative for practitioners: good management is mindful
management (i.e. the more mindful your people and organizing processes are, the
better). The following sections will critically examine these claims and clarify the
relation between mindfulness and routines.
3. Impact of “mindfulness” for (thinking about) management practices
First, theoretical implications are outlined; recommendations for management
practices are described afterwards, while being aware that this is not a
comprehensive list.
3.1 Mindfulness as an aspect of managerial cognition and action
Theory building in the field of cognitive management studies, especially managerial
cognition, refers to managerial information processing, beliefs, and mental models that
serve as a basis for decision making. It is argued that limits and biases regarding
people’s perceptions and interpretations produce a definition of a situation that in turn
form the basis for (managerial) decisions (Porac and Thomas, 2002). Cognitive
distortions and inappropriate mental maps are of special interest, because they may
thwart change (e.g. Tripsas and Gavetti, 2000). More conceptually, Weick observes
(1979, 2006; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007) basically three drivers that cause cognitive
distortions:
(1) people tend to be subject to self-fulfilling prophecies;
(2) simplifying complex phenomena; and
(3) retrospective justification reducing cognitive dissonance.
The limited capacity to attend to and process information results in a simplified
perception of a problem. If there are beliefs or predictions about how an event is
structured or will turn out, self-fulfilling prophecies are likely, i.e. the prediction causes
itself to become true. Part of this self-enforcing mechanism is the tendency to search for
arguments or evidence confirming and justifying the choices made earlier
(retrospective justification). This strategy can also be applied if people have to cope
with two contradictory pieces of information, in order to reduce this cognitive
dissonance. These drivers result in searching too narrowly, overlooking small events
that indicate negative trajectories, reinforcing traditional mental models, losing the
vividness of awareness, not communicating and – as an outcome – limit an
organization’s capacity, because people rely on learned behavior and are committed to

6. MD an action (Weick, 1979; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007). The notion of mindfulness can
49,2 be read as counteracting the drivers of cognitive distortions and the inertia of
inappropriate cognitive structures because new categories/mental maps are created
continuously. Mindfulness ensures openness to new information beyond the followed
trajectory. This function is also enforced by being aware of more than one perspective
during the course of action and yields a dynamic mechanism. Mindfulness as a
258 knowledge context or a cognitive style of acquiring, sharing, and using knowledge is
also a mode of creating (enacting) reality. By seeing the limits of a category and the
limits of choosing specific categories the way decisions are made, or unexpected
events, and anomalies are treated is becoming more flexible. Arguing for such a
relation between mindfulness and enactment also means that all these organizational
phenomena are not only (passively) perceived or discovered, but also (actively)
constructed. Although managers are tempted to perpetuate old categories, they are not
doomed to escalating commitment (Staw, 1981) and inertia.
In contrast with some economic theories that assume bounded rationality while
people perceive and process information and that people behave opportunistically
(Williamson, 1985), Weick’s view of cognition and behavior in organizations is quite
positive, which is reflected by words such as “mindfulness”, “resilience”, “expertise”,
“respect”, “wisdom”, “reflection”, “thriving”, “updating” (Weick, 2003). In his writings,
people appear to be the main – and sometimes only – resource that is capable of for
with information overload, ambiguity, complexity, and unexpected events. And they
do so not for the sake of their own interest, but in order to keep things going on, even in
the face of “the unexpected”, breakdown or equivocality. The fact that they sometimes
make wrong decisions or fail is neither caused by “self interest seeking with guile” nor
by “calculated efforts to mislead, distort, disguise, obfuscate, or otherwise confuse”
(Williamson, 1985, p. 47). In Weick’s analyses wrong decisions and failures are caused
by the ongoing flux of (organizational) life that cannot be captured by plans or rational,
mental calculation: mistakes and fallibility are inevitable in organizing (Weick, 2003).
3.2 Implications for practices of managing and organizing
Following Weick’s discussion, the implications on management practices are quite
different from those suggested by traditional management models that are based on
economic theories (like transaction cost or principal agent theory): it is not personal
interests, (formal) roles and responsibilities, or goals that determine the course of
action, but it is what experts know and how they can contribute to solving the
challenge at hand. Expertise is more respected than what the hierarchy, authority,
plans or goals prescribe (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 148). If mindfulness is
established, people do not need to be monitored permanently because respectful and
trustful interactions are the norm, and there will hardly be a mismatch between a
manager’s interests or goals and those of shareholders or employees because the latter
work hard in order to enhance the organization’s capacity to act. Consequently, they
reject rational choice theorems that result in management practices such as stating a
strategy and goals in the first place and elaborating on plans whose application is
monitored within hierarchical settings afterwards (Weick et al., 1999; Weick and
Sutcliffe, 2007). Moreover, planning can do more harm than good because it
unwarrantedly simplifies the complexity of organizational challenges, enforces the
generation of specific expectations that lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, narrow what

7. is noticed and limit the repertoire of possible actions especially in the face of novel or New wine into
unexpected events (Weick, 1979; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). Instead of planning, old bottles
categorizing, and prescribing what people should do (via rules, processes, IT-based
procedures, etc.) the implications drawn from Weick’s writing direct to a form of ad hoc
structuring that aims at facilitating respectful communication between knowledgeable
experts (for positive as well as negative impacts of information technology on
mindfulness, see Valorinta, 2009). 259
Putting the five principles for mindful organizing into practice is not easy since, it
asks for counterintuitive behavior (e.g. pay attention to failures not successes; get
better at being reactive rather than proactive or improving plans). In addition, an
organizational culture must be established where reporting of failures is without
blaming individuals is fostered, where values defer to expertise in order to enable
change, and where learning is part of its institutionalization (Weick and Sutcliffe,
2007). Yet, there are some frugal tools for auditing how well an organization has
already implemented the five principles and for further enhancing the capability of
mindfulness. For example, a nine-item-questionnaire addresses how strong a firm’s
mindful organizing practices are by asking respondents to evaluate assertions like “We
talk about mistakes and ways to learn” or “We discuss our unique skills with each
other so that we know who has relevant specialized skills and knowledge” (Weick and
Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 103). These questionnaires for auditing are accompanied with
recommendations for small wins in mindful organizing, e.g. the advice to implement a
briefing protocol called STICC (for “situation”, “task”, “intent”, “concern”, “calibrate”)
as it is known from models of naturalistic decision making. Its major benefit is step
four, which asks people to think about and watch out for small events, failures,
anomalies or, in general, details that would change the situation, thus requesting to
change expectations (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 156). However, besides anecdotal
evidence and case studies, there is no empirical evidence about the effect of these tools.
A different approach to putting the five principles into action was provided by
Vogus and Welbourne (2003), who examined the impact of certain HR practices on
the establishment of the principles. For example, the use of skilled temporary
employees will create divergent ideas and a reluctance to simplify interpretations.
Positive employee relations will create a climate that facilitates intensive ongoing
communication and sensitivity to operations, and an emphasis on training values
recovery skills and resilience and builds the competence to enable them. Vogus and
Welbourne (2003) find that firms that utilized these human resource practices
innovated more frequently, and firms with more innovations had higher stock prices
over time. However, they admit that they did not test principles of mindfulness, but
only hypothesize and test the direct relationship between HR practices and
innovation (Vogus and Welbourne, 2003). Thus, it is not clear at all whether they
really captured the management practices that establish the principles for mindful
organizing.
4. Limitations of (thinking about) mindful management and organizing
So far, the concept of mindfulness has been used by organization research in a
non-critical way. If it is discussed critically, then the line of argument is about the costs
of mindfulness: opportunity costs of invested cognitive capacity that cannot be
invested elsewhere and the costs of not using established routines more mindlessly

8. MD (Rerup, 2005; Levinthal and Rerup, 2006). Yet, there are more limitations regarding the
49,2 theoretical and practical implications and they are in conflict with the positive view of
mindfulness as it is presented by Weick and others.
4.1 Emphasis on positive effects neglects opportunistic behavior and issues of power
The notion of mindfulness is biased with a positive and optimistic stance. It is argued
260 that a refinement of concepts, acquisition of more details, and the treatment of no news
as news (thus: information) increase mindfulness (Weick and Putnam, 2006; Weick and
Sutcliffe, 2006). For such a line of argument, it must be implicitly presupposed that
more information is neither confusing nor increasing complexity, and that confusion is
neither deliberately caused by opportunistic actors nor that people could hesitate or
resign in the face of ever-increasing complexity. There is an implicit assumption in the
literature on mindfulness that organization members are all experts who can perceive
and interpret anomalies and novel events or, in general, the unexpected rightly – and
that they will act like archangels. Mindfulness as depicted by scholars like Weick and
Sutcliffe is positive in terms of cognition and action, because whenever people spot
unexpected leverage points or vulnerabilities, they do not exploit them for their own
agenda, but in the interest of solving the task at hand and serving the group or
organization. Information asymmetries, diverging interests or opportunistic behavior,
which request considering notions of power, domination, contracting, or other forms of
conflict resolution, do not appear. Instead, activities that become interlocked are
conceived of as equal, i.e. there are no dominant or self-interest seeking units within the
network of loosely coupled systems in and between organizations. Yet, if information
overload or obfuscation and opportunistic behavior are acknowledged as quite
common phenomena in organizations, it follows that not every subtle cue, anomaly or
small event makes it to the (strategic) agenda of (top) management (e.g. Dutton, 1997;
Rouleau, 2005). This is not only due to a limited capacity of mindfulness or even
mindlessness (as argued by Levinthal and Rerup, 2006), but because mindfulness also
facilitates the usage of influence tactics. On the other hand, leveraging power relations
is constitutive for achieving mindfulness because bringing small events to the level of
organizational attention requires leveraging resources of power. Resources are, for
example, technical expertise and social skills that help to understand the issue and
persuade others of its benefits as well as being able to use an organization’s rules and
procedures for coordination and allocation such as investment or budgeting rules (see
Crozier and Friedberg, 1980). At least, we have to acknowledge that power plays a
crucial role for acting mindfully.
4.2 Unintended consequences of the principles for mindful organizing
The positive bias on the level of behavior is mirrored by a one-sided description of the
principles for organizing. The principles themselves are questionable and can
contradict the establishment of mindfulness by producing unintended outcomes that
encourage opportunistic behavior.
Weick himself (2001, p. 144) observes that people “are most tempted to act in a
mindless fashion [. . .] when they are preoccupied with something”. The “something”
can be “preoccupation with failure” because sustained conversations about failure
threaten workers’ identities as long as failure is associated with incompetence and
blame (Eisenberg, 2006). Such outcomes will impede respectful communication

9. between knowledgeable experts. Preoccupation with failure is then revealed to be a New wine into
mixed blessing that can facilitate both mindfulness and mindlessness. If people old bottles
constantly scrutinize and criticize what is going on, respect, consistency and trust can
hardly be established. Instead, colleagues are likely to perceive continuous attention
and criticism as being monitored and controlled which in turn creates, reinforces, and
increases distrust and opportunistic behavior (Goshal and Moran, 1996; Goshal,
2005).There is empirical evidence for these mechanisms that produce what Kets de 261
Vries (2004, for example) calls “suspicious organizations”, which are characterized by
an atmosphere of distrust and paranoia because they are preoccupied that something
can go wrong and are too focused on external threats. Constant scrutiny is close to and
can lead to repressive practices and structures that facilitate exactly those “bad
management practices” that Weick seeks to avoid.
Another example for the self-contradictory tendency of the principles for
mindfulness is emphasizing the importance of expertise. This can also be read as a
preoccupation, and therefore as supporting mindlessness instead of mindfulness,
because experts are treated as more valuable than a novice or (advanced) beginner. It is
interesting that Eastern accounts of mindfulness argue just the other way round (and
Weick is not only familiar with these accounts, but is also in favor of them; Weick and
Putnam, 2006): mindfulness is depicted as “a beginner’s mind” instead of “an expert’s
mind” because expertise tempts people to use prior experience and to search solutions
within or next to the field they are already experts in, which in turn confines
possibilities (Suzuki, 1980). In other words, preoccupation with expertise can favor
reusing old concepts over exploring new ones. If expertise is not only understood as an
attribute or trait of individuals, but is addressed on the level of practices or interlocked
behavior, it can be understood as a group or organization phenomenon. If it is put in
supra-individual terms, the relation to the discussion of core competencies and core
rigidities respectively path-dependencies becomes obvious: a given expertise (or
competency) in a specific subject might lead to further investments for exploiting this
area, thus yielding self-reinforcing mechanisms that might result in a lock-in that
impedes the adaption to changed (environmental) conditions (e.g. Leonard-Barton,
1992).
4.3 Mindfulness versus routine, mindful routines or routines for mindfulness?
The question how mindfulness relates to routines is decisive for understanding the
connection between mindfulness and (dynamic) capabilities because there is a broad
consensus that (dynamic) capabilities consist of routines (e.g. Winter, 2003; Helfat et al.,
2007; Teece, 2007; Easterby-Smith et al., 2009). Thus, if mindfulness contradicts the
notion of routines, it would not be a useful concept for explaining (the
micro-foundations of) dynamic capabilities. On the other hand, if mindfulness
contributes somehow to the (re)configuration of routines, it is a dimension that must
not be neglected in a discussion of the nature and development of dynamic capabilities.
Originally, mindfulness and routine behavior are presented as opposing each other:
mindlessness is either associated with automaticity, routine, habit, stability, and
continuity (e.g. Weick et al., 1999; Fiol and O’Connor, 2003), or mindfulness is depicted
as distinct from routine because both draw on the same resources, therefore they
cannot function simultaneously (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2006). In contrast, it is argued for
grades of mindfulness and relations between mindfulness and less-mindfulness in such

10. MD a way that they make use of each other (e.g. Bigley and Roberts, 2001; Rerup, 2005;
49,2 Levinthal and Rerup, 2006). Basically these are attempts to link mindfulness and
routine by showing either that routines are (to some extent) mindful, i.e. they consume
more attention than was first thought, or that mindfulness needs routines because they
relieve the mind from attending to too many objects or provide the raw material for
recombination. For example, re-fitting a routine according to the specifics of the
262 situation (anomalies, small deviations, etc.) at hand is an effortful accomplishment that
consumes attention and awareness – in other words, mindfulness (Levinthal and
Rerup, 2006). It is interesting and at the same time confusing that Weick and Sutcliffe
(2007, p. 61) agree with such a line of argument: they affirm that enacting routines
involves mindful activity; thus, mindless and routine cannot be synonyms. However,
Weick and Sutcliffe (2006) do also stress that routines and mindfulness are distinct
because they cannot occur simultaneously. They suggest that routines go along with a
single distinction and simple interpretations, whereas mindfulness is associated with
multiple distinctions and a variety of interpretations. Hence, they present routines as
repeated activity which can be conducted “simple-minded”, i.e. the accomplishment
does not make use of a significant amount of conceptual complexity that derives from
considering situational discriminators.
In order to avoid confusion and clarify the conceptions of mindfulness and routine,
we should be aware of the distinction between notions of awareness and
distinction-making, and between the level of the individual and the collective level.
First, being mindful means to be aware of many situational discriminators.
However, the crucial questions is, whether agents have to be fully aware of the
distinctions they apply in order to see anomalies. Following Polanyi (1966) and Searle
(1995), there is a “background” of distinctions that actors pre-reflectively draw upon in
order to perceive, think, interpret, and understand the world[1]. Routine in the sense of
behavior that has been repeated again and again in a variety of situations creates this
background, whereby more routine enhances its scope and quality: the greater the
repertoire of situational discriminators, the more refined the distinctions are and the
more appropriate the judgments and actions are (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005). It is only
in this way that experts are prevented from falling into a competency trap, i.e. favoring
old concepts over exploring new ones. If agents repeatedly engage in the same activity,
but without significantly changed circumstances they can only build up and draw on a
limited background. Thus, they might be fully aware of what they are regularly doing,
but we would not call it mindful behavior.
Second, the notion of mindfulness is associated with individual cognitive activity,
whereas routines are depicted as collective patterns of behavior (e.g. Winter, 2003).
Following the analytical distinction between the individual and the collective, activities
in organizations are described in the sense of agents enacting, encoding or exploiting
routines, respectively the other way round in the sense of routines that enable
mindfulness. Such a view is applied by Levinthal and Rerup as well as Weick and
Sutcliffe. By doing so, they implicitly argue for a dualism between agency and
structure, with the (more or less) mindful agent applying routines (respectively
routines that enable an agent to act mindfully). By drawing on Giddens’ (1984) idea of
the duality of structure, we can see that the principles for mindful organizing are
preconditions or the medium and results of agents’ activities. They are a set of rules
that actors draw upon in the practices that enhance or diminish a feature of a social

11. system that is called action repertoire for managing the unexpected. Mindfulness does New wine into
not appear as an attribute of an entity (the mindful individual, group or organization) old bottles
but as an outcome of social practices that shapes further practices. The practice lense
also brings issues of power and their relation to mindfulness (as discussed above) into
the focus of analysis.
5. Mindfulness and the nature and development of dynamic capabilities 263
Dynamic capabilities refer to the firm’s ability to alter the resource base (e.g.
Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). The emerging literature on dynamic capabilities is far
from reaching a common understanding concerning even its most basic aspects: the
definition, nature, and development of dynamic capabilities (Di Stefano et al., 2010). In
order to overcome these shortcomings, there is an increasing interest in explicating the
micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities (Zollo and Winter, 2002; Gavetti, 2005;
Teece, 2007). It is frequently argued that cognition plays a crucial role in the
development of dynamic capabilities: as managerial initiatives are directed by
cognitive orientations, the development of dynamic capabilities is contingent upon
managerial action (e.g. Narayanan et al. 2009; Easterby-Smith et al., 2009). Most of the
discussion about the psychological micro-foundations of capability development is
grounded in theories of human cognition and agency that privilege conscious
reasoning and dispassionate analysis as means of overcoming cognitive bias and
inertia (Hodgkinson and Healey, 2009). In a similar vein, the few studies that consider
mindfulness argue for a causal and positive relationship between becoming
consciously aware of the reasons for successes or failures of prior performances and
the extent of developing dynamic capabilities: the more conscious awareness of root
causes, the better/more dynamic capabilities are developed (Romme et al., 2010).
However, this article suggests that overcoming cognitive distortions is not only a
conscious cognitive process but must consider a pre-reflective dimension of cognition
as well as issues of power. To develop more plausible models of the micro-foundations
of dynamic capabilities it is necessary to revisit the understanding of the nature of
mental processes such as mindfulness and their relation to action, routines, and
changing (collective) routines.
By drawing on Teece’s (2007) suggestion that dynamic capabilities can be
disaggregated into the capacity to sense and shape opportunities and threats, the
capacity to seize opportunities, and the capacity to reconfigure a company’s intangible
and tangible assets, several propositions regarding the relation between mindfulness
and the three capabilities suggested by Teece can be derived.
Treating past experience with ambivalence as a major characteristic of mindfulness
helps to sense opportunities and threats because it enables individuals and
organizations to scrutinize scan for, interpret, and learn about small events,
anomalies, unforeseen vulnerabilities or unexpected leverage points that are early
warning signals of threats as well as opportunities. As a consequence, organizational
actions are more sensitive to operations as well as on alert regarding changes in the
environment. Arguing from the perspective of individual mindfulness it is not the
content of new information that may contradict extant beliefs and then lead to an
adaption of mental maps but the cognitive style that shapes whether the cue is
perceived as critical or as irrelevant. Arguing from the perspective of organizing for
mindfulness it is not only people’s perceptions but the processes and practices of

12. MD organizing and managing that constitute whether an event counts as critical, favorable,
49,2 or irrelevant. Organizational practices and processes that foster mindfulness (e.g.
conducting STICC protocols) should also enhance the development of dynamic
capabilities. In fact, there is evidence in the research on dynamic capabilities that
resembles practices known from the literature on organizing for mindfulness. For
example, discussing the reasons for successes and failures in prior experiences, is a
264 way of unveiling some of the causal ambiguity that pertains to most organizational
activity. Thereby the cyclical evolution of organizational knowledge that leads to
dynamic capabilities is initiated (Zollo and Winter, 2002).
P1. Being more mindful enhances the capability of sensing opportunities and
threats because treating past experience with ambivalence means scrutinizing
what has been learned by scanning for and (re-)interpreting early warning
signals.
It has been argued that cognitive structures inhibit the unbiased evaluation of
opportunities and produce the unwanted effect that actors look for alternatives only in
the neighborhood of the current practices, thus unintentionally suppressing
unconventional initiatives (Burgelman, 2002). The overcoming of biases, delusions,
or hubris in order to seize opportunities appropriately is a challenge that has recently
entered the literature about dynamic capabilities (Nelson and Winter, 2002; Teece,
2007; Hodgkinson and Healey, 2009). Mindful behavior counteracts the drivers of
cognitive distortions and inertia of inappropriate cognitive structures and results in
changes of routines. It does so by sweeping in more interconnected details and
introducing new concepts to existing ones, thereby enabling practitioners to constantly
reflect on and change the rules of performance they are entering into and socializing in,
so that people know more fully what is happening. This mechanism of mindfulness
explains a crucial feature of dynamic capabilities: the phenomenon that dynamic
capabilities enable a deviation to take place from the knowledge that otherwise would
have arisen from experiential learning (Pandza and Thorpe, 2009).
P2. Being more mindful enhances the capability of seizing opportunities by
counteracting the drivers of cognitive distortions and inertia of inappropriate
cognitive structures.
Mindfulness increases vividness and resilience, i.e. it encompasses the ability to recover
and preserve functioning despite the presence of adversity. This means that mindfulness
enables an organization to reconfigure already available resources and to improvise by
integrating new resources in order to cope with changed conditions. In addition, being
more mindful is to attend to nuances, anomalies, etc., with greater stability; therefore,
such events do not get lost during further processes of organizing. This means that
mindful organizing not only ensures the detection of opportunities and threats, but also
stabilizes the way solutions to the adversity are implemented in the day-to-day
production. The change in social practices is possible since mindfulness and power are
interwoven, i.e. mindfulness involves the capacity to (re)produce social practices.
P3. Being more mindful enhances the capability of reconfiguring assets to
maintain competitiveness because of its capacity to stay focused on events
and transform social practices.

13. Following the line of argument that mindfulness should rather be understood as an New wine into
outcome of social practices that shapes further practices than as an attribute of an entity, old bottles
the relation of routines and mindfulness has been reconsidered. Such a view can shed
light on a difference proposed by Winter (2003) who asserts that “ad hoc problem
solving” must be distinguished from routine, and therefore is not relevant for the
development of dynamic capabilities. If an organization has learned how to solve
problems constantly ad hoc by reproducing practices that enable such “ad hoc problem 265
solving behaviors”, we can easily call this feature of the social system a routine that
facilitates a company to constantly enhance its action repertoire to address changing
environments. Thus, the crucial question for organization theory and management
practices is not whether assumption regarding personal of behavioral characteristics
(e.g. opportunism, mindfulness) are right or wrong, but rather whether “good
management theories” can create “good management practices” that in turn justify the
positive assumptions drawn by the respective theory. First affirming signals are
identified by the research on “positive organizational scholarship”. For example, Dutton
and Glynn (2008) provide an overview of studies that show how positive emotion (e.g.
joy, happiness, contentment), positive meaning (e.g. seeing ones’ job as a calling,
assessing one’s career as valuable), and positive connections (e.g. connections with others
that are trusting, respectful) develop an environment that allows mindful, resilient,
respectful, wise, reflected, thriving, competent action. However, I have also argued that
the principles for mindful organizing can produce distrust, paranoia, hysteria and the
like. Thus, we have to acknowledge that people’s practices amend as well as reproduce
the stock of practices on which they draw and that there are thresholds that demarcate
“tipping points”, where practices of mindful organizing become practices of mindless
organizing. Boundary conditions (e.g. profit versus non-profit organization; economic
crisis versus boom; small anomalies versus emergencies; availability of slack resources)
might play a mediating role for the tipping points.
P4a. “Good management practices” that facilitate positive emotion, meaning, and
connection increase the (re)production of mindfulness as a medium and
outcome of social practices.
P4b. Boundary conditions influence the “tipping points” that demarcate when
“good management practices” decrease the (re)production of mindfulness as a
medium and outcome of social practices.
6. Conclusions
The paper reviewed the notion of mindfulness critically, especially its application
within organization studies, and shows how putting “new wine” (mindfulness) into
“old bottles” (dynamic capabilities) can contribute to the explanation of the nature and
development of dynamic capabilities. By arguing that a concept of power is missing
and that the principles for mindful organizing can turn out to enforce practices that
contradict the characteristics of mindfulness the notion of mindfulness is refined. It is
suggested that scholars should put more emphasis on practices as depicted by social
practice theory, in order to be able to analyze how power relations are mobilized and to
capture the tipping points of processes of organizing and managing. Hence, more “new
wine” (power, unintended consequences, social practice theory) is put into “old bottles”
(mindfulness). If both scholars and practitioners want to understand why some

14. MD organizations seem to adjust and enhance their capacity to act more effectively than
49,2 others, it is important to look at mindfulness on the level of practices and how they
evolve.
While there are apparent parallels between the notion of mindfulness and the
concept of dynamic capabilities, there are also some notable differences. The
discussion of dynamic capabilities is not only concerned with managerial (cognitive)
266 activity that introduces new categories and changes routines, but also with change
routines, i.e. (second or high-level) routines that change ordinary operational routines.
In addition, it is more focused on how to initiate market changes. Studies in
mindfulness are more interested in how to discover unexpected events in ongoing
operations rather than creating them and they are focused on internal changes rather
than influencing markets.
Even more “new wine” could be put into the “old bottles of organization theory” if
insights from other disciplines, for example medicine, regarding the nature and
mechanisms of mindfulness were considered: fatigue, dogmatism, lack of opportunities
to practice mindfulness, unexamined negative emotions (and the lack of forums to deal
with fears), failure of imagination, and the (economic, social, or temporal) pressure to
act all limit mindfulness (Epstein, 1999). Thus, the absence of these factors is a
precondition for mindful behavior and management practices should aim at reducing
them. Considering such issues might well lead to propose more than the five principles
that are suggested by Weick and others. The “positive organizational scholarship”
movement might be a helpful resource for identifying boundary conditions for
mindfulness (e.g. viewing one’s career as flourishing or stuck might impact the
preoccupation with failure; cf. Dutton and Glynn, 2008).
There is still some work to do regarding the conceptual rigor of the notion of
mindfulness. As outlined in this paper, Weick and colleagues provide a wide range of
definitions, possible outcomes, and interrelations with other constructs. One of the
contributions of this paper is to have discerned these similarities and interrelations, but
also the limits of the concept’s explanatory power. Future research might refine the
propositions regarding the relation between mindfulness and dynamic capabilities and
validate or refute them empirically.
Note
1. Owing to space limitations, the relevance of Polanyi and Searle can only be indicated: Searle
(1995) as well as Polanyi (1966) try to explain how typification or categorization is possible
without getting stuck in the search paradox. While Searle argues that a “background”
consisting of non-intentional structures must exist, Polanyi refers to a mode of knowing in
which actors draw from a proximal term (e.g. the body’s sensory system), of which they are
not focally aware, to the distal term (e.g. the object that is perceived). Both scholars depict a
mechanism that argues for a mutual constitution of pre-reflectively processes, i.e. perceiving,
sensing, feeling, thinking without consciously processing predicative or propositional
representations, and being consciously aware, whereby the former builds the basis (or
background) for the latter.
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Corresponding author
¨
Christian Gartner can be contacted at: christian.gaertner@hsu-hh.de
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