Organization studies have long focused on the problem of understanding the possibility of pursuing effectiveness and resilience at the same time. An emerging perspective, reconciling mindfulness and routines, allows to address these contrasting goals: routines channel the exploratory nature of mindfulness, but they also support it by providing context to its enactment. Despite these results, available empirical evidence from mindful organizations has not helped understand how mindfulness can be supported by routines without losing its broader scope of attention. Moreover, an operational definition of mindfulness is still an open question.In this paper, we adopt an analytical framework allowing to break down routines into their sensing and reacting components. Using evidence from the flying practices of Tornado crews in the Italian Air Force, we show that mindfulness concerns the parallel activation and re-combination of these components, allowing the rapid deployment of responses but also the continuous reassessment of the situation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.