Mindfulness in projects

Abstract

Over the last decade, the ability to manage unforeseen or complex situations has been recognized as a key skill for project managers. Project management has been conceptualized as a problem in information, insofar as project performance depends on the ability to capture the information needed to make the right decisions in a context where this information is limited and sometimes changing. Mindfulness—the study of which has exploded in the management sciences over the last 20 years—may prove highly relevant as a meta-cognitive practice for improving the individual and collective performance of project stakeholders. This essay aims at sparking new avenues for research at the crossroads of mindfulness and projects and highlights promising research questions along seven research themes to be addressed in future studies. In this way, we hope to arouse the interest of researchers from the project and mindfulness communities and, thus, contribute to the structuring of mindfulness research in project contexts.