I came to a client to facilitate a workshop. Something pretty businessy. But before we got started, I started with a bit of a mindfulness guided practice. Why?

Research tends to show that people have better ideas when they first had a bit of a meditation session before coming up with new ideas.

But more importantly from a personal experience, doing something like meditation just calm you the fuck down! It makes you jump of your getting shit done tunnel vision and grind mode, and get’s back into a “I’m a fucking human mode”.

Back when I worked for a church, there was this tradition to either start or end a meeting with some prayer time. A lot of the time, this create a bit of zoom out moment, where you would come out of the usual problem and then see things from a bit more far away. (1)

Action question

What practices, like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spirituality, could you bring in your workplace or even service to help people be humans and not robots?

Footnotes

(1) Having more distance with what you do and see the wider implications of your work and what’s really important is definitely something we need more of if we want to make our services nicer for humans and the planet.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.