 Good afternoon. I'm going to talk about today mindfulness and how it can be useful in agile transformation, agile culture context. This was originally was a 45 minutes session, but moved to 20 minutes. So I'll try my best in terms of creating any experiential part. But my primary target is to create awareness and give pointers and create enough motivation so that you will go back and explore this topic. Is that OK? So quickly about why I am qualified to talk about this topic. Basically, professionally, I'm an electronics communication and computer science engineer. Worked in IISC on military avionics, light combat aircraft. Then in Motorola, different parts of the world. Then worked at Mindtree for nine years since the beginning until it became about 10,000 people organization. Then started our own consulting with various IT companies on agile organization transformation, leadership development, project management coaching areas. This on the professional side. On my other interests, I play tabla. I like a lot of music in this kind of classical music. I used to do a lot of gymnastics. So coming to know what is mindfulness? Is there, I mean, how many of you do any kind of meditation? Can you raise your hand? That's quite encouraging. How many of you know about mindfulness? OK, a little bit. See, essentially, you're all sitting here. Are you aware of that now? Right? And you're all breathing. Are you aware of that now? Can you become aware of that now? So just before I ask that question, were you aware of breathing? Even though it was happening, we were not aware. Can you be aware that there is a sound coming from the other halls? No, yes. Earlier, it was not. That means we have a capacity to be aware. 20% is submerged, not so visible. So there are some hard aspects, and there are some soft aspects. When you come to, say, agile culture, any practices. So what are some of the hard aspects which are so more visible in an agile context? Typically, there are all these things, practices, ceremonies, tools, metrics, which are, we can kind of get a feel for this much more easily. We can visually see them happening. What are some of the not so visible part? There are all these aspects. Shared vision in the team, motivation levels of individuals in the team, communication, collaboration, team engagement, customer engagement, self-organizing nature. All these are very subtle, very subjective, not very measurable, not very visible. But just like iceberg, which moves because of the undercurrents, not because of the wind on the surface, really the success of agile is in this bottom of the iceberg, not so much on the top of the iceberg. And most of the time, we focus so much on the top of the iceberg, which are practices, tools, metrics, because they are more visible. And we tend to neglect the bottom of the iceberg, which is the real make. See, until 90s, people thought that people with high IQ become very successful. Until then, when the Daniel Goldman came and showed that through his research, emotional intelligence is the one which actually contributes to the success of the people. EQ has typically the four or five dimensions. The first thing is called self-awareness. That means I being aware of what drives me, what motivates me, what puts me off, and my behavior, how it impacts somebody else, I being aware of that is the self-awareness. The second component of emotional intelligence is self-regulation. That means I moderate my behaviors, my actions with this awareness. The third one is called self-motivation. That means I have driven by my own internal inspiration rather than external motivations. The fourth one is called empathy, which is my ability to judge the emotional makeup of other people. That means I'm able to see what drives somebody else, what puts off somebody else, and I have that awareness, that is empathy. And the fifth component in emotional intelligence is called social skills. See, empathy is an interpersonal skill. Social skills is a group skill. So these five are the most important in the emotional intelligence dimension. Now, taking this metaphor of iceberg, we want to get the results at the end. And at the top of the iceberg are the kind of management practices, I would say, which are estimation, planning, tracking, risk management, time management, quality management, all these kind of things. They are kind of a hard science or a hard aspect. And they talk about what to be done. And they need IQ because these are information, knowledge, and you can learn it through training. These are more visible part. If you go one level below the iceberg, I say these are leadership aspects. They are soft in nature. And they are about how to do these things in a behavioral way. And they need EQ, emotional intelligence. You can't develop emotional intelligence through a classroom training. You actually need coaching because they are contextual. They are a behavior change in individuals. So many of these things like delegation, empowerment, communication, motivation, influencing, you talk about all these leadership dimensions. There are actually 67 leadership traits defined. So all those things are kind of the bottom of the iceberg. And if you now look at mindfulness, it comes even below this. It's even more deeper part of this iceberg, which is even very subtle. So it's very subtle. It requires awareness. It is about MQ. Just like IQ, EQ, this is mindfulness quotient. That means how aware I am. With this awareness, I can perceive things better. If I'm not able to perceive things better, I may be solving a wrong problem. The better my perception, I'll be more able to deal with the real problem. With perceiveness, then I need to process. I process non-judgmentally. That means I won't put a filter and then bias. With much more openness, I process that information. Then I perform with empathy, with connecting to people. So this is where actually mindfulness fits. So that means if you bring mindfulness, you can impact your emotional intelligence and your external practices and achieve results much better. So this is kind of putting this culture into place at individual behavior, team behavior, at an organizational context. So this is where mindfulness fits into this whole transformation. And many organizations have started adopting this in a very big way. One of the big movers is Google. They have defined a program called Search Inside Yourself. And because of the popularity of that, they have created an external organization called Search Inside Yourself Institute. You can go to this website. They have published a lot of information. A lot of good videos are there in that. So this program is very popular right from engineer level to earlier the Eric Smith level. And this has three components, mindfulness practices, certain meditation practices, and other soft skills practices, emotional intelligence, and a neuroscience evidence of how it works. They have tied up with Stanford University to bring evidence of these practices, how it changes brain, how it changes neural connections, how it changes chemistry in the body or the hormones, because of which, how our moods change, how our thinking changes, how our behavior changes. So it's a phenomenally impactful because it brings that scientific evidence behind that. So now coming to deeper question, where does really software happen? It really happens in people's mind, isn't it? Software is not happening in computer. Computer is a dumb terminal. It just captures whatever we type. Real software is happening in people's mind. This is a very big imperative we need to understand. That means this engine is very highly variable from morning to evening, based on who tells what, my mood changes. Based on what happens in the family or in the traffic, my behavior in office is getting affected. So we are dealing with this context. So I won't be able to do some of these exercises. I circulated some sheets. Essentially this is about simulating two sequential processes in our brain and two concurrent processes and measuring how much time it takes. If you do that kind of exercise, they are available as games. You might have done it in many contexts. So you can notice that just by simulating two sequential processes into parallel process, our productivity drops 30% to 50% because this engine has to multitask. Now imagine in a real life of a software engineer, how many processes will be concurrently running? If the workplace environment is very conducive, such kind of disturbancing processes could be reduced, then the productivity improves. So the real productivity improvement and quality improvement is in the touch time of mind, what we call as engagement of mind because it's not about whether I'm sitting eight hours in the office. It's about how much of my mind is engaged in this transformation because this is the transformation engine. So agile manifest is basically, we are trying to look at better ways of developing software. So the key imperative for, sorry, productivity, quality, you know, you talk about all those. It's really in the touch time of the engagement of mind. So if you have to improve this, actually mindfulness plays a very big role. So there are some quick insights about neuroscience, how the research says, by doing this mindfulness practices, they have shown that the brain frequency changes from a high frequency to what they call theta state. That means it's a deeper relaxation, calm mind. And when you are calm, we perceive better. Have you noticed that? If I'm tense or if I'm stressed or if I'm in a bad mood like anger, et cetera, I won't even notice anything around me. Whereas if I'm calm, I notice so many things. So that's the bottom of the iceberg. See, bottom of the iceberg, you can't measure, but you can sense it. So if you have to sense it, our mind has to be calm. Second one, these practices, actually they have seen that there is a change happens in the brain itself. The center of the brain, which is called hypothalamus, is called primitive brain, which actually drives fight or flight instinct. That means for every situation, I'll be subconsciously thinking about, should I run away from this or should I fight this? That creates a lot of stress, anxiety, all the rash behaviors basically. So by mindfulness practices, they have seen that gray matter reduces in this hypothalamus. That means my tendency is to be become stressful, my tendency to become anxious, tendency to become more negative moods reduces. And they also seen that gray matter increases in the neocortex, which is called the intellect brain or the thinking brain. My ability to think improves. Another thing they have seen is there are something called neurotransmitters, which are like hormones. You might have heard about dopamine, which people take for antidepressant. So there are many such things. They have seen 35 such hormones get balanced by mindfulness practices. Oxytocin is called love and pleasantness. Serotonin is about self esteem and confidence. Opiates like a painkiller, so many things. That means I can become more calmer. I can deal with myself better. I can become more effective in my own performance and interactions with people. So again, I want people to do this exercise. This is a very simple part in, for example, Search Inside Yourself program, is just the watching of breath. If you close your eyes, sit relaxed, observe your own breath, you can get into very quick meditative practice. Very simple one. So this is kind of a academic exercise. You can map to agile values and principles. We talk about individuals and interactions. So awareness and empathy impacts this significantly. We talk about working software, which actually through focus and motivation, we can drive towards bringing that output. Customer collaboration, empathy is a big factor in customer understanding. Responding to change, again, awareness and empathy. Similarly, you can look at agile principles. I have just highlighted few of them where mindfulness can have significant impact, changing requirements, working closely with teams and customers, motivated individuals, face-to-face conversations, sustainable pace. That means I won't get tired out. I won't burn out, you know? Self-organizing teams, retrospectives, you know, many of these kind of things. So there are a lot of case studies. I've just given pointers. I'll be putting this slide on the website so you can take a look at that. One of the closer here is a company called Happiest Minds. They have created a wonderful framework for mindfulness. We work with them closely. So we talk about being mindful and doing with mindfulness. So one is inside, one is external. So a lot of programs, a lot of organizations are now actually picking this up. And we have seen many results. If people are willing, we can do a five-minute exercise. Can we do? Okay, very good. So now that means, can you all sit relaxed? Sit with your back straight. Because there is a great science behind this, sitting, keeping your back straight. Actually, spinal column is like an antenna which feeds into the brain. I mean, these are all now becoming more aware of that. And keep your palm upwards like this on your thigh. So just now relax your shoulder. You always notice that whenever you are tense, shoulder and neck become tense. That's why people say that the person is, you know, shouldering huge responsibility. Right, because it shows up here. So close your eyes. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and just exhale fully. Relax your shoulder and neck. Leave your hands hanging freely on your thighs, facing up, sorry, keep your palm facing up on your thighs. Relax the shoulder and your neck. Take another deep breath and exhale fully. Take your attention to your breathing. Just observe how the air is moving in and moving out. Just observe how the nostrils are slowly opening up and closing, movement of nostrils. Continue to observe the breath. Bring back the attention to breath again. Continue to observe the breath. Feel the air passing through your nose. Feel your chest expanding and contracting. Bring your attention to your nose and the breath. Keep observing the breath. Slowly open your eyes. Was it a little bit relaxing? It was too short, I know. How many minutes did you meditate? It's about four minutes. Were you hearing the outside sound? That one. People wanted to do this mind switch exercise. Which one you wanted? Yeah, I think it's time out. But maybe if people are interested, I can do whoever wants to proceed, you can proceed. Thank you very much. Whoever has got that sheet and want to do that exercise, you can stay back.