Mark Graban opened the session with an honest disclosure. Dave Kippen, the presenter, had been dealing with a widespread internet outage at his home for the past hour and a half. He had relocated to an undisclosed parking lot with better cell signal so the webinar could happen. The audio might cut out. The video might pixelate. They were going to try.
The irony of that opening — Dave was about to spend the next 45 minutes talking about mindfulness, equanimity, and how leaders react to stressful situations — wasn't lost on anyone. The webinar itself became a small live demonstration of the topic. Could the presenter remain steady through a situation that would have rattled most people half an hour before going on air?
Dave, as it turned out, could. The internet had failed. His wife was running around the house frustrated about her shows and her Alexa. He took a shower. He sent Mark a note. He drove to the parking lot. The work got done. Not without it being unpleasant, he was clear about that. But without the unpleasantness becoming the story. The framework he was about to walk through is what made the difference, and the framework is what this session was about.
Dave Kippen has spent 15-plus years as a Lean leader, change agent, coach, and educational instructor. He has coached more than 250 people through Lean 101, 102, and 103 classes, and facilitated over 100 Kaizen events across the U.S. and Europe. He is bronze certified through the SME/AME/Shingo Prize/ASQ partnership. About three years before this session, he began a parallel journey into meditation and mindfulness — initially to address things outside of work where his own reactions weren't quite where he wanted them to be. Someone pulling out in front of him in traffic. Overreacting to small frustrations. Worrying about the past or the future in ways that didn't serve him.
What he found is that the work he did on himself outside of the office came back into the office in ways he hadn't anticipated. The same disciplines that helped him not react to bad drivers helped him not react to bad news from a global CI assessment. The same disciplines that helped him be present at the dinner table helped him be present in coaching conversations. The crossover between mindfulness and Lean leadership turned out to be much deeper than he had initially expected, and this session is his working summary of where the two overlap.
Dave Kippen has served as a Lean leader, change agent, coach, and educational instructor for the past 15-plus years. He has coached more than 250 people through Lean 101, 102, and 103 classes and facilitated over 100 Kaizen events across the United States and Europe. He is bronze certified through the SME/AME/Shingo Prize/ASQ partnership. He has been on a meditation and mindfulness journey for the past three years that has deepened his passion for improving the human condition. His stated ultimate goal is to help end workplace suffering by making the workplace more engaging, fun, and meaningful for employees at all levels.
Dave opened by clearing away common misconceptions, because the word mindfulness carries enough baggage that the actual practice can be hard to see.
Mindfulness, as Dave practices and teaches it, is not religious. The teachings have roots in Eastern traditions, but nothing he was going to share required adopting a religious framework or accepting anything on faith. Everything he discussed is experiential. The practices encourage you to test them for yourself rather than trusting the instructor. "Please don't trust Dave with blind faith," he said. The framework works because you can verify it by trying it.
Mindfulness is not about being happy all the time. The popular framing treats it as a kind of perpetual joy — living in the moment with a smile on your face. That framing misses the point. Dave was clear that mindfulness is about being able to experience whatever is actually happening — joy and suffering, comfort and stress, pleasant and unpleasant. The goal isn't to feel one way. It's to be present to feeling whatever you're actually feeling, rather than reacting unconsciously to it.
Mindfulness is not about spending a week in a Nepalese cave or finding an enchanted forest. Most practitioners haven't done anything that exotic. The work happens in regular life — at desks, in conference rooms, in parking lots when your internet goes out and you have to present a webinar. The practice is available wherever you are, in whatever circumstances you're in.
Dave's working definition of mindfulness has three parts.
A true reflection on what's going on around you right now in the moment. Not what's happening across the country, not what happened earlier, not what might happen later. What's actually happening in your immediate space, right now.
Examining what's happening inside your own skin in real time. This is a curiosity practice, Dave was clear. The same curiosity that drives good continuous improvement work — the willingness to ask why, to investigate without assumptions, to keep a beginner's mind — applies to investigating your own internal state. What sensations are present? What thoughts are passing through? What's the emotional weather right now?
The intersection of three tenets: presence, equanimity, and impermanence. These three concepts were the spine of the rest of the session. Each one has direct application to Lean leadership in ways Dave walked through specifically.
Dave's bottom line on what mindfulness produces, in his own words: the ability to experience the causes of joy and of suffering. He acknowledged the word "suffering" carries baggage, particularly outside the Eastern philosophical traditions where it's the standard term for the full range of negative emotional experience. When he uses the word, he means stress, anger, anxiety, frustration — the whole catalog of difficult feelings, packaged into a single shorthand. The goal isn't to eliminate suffering. It's to see it coming, recognize it when it arrives, and have a moment of choice about how to respond.
The first tenet Dave walked through is the foundation for the other two.
Presence, in mindfulness practice, is noticing the raw data of the current moment. The phrase was deliberate. Raw data — not interpreted data, not summarized data, not the processed version of the current moment that your brain usually serves up. The actual sensory information that's arriving right now, before your brain has done the work of categorizing it.
Dave ran the audience through a short experiential exercise to make this concrete. Several quick observations, with the chat encouraged to share what came up.
First: visual. What's in your immediate field of view right now? What's there that you haven't noticed in a while? The chat lit up with responses — a snowy landscape, the corner of a desk, family photos, things people walked past every day without seeing.
Second: external touch. Take a sip from whatever drink is near you, or pick up a pen and write your name. Where did the cup touch your lips first? Top lip or bottom lip? Which finger had the most pressure on the pen? Have you ever thought about that in your entire life? The point wasn't the answer. The point was that these are sensations available to you every second of every day, and almost no one notices them because they've become background.
Third: sound. What can you hear right now if you stop and listen? The chat populated with road noise, a refrigerator hum, a clock ticking, a dog snoring, "reggae music on YouTube at low volume to keep the dogs calm while I'm attending the webinar." All of these were available to the listeners the whole time. None of them had been the focus of attention until the question was asked.
Fourth: internal sensation. What's happening inside your body right now? A crick in the neck. A bit of tension in the shoulders. Heartbeat. The pressure of standing at a desk. The faint buzz of tinnitus. The temperature of a hand against a laptop.
Dave's point with the exercise was that all of this raw data is always present. Your senses are functioning continuously. Your body is producing sensations every moment. The reason none of it registers most of the time isn't that it isn't there. It's that your brain has trained the input out of conscious awareness as a survival mechanism. You can't pay attention to everything at once. The mind triages.
The question Dave asked next was the operational one. In the moments when you're truly present to what's happening right now, what can't you also be doing? The chat answered quickly: worrying about the future, fretting about the past, surfing your phone, unconsciously reacting to something. The answers got at the deeper point. Presence isn't just about noticing more sensory detail. It's about occupying the present moment fully enough that the past and the future temporarily lose their grip on your attention.
This is, Dave noted, why mindfulness gets recommended for stress and anxiety. It isn't because the practice eliminates the underlying conditions. It's because while you're genuinely present to the current moment, you can't simultaneously be lost in anxiety about something that isn't happening right now. The antidote is structural, not therapeutic. It works because of how attention itself operates.
Dave's small reframe on a phrase everyone uses: instead of telling someone "take a breath" when they're getting worked up, try "feel the breath." The first phrase is information — you're going to breathe anyway. The second is an invitation into presence. Where does the air hit your nose? How does your chest feel as it rises? The shift from "take" to "feel" turns a verbal pacifier into a doorway.
Dave's hypothesis on the connection to leadership work: if you can be more present to what's actually happening in front of you, you'll choose a better path forward. The body and senses, in this framing, are leading indicators of what your mouth or brain is about to do. If you can notice the rising frustration before it becomes a comment you regret, you have a moment of choice. If you can sense the impulse to jump in and rescue a struggling team member before you actually jump in, you can decide whether the rescue is helpful or whether letting them work through the discomfort would serve them better.
Dave shared a small story to illustrate this. A young employee on his safety team had been appointed team lead and was about to do his first formal report-out to plant leadership. The kid had no positional authority and limited public-speaking experience. The presentation started rocky. Dave felt the impulse rise — jump in, save the kid, smooth over the awkward parts, make sure the message landed.
He didn't. He noticed the impulse, sat with it, and let the moment unfold. By the time the report-out was done, the young team lead had said everything Dave would have said. The presence — sensing his own urge to act and then deliberately not acting — turned a moment where Dave could have undermined a developing leader into a moment where the leader got to develop.
This pattern repeats constantly in coaching work. The instinct to fill silence, to provide the answer, to rescue the conversation, to keep the meeting moving — all of it is well-intentioned. All of it can also be exactly what prevents the other person from doing the work they need to do. Presence is what creates the gap between the impulse and the action, where the choice to do something different becomes available.
The second tenet builds on the first. Equanimity, roughly translated, is the ability to balance emotional reactions rather than be carried away by them.
The mechanism Dave walked through is what mindfulness teachers call feeling tones. Anything that arrives in your awareness — an email, a thought, a word, a piece of news, the taste of your morning coffee — gets assigned a feeling tone automatically, in the first half-second of the encounter. Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The assignment happens before conscious thought. It's hardwired. You can't stop it.
What you can do is notice it.
Dave ran another quick experiment. Three scenarios, three stimuli. For each, the audience was asked to identify the immediate feeling tone — pleasant or unpleasant.
A weed. Most people: unpleasant. Some: neutral.
A red X on your KPI board. The reactions were more mixed. Some people found it unpleasant, some neutral — particularly if the metric wasn't theirs personally. As Mark observed in the moment, "the data is what it is, the rational side of my brain says hey, let's dig in and work on it." But the immediate feeling tone, before the rational response kicked in, was still there.
Your boss asks you a question and you have to say "I don't know." This produced the widest spread. Pleasant for some, deeply unpleasant for others. The variable was the boss. With a good boss who treats "I don't know" as an opportunity, the feeling tone could even be pleasant. With a different kind of boss, the feeling tone was the poop emoji.
Dave's point wasn't that any of these reactions are wrong. The point is that humans automatically label experiences as pleasant or unpleasant, and that automatic labeling kicks off what mindfulness teachers call the monkey mind cycle — a chain of reactive thoughts and behaviors that, left unchecked, takes us places we usually don't want to go.
A question came in about whether this was stoicism — the philosophical tradition of treating external events with detachment and only caring about one's response. Dave's answer was clear. No. Stoicism leans toward "nothing matters, who cares" as the response to external stimuli. Mindfulness goes the other direction. The goal isn't to suppress reactions. The goal is to see them — pleasant or unpleasant, joyful or suffering — without being unconsciously controlled by them. Denial isn't the move. Awareness is the move.
The framework Dave learned years ago — stop, challenge, choose — is the operational version. Something hits you. You stop. You challenge why you're thinking what you're thinking. You choose your response. The pause between stimulus and response is where leadership actually happens. Without the pause, you're not leading. You're reacting.
Dave shared a story from his own work that illustrated the practice. He had spent two years standing up a continuous improvement program at a plant in California, working with a team he was proud of. The global maturity assessment team came in to evaluate the plant's progress. On the morning of the second day, Dave got a call from the global CI leader at 6:30 AM. The opening line was: "We need to talk about this plant."
Dave thought he was about to get praise. Instead, the next sentence was: "This plant is going to have the lowest maturity assessment score we've ever seen."
The feeling tones, Dave said, were not pleasant. He could feel the rise. Defensive thoughts started to form. The impulse to argue, justify, push back was right there.
What he did instead was stop. He noticed the feeling tones. He let the pause happen. And then he said: "All right. What did I miss?"
That single question — instead of the defensive reaction that almost arrived — changed the entire trajectory of the conversation. The global CI leader was now in a coaching position. Dave was now in a learning position. The information that needed to come across came across, in a way that produced action rather than conflict.
Equanimity isn't the absence of feeling. It's the gap between feeling and the reaction the feeling tries to produce. Dave's framing tied directly to Stephen Covey's idea of increasing the gap between stimulus and response — Mark noted the connection during the session, and Dave agreed they were almost the same concept from different traditions.
The third tenet is the one Dave thought might land the hardest, and the one he had to be most careful about framing.
Impermanence is the recognition that everything is transient. Clouds form and dissipate. Waves rise and fall. Thoughts arise and pass. Pets we love come and go. Favorite bosses and worst bosses both move on eventually. Favorite jobs and least favorite jobs both end. Even, if you want to go cosmic about it, the universe itself.
This sounds like it could lead to nihilism — nothing matters, why bother. Dave was clear that wasn't where he was taking it. The framing was something closer to: everything is impermanent, including the current state you're suffering through. The current quality problem isn't the first one and won't be the last. The current A3 isn't going to be your final A3. The current frustration won't last forever. Neither will the current joy. Both will pass.
The implication for leadership and improvement work is a kind of ease with the current state. The current state is what it is. Some of it is what you want. Some of it isn't. Either way, it's not permanent. The work you're doing today will produce a state different from today's. Your attachment to today's state being exactly what you want it to be — or your attachment to yesterday's state lasting forever — is, in mindfulness framing, what causes most of the suffering you experience around change.
The connection Dave drew to continuous improvement was specific. He pointed to the increasing tendency in CI work to call things experiments or tests rather than implementations. The reframe matters. An experiment can fail without the entire effort failing. A test can produce information that wasn't expected without that being a problem. The Lean community has gotten better at this framing recently, Dave thought, and the improvement is partly about getting more comfortable with impermanence — the recognition that this version of the standard work isn't the final version, that this approach isn't the only approach, that the work itself is going to keep evolving.
He used a holiday example that came up in the chat. Approaching the holiday season, the temptation of pumpkin pie. The flavor and the good feeling from the first bite are very impermanent. Sometimes a bite or two satisfies. The realization that the pleasure won't last makes it easier to stop eating before the third slice. Mark added that even the anticipation of the first bite is sometimes better than the bite itself — and that, too, passes. If you eat the whole pie, you ate the whole pie. The bad feeling about it will also pass.
The application to leadership is structural. Many of the things we cling to at work — a metric that's going well right now, a team configuration that's working, a particular initiative that has momentum — are going to change whether we want them to or not. The leader who recognizes this is better positioned to enjoy what's working while it's working, prepare for what's changing, and not over-invest emotionally in any single state of affairs. The state is going to change. The question is whether you're going to be ready when it does.
The phrase Dave used as his stated goal — helping end workplace suffering — is worth pulling out because it frames why mindfulness work in a leadership context matters at all.
Workplace suffering isn't just the bad days. It isn't just the difficult bosses or the unfair processes. It's the cumulative effect of unconscious reactions, accumulated stress, attachments to outcomes we can't control, and the absence of small daily practices that could meaningfully change the texture of work life. Most of the suffering, in Dave's framing, doesn't come from external conditions being objectively terrible. It comes from internal patterns that respond to ordinary conditions in ways that make them harder to bear.
The leader who develops some capacity for presence, equanimity, and acceptance of impermanence becomes a less stressful person to work with. The team around them experiences less collateral damage from reactive moments. The decisions made in the calmer state are usually better. The relationships sustained through equanimity hold up across difficult conversations that would have broken relationships sustained only through agreement.
This isn't soft. It's structural. The same reactive patterns that produce personal stress also produce organizational stress, and the organizational stress produces the kind of culture where people don't speak up, don't surface problems, and don't engage with improvement work in ways that would actually move the organization. Mindfulness work, in this framing, is part of the infrastructure of a healthy improvement culture. The leader is part of the system. What the leader brings into the room shapes what the room can do.
The mindfulness practices Dave described are individual disciplines. The presence, the equanimity, the recognition of impermanence — all of it happens inside a single person's awareness. No software does this work for anyone. The breath has to be felt by the person doing the breathing. The pause between stimulus and response has to be taken by the person who would otherwise react.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural friction that makes those individual disciplines harder to sustain. A leader trying to be present in coaching conversations needs those conversations to actually happen on schedule — which means the work the coaching is about needs to be visible enough that the right conversations get prioritized. A leader trying to maintain equanimity in the face of difficult metrics needs the metrics to be presented in ways that show the trend over time rather than just the current value, so the immediate feeling tone of a single bad number doesn't dominate the response. A leader trying to maintain a sense of impermanence about the current state needs to see the current state in the context of where things have been and where they're going, rather than as a fixed problem demanding immediate emotional response.
The "experiment" framing Dave noted as a positive trend in CI work depends on infrastructure that lets experiments actually be tracked as experiments — with hypotheses, predictions, observed results, and learning captured for the next iteration. Without that structure, "experiment" becomes a polite word for "attempt that probably won't be measured." With it, the framing becomes operational and the impermanence becomes part of how the work gets done rather than something to be defended against.
None of this changes what Dave was teaching. The practice is the practice. The breath is the breath. The gap between stimulus and response is internal and individual. What infrastructure does is keep the conditions around the practice from making it harder than it has to be — and keep the improvement work itself flowing in a way that lets the leader's presence, equanimity, and acceptance of impermanence actually have somewhere productive to land.
What is mindfulness in this framing? A true reflection on what's going on around you right now in the moment, an examination of what's happening inside your own skin in real time, and the practice of three intersecting tenets: presence, equanimity, and impermanence. It is experiential rather than theoretical. The practices encourage you to test them for yourself rather than accept them on faith. Dave's bottom-line description: the ability to experience the causes of joy and of suffering, so that you can see emotional reactions arising before they take you somewhere you didn't want to go.
Is mindfulness religious? Not as Dave practices and teaches it. The teachings have roots in Eastern philosophical traditions, but nothing in the framework requires adopting a religious worldview. Everything is experiential. The practices can be verified by trying them. People from any religious background, or none, can use them without conflict with their other commitments.
What does Dave mean by "workplace suffering"? The cumulative effect of unconscious reactions, accumulated stress, attachments to outcomes we can't control, and the absence of small daily practices that could change the texture of work life. The word "suffering" carries baggage in English, but in the philosophical traditions where the concept originated, it's the standard term for the full range of negative emotional experience — stress, anger, anxiety, frustration. Dave uses it as shorthand for all of that. The goal isn't to eliminate suffering. It's to see it coming, recognize it when it arrives, and have a moment of choice about how to respond.
What is the difference between "take a breath" and "feel the breath"? "Take a breath" is information — you're going to breathe anyway. "Feel the breath" is an invitation into presence. Where does the air hit your nose? How does your chest feel as it rises? The shift from "take" to "feel" turns a verbal pacifier into a doorway. Dave's challenge to leaders is to substitute the second phrase for the first the next time they're tempted to tell a stressed colleague to take a breath.
What are feeling tones? The automatic labeling of every experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, in the first half-second of the experience arriving in awareness. The labeling happens before conscious thought. It's hardwired and unavoidable. What you can do is notice it. Recognizing the feeling tone before it kicks off the chain of reactive thoughts is the first step toward equanimity — the gap between feeling and the reaction the feeling tries to produce.
How is mindfulness different from stoicism? Stoicism leans toward "nothing matters, who cares" as the response to external stimuli. Mindfulness goes the other direction. The goal isn't to suppress reactions or claim that nothing matters. The goal is to see reactions — pleasant or unpleasant, joyful or difficult — without being unconsciously controlled by them. Denial isn't the move. Awareness is.
How does this connect to "stop, challenge, choose"? The two frameworks overlap heavily. Something hits you. You stop. You challenge why you're thinking what you're thinking. You choose your response. Equanimity is the practiced capacity to create the gap between stimulus and response, which is exactly what "stop, challenge, choose" describes from a different tradition. Stephen Covey's framing of increasing the gap between stimulus and response is also the same idea.
Does mindfulness mean being detached or not caring? No. Mindfulness doesn't ask you to stop caring about outcomes or stop having reactions. It asks you to see your reactions clearly so you can respond rather than just react. A leader practicing mindfulness can still care deeply about a quality problem, a missed target, or a struggling team member. The difference is that the caring drives a considered response rather than an automatic reactive one.
What is the practice of presence in a leadership context? Noticing what's actually happening in the current moment — the sensory inputs available to you, the internal sensations in your body, the thoughts passing through your mind — rather than being lost in past or future concerns. The practical move at work is to feel what's happening before you act on it. The body and senses become leading indicators of what your mouth or brain is about to do, which gives you a moment of choice about whether to continue with the reflexive response.
What is equanimity in a leadership context? The capacity to maintain balanced response to whatever arises, without suppressing the feelings underneath. A leader practicing equanimity can receive bad news without immediately defending against it, hear pushback without immediately overpowering it, and notice difficult feeling tones without immediately reacting to them. Dave's example was receiving a call about his plant having the lowest maturity assessment score ever and asking "what did I miss" instead of the defensive response that almost arrived.
What is impermanence in a leadership context? The recognition that everything is transient. The current quality problem isn't the first or last. The current frustration won't last forever. The current standard work isn't the final version. The reframe matters because it produces a kind of ease with the current state rather than over-attachment to any particular state of affairs. The increasing tendency in CI work to call things experiments rather than implementations is partly about getting more comfortable with impermanence — the recognition that this version is going to evolve into the next version regardless.
How is mindfulness practice different from meditation? Dave's analogy: mindfulness is to meditation as muscle use is to going to the gym. You use your muscles all day every day even if you never go to the gym, but going regularly strengthens your capacity to use them. Mindfulness can be practiced anywhere without ever meditating, but adding meditation as a regular practice tends to deepen the mindfulness work. Both are useful. Neither is required for the other.
What books and resources did Dave recommend? "Peak Mind" by Amishi Jha was his current favorite at the time of the session — it weaves real-life stories with scientific data on attention and mindfulness, and offers practical challenges including the suggestion to be fully present for just two minutes in your next conversation with someone. He also recommended "10% Happier" by Dan Harris (book and app), and Sam Harris's "Waking Up" app, which has a beginner's 40-day meditation program that functions as a "couch to 5K" for meditation practice.
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