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Beyond Mindfulness to the Mind: Our 2026 Evolution in Name and Mission


As we enter 2026, we’re opening a new chapter in the life of our association. This month, we’re beginning to evolve our name and focus from the Institute for Organizational Science and Mindfulness to the Institute for Organizational Science and Mind (still IOSM). This change reflects where we began—and where our work is now taking us.


Where We Started—and What We’ve Learned


When we founded IOSM in 2020, our shared mission was to translate the growing body of mindfulness research into practical, evidence-based solutions for leadership, work, and organizational life.


At that time, mindfulness represented the most credible form of what we now understand as an early form of neural training practice. Leading organizations such as Google, SAP, Microsoft, and Intel were creating large-scale mindfulness programs to help employees manage stress and restore functional capacity in demanding environments.


We experienced how powerful this work could be—not only in reducing stress, but in helping people regain clarity, emotional balance, and a sense of agency at work. In many cases, mindfulness quite literally helped individuals and teams survive unsustainable conditions.


In 2023, we took our work further by creating the Organizational Mindfulness Program—the first all-secular, all-science mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) designed from the ground up to support leadership effectiveness and organizational performance.


This remains a flagship certificate course and satisfies our Practitioner-level requirement for IOSM Facilitator and Teacher Certifications.


Beyond Mindfulness


Over the past two years, our research has taken us beyond mindfulness itself to related discoveries in procedural learning and self-directed neuroplasticity, which offer new capabilities for more effective leadership and work.


Mindfulness is a foundational intervention for awareness, attention, stress management, and emotional regulation. It offers powerful solutions that address our growing human skills gap. Yet, we now recognize it as one among multiple effective methodologies in the broader discipline of neural training.


Neural training creates the infrastructure layer beneath human wellbeing, effective leadership, engagement, and high-level work. It incorporates science-validated, millennia-old human performance practices—such as mindfulness, meditation, and stoicism—with modern science in the fields of flow state, somatics, interoception, positive psychology, and cognitive-behavioral therapies.


Over the past decade, each of these disciplines has been rigorously studied through neuroscientific research and has been found to include evidence-based protocols that, like mindfulness, reshape neural pathways. Together, they represent a hardware upgrade to more intentional control of the human operating system, and an essential prerequisite for working effectively alongside AI.


The Urgency of Neural Skills


Artificial intelligence is raising the bar for human skills. As AI absorbs technical, analytical, and repetitive work, our value increasingly lies in human capabilities that cannot be replicated by machine learning—judgment under uncertainty, social and situational awareness, ethical decision-making, emotional regulation, sense-making, trust-building, intuition, and values-based leadership.


These mental and emotional skills cannot be developed solely through information or insight, especially under pressure. They are trained through experiential and procedural methods that directly build or retrain neural networks. This is true for performance capabilities such as stress management, attention control, emotional intelligence, mental strength, and resilience—and equally true for leadership capabilities, including authenticity, vulnerability, presence, trustworthiness, compassion, and adaptability.


Mindfulness plays a foundational role in this work. It strengthens awareness of attentional, emotional, and internal states and creates the conditions for change. The neural skills required to operate effectively alongside AI—such as sustained focus, emotional stability under pressure, consistent judgment, adaptive behavior, and relational trust—are trained through neural practices that build on that foundation.


What This Means to Our Community


For our members, facilitators, teachers, and partners, this evolution represents an expansion of the work we can bring to our organizations and clients.


Mindfulness remains at the foundation of our integrated approach. It offers practices that calm the brain and body, access states of awareness, stabilize and strengthen attention, enable emotional regulation, and activate empathy, compassion, and other core emotional capabilities. Nothing about its importance is diminished.


What is changing is the scope of what we can now train on that foundation. As the demands of leadership and work continue to intensify—particularly in an AI-accelerated environment—we are broadening our focus to include the full range of neural skills required to think clearly, relate skillfully, and act consistently under pressure.


This evolution allows us to better support our members and clients in the work they do: helping individuals and organizations not only become more aware, but more capable—more resilient, more focused, more trustworthy, and more effective in the face of complexity.



Organization: Institute for Organizational Science and Mind (IOSM)






About IOSM


The Institute for Organizational Science and Mind (IOSM) is a global non-profit association of human capital and operating leaders, educators, and coaches. We share a common mission to apply neural training methodologies to create more effective leaders, a happier, healthier, and higher-performing workforce, and a safer, more inclusive, and more productive workplace.

 
 
 

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