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Mindful leadership offers a powerful antidote to the stress and burnout facing many school leaders today. This chapter integrates three key streams of mindfulness research and practice – contemplative, cognitive, and organizational mindfulness – to present a more caring and compassionate model of educational leadership.

Drawing on the experiences of focal school leaders, the chapter explores how mindful leadership practices can transform schools by cultivating awareness of self and others. In addition, this chapter explores how leaders can situate themselves within and the larger school-community environment, developing equanimity and resilience in the face of challenges, adopting a stance of curiosity and openness to multiple perspectives, nurturing authentic relationships and emotional attunement, and navigating paradoxes of purpose and identity with wisdom.

Rather than a fixed technique, mindful leadership is presented as an ongoing practice and way of being – purposeful, present, and openhearted. By starting where they are and committing to continual growth, educational leaders can become leaders in fostering cultures of well-being and transformative learning. The chapter concludes with suggested mindfulness practices for individuals and organizations to support this lifelong journey. Mindful leadership is ultimately a courageous and pragmatic path to more clearly see reality, embrace vulnerability, and wholeheartedly engage in positive change.

Project management scholars and practitioners have long debated how best to harness social interactions to optimise knowledge exchange and enhance stakeholder alignment and value. This study aims to assist project managers to understand and manage fuzziness and create enduring front-end value. It views the project life cycle as a potential source of co-created value. The paper uses a social capital lens to provide a deeper understanding of the project front-end; it uses a three-dimensional view (structural, relational, cognitive) to explore how stakeholder social capital can overcome front-end fuzziness to enhance decision-making and, thus, value creation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers from teleconnections companies, which, when combined with secondary data, established the impact, nature and dimensions of social capital within a project management setting.

The research found that social capital can help to reduce complexity, uncertainty and equivocality in the early stages of projects, making them more clearly defined and thus helping to create greater stakeholder value in the later stages of the project. A surprising finding was that some project team members engaged in intentional equivocality to try to promote their own benefits rather than those of the organisation.

This paper reconceptualises the impact of social capital on stakeholder value creation in the front-end of projects. The paper contributes to a more holistic view of the front-end of project management, focusing social capital to reduce the sources of front-end fuzziness.