Maria Popova has a fascinating review of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She describes how Dweck speaks of a fundamental difference in how we view our personality, and between what she calls 'fixed' and 'growth' mindsets.
"A 'fixed mindset' assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A 'growth mindset', on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness."
It made me think about differences in the mindsets that develop at companies, and the parallel that might be drawn with fixed and growth organisational approaches and cultures.
In Great by Choice, Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) studied companies that had risen to great things in difficult times. One of the key differences he identified between these companies and others that did much less well was the practice of 'empirical creativity'. This he defines with a 'bullets' and 'canonballs' metaphor. Instead of firing canonballs (putting significant resources behind untested ideas), the more successful businesses began by firing smaller bullets (they prepared the way with lots of low cost, low risk, low distraction tests at a far smaller scale in order to develop learnings about what works and what doesn't). In other words, they made lots of little bets. This kind of 'empirical creativity', he says, is a blend between creativity and discipline.
In all the talk about failing fast or failing forward (or whatever we want to call it) that we hear so much about, there's generally not enough emphasis on the critical thing that supports these kinds of approaches and turns embracing failure into celebrating success. And that's an organisational culture that is not fixed, and wants to learn.
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