You Need A Growth Mindset!

How a simple dichotomy can do more harm than good.

We are told on every (digital) street corner that we need a Growth Mindset. Whether we like it or not! All subtlety is out the window when it comes to mindset. You don’t want to be found dead labeled “fixed mindset”. But is it really that bad to have a fixed mindset?

In 2006, Carol Dweck (1946) published her now famous book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”. Her work on the attitude or belief of people towards the innateness or malleability of intelligence and other traits has caused quite a stir in the business world. Dweck maintains that people can roughly be divided into two groups, one with what she calls a fixed mindset, and one with a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset mostly believe that we are born with certain abilities and that these stay basically the same throughout our lives. People with a growth mindset mostly believe that we can grow our intelligence and other traits by working hard, learning, and training. She makes a point of fixed mindset people having a strong dislike of failure and growth mindset people enjoying failure as a chance to learn and grow. In the eyes of Dweck, a growth mindset is highly favorable over a fixed mindset.

You might recognize this idea from the lean and Agile world, where the positive approach towards failure is advocated strongly, even encouraged. “Fail fast,” is the motto that espouses the idea that if you put your product out in the market very quickly — perhaps even before you consider it to be ready enough to become a great success — you will receive valuable feedback from real end-users. In other words, you will hear very quickly what they don’t like about your product, which could be considered a failure by some, but on the other hand grants you the opportunity to act upon that feedback quickly and adjust accordingly.

Throughout her book, Dweck makes comparisons between what a growth mindset person thinks about a certain situation, as opposed to the — in her eyes — very limiting ways a fixed mindset person thinks about the same situation. For instance, when she discusses business and mindset, the example of Enron keeps popping up. Energy company Enron supposedly had a very fixed mindset, with a very large focus on hiring talent. Management consultants…