What's your group mindset?

I've been reading Mindset by Carol Dweck, Ph.D. This is her take on the psychology of success. It deals with what she calls a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”. A major theme in this book is that those of us who have the growth mindset embrace challenges (and even failures) as an exciting way to learn. She explains that people who believe that they have the capacity to become more intelligent look for ways to learn new things and therefore DO become smarter. On the reverse side of this coin are those who live with a fixed mindset. Here she believes live the people who have bought into the belief that your IQ is static. They spend a lot of energy proving their worth time and again attempting to seem smart and avoiding situations where they are challenged. After reading through a good portion of this, I began to reflect back on how this applies in a startup technology company. Can an organization have a collective mindset? I say yes.

Going into a startup technology endeavor (I'll say software because that is what I do) a battle scarred vet is going to know that no matter how well the upfront planning was done, unexpected challenges loom around many corners waiting to derail even the best efforts. Now, top-notch technical specifications is one of the ways to reduce the risk and therefore the impact of these “unknowns”, but there will still be some and how the team deals responds to them builds the development culture.

Applying Dweck's theory it is plain to see that the group has the choice to view the challenges as a way to learn or as another roadblock on their way to success. What example will the team lead set? Here is my hope: that early on the manager rubs his/her hands together and says“ahhh, here is an opportunity for us to increase our knowledge base, gauge the amount of time necessary for unknowns, and prove our expertise as a team”. What I mean here is a) solve a problem once and it is solved forever if a short article up on the team wiki b) time how long it takes to resolve the issue and use that factor in development estimates going forward (keep revising this as the team gets better at it). Here is a wonderful metric for evaluating the team. c) Show off! It is a good feather in the group's cap that they were hit with undocumented technical challenges and only took x amount of time to overcome them. This approach/attitude is one of the building blocks to creating an exciting team that thrives in the often unknown technical environment of a startup.

For brevity's sake, I presented just the positive side of the argument. I think we can all see what kind of group is built with a fixed mindset. I am encouraged to reinvigorate my own attitude this week when the inevitable challenge arises. I think my phrase will be “Oh! Good, this is a cool issue to work on. Who is lucky enough to spend some cycles puzzling on this one?”

Good luck,

Brian